As the President said during the campaign when he correctly talked about how much energy we could save if people simply inflated their tires the correct amount (the GOP mocked him, and fact checkers discovered the President was correct), it's almost as if they're proud of being ignorant.
Well, party of dumb is at it again. This time they're criticizing the President for, correctly, talking about the energy implications for, of all things, algae. Here's from the President's energy speech:
We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance -- algae. You’ve got a bunch of algae out here, right? (Laughter.) If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing all right.Republicans immediately mocked the algae line. Without fact checking it, of course. I think this is what the President is referring to, it sounds kind of cool. From CNet:
Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in the United States. And that means greater energy security. That means lower costs. It means more jobs. It means a stronger economy.
Now, none of the steps that I’ve talked about today is going to be a silver bullet. It’s not going to bring down gas prices tomorrow. Remember, if anybody says they got a plan for that -- what?
The Lawrence Berkeley group's goal is to implant genes from other organisms, including algae and cyanobacteria, which encode for enzymes that produce hydrocarbons known as isoprenoids and alkanes. After harvesting, the tobacco leaves would be crushed down, the hydrocarbon molecules separated, and then converted into diesel, jet fuel, or gasoline, according to Berkeley.And here's another method, described in Popular Mechanics.
And this appears to reference the study the President was referring to. I'm not convinced he should have been so unequivocal about the 17% figure, but he's right to mention that we're investing in new things that might some day create a lot of energy from unexpected places.
Of course, it's funny that some prominent Republicans have also been supporting the algae research, including Senator Johanns, Cong. Darrell Issa, and Cong. Mike Pence. So if this is 'weird,' as Newt Gingrich, the kind of weird, just proclaimed, then Johanns, Issa and Pence are weird too.
When the Republicans have a chance to knock science, knock knowledge, they take it (thus the reason Rick Santorum said last night that going to college is a bad idea, and anyone who helps kids go to college is a snob). Their party regularly panders to racist, bigots, and end-of-world nutjobs. Facts and education are hardly the way to appeal to a crowd that respects neither.
