Chu Needs to Resign as Energy Secretary after paying out $10M "affordability prize" for a $50 light builb

It sounds like Chu has zero common sense when you read the story of the $10M "affordability prize" for the $50 light bulb.  Obviously he doesn't buy light bulbs.  In fact he seems pretty out of touch with the rest of the Country who buy light bulbs and drive automobiles.

This man doesn't seem to think twice about using our tax dollars recklessly.  Because someone like Chu is very intelligent doesn't mean they will make a good Energy Secretary.  As time has gone on, it is more evident that Chu should never have been chosen.  For starters, he is against fossil fuels as a way to combat climate change.  He forgets that oil and gas fuel our nation.  Are his policies contributing to the high price of a gallon of gas as he doesn't own a car so the price of a gallon of gas means nothing to the man plus he prefers higher gas prices so we will buy more fuel efficient cars.  Has he ever been to Middle America where if you don't have a car, your travel is going to be limited in most areas?

Chu doesn't seem to have a good grasp of what an Energy Secretary does and seems to do what he wants as well as being adverse to oversight as he has not been very open with Congress:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu faces questions over whether his laboratory smarts and Silicon Valley background have undercut his ability to operate inside the Beltway. 

Chu has kept a very low profile during the Solyndra affair, traveling to China and Vienna in September and speaking almost exclusively on other topics within his domain as questions pile up from Congress about the lost $535 million loan guarantee.

Now we learn that Chu travels the world avoiding questions about the $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.   Will he ever answer questions or will he resign and return to academia which he never should have left?  We have had some bad energy secretaries over the years, but Chu may be the prize winner for the worst Energy secretary:

Hazel O'Leary, who served as Energy secretary for President Bill Clinton's entire first term, said that despite Chu's impressive resume, Obama's transition team advisers might not have gotten it right when they picked him to run the department. 

"Generally, if you're in the first administration, the people advising the senior folks in the White House about how to place folks in jobs have very little understanding about what the challenges of the job are," she told POLITICO.

Even the Clinton Energy Secretary, O'Leary thinks he is over his head as Energy Secretary.  Dim Bulbs at the Department of Energy says it all.  Making the Energy Department a cabinet position has pretty much not worked well from Day One, but Chu may be one of the worst which figures from the Obama Administration.

Dim Bulbs At The Department Of Energy
Posted 06:37 PM ET 

Energy: As gas prices hit $3.79 (and $4.20 in California), Energy Secretary Steven Chu admits he doesn't own a car. Seems he doesn't own any lights either, since he just gave a $10 million "affordability prize" for a $50 bulb. 

Chu says the prize — awarded to Philips for its new LED bulb — was meant to spur development of advanced, superefficient light bulbs that are "affordable for American families."
But at $50 a pop, even the one-percenters will find it hard to afford lighting their mansions.
And maybe Chu hasn't shopped at Home Depot lately, but there's already a bulb on the market that's highly affordable. It's the thing Thomas Edison invented a while back, and it costs just 37 cents.
Of course, the green bulb crowd explains that LEDs — along with the garish neon bulbs — cut electricity use, which is why they're forcing Americans to buy them. Just make sure you don't drop one. 

To make matters even more ridiculous, Chu actually managed to find the most expensive LED on the market for his affordability prize. Two others brands sell for almost half the price of Philips'. As Home Depot's Brad Paulsen told the Washington Post, "This is a Cadillac product."
But ineptitude is par for the course at Chu's Energy Department. This is the same crowd, after all, that handed out $535 million in loans to Solyndra, only to have the company squander the money and go bankrupt. 

They're the same geniuses who gave Fisker Automotive $529 million in loan guarantees to create domestic jobs building its luxury electric car, only to have the company site the plant in  in Finland.

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These are the ones who showered praise and taxpayer money on the plug-in Volt, only to have Chevy suspend production because so few people actually wanted to own the thing. 

And it's headed by a guy who yearns for European-level gas prices so Americans will give up their energy-hogging ways, only to find his wife driving a gas-guzzling BMW. 

But what does Chu himself care about high gas prices? As he told a House subcommittee this week, "I don't own a car at the moment." 

Tell us again why we need a Department of Energy? 

Source:  IBD

Chu's background is not that of someone who you would normally find in the cabinet:

Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Previously, he had been a professor of physics at Stanford University. He is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. For example, he has conceived of a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today.

 It is past time for Chu to return to Silicon Valley or Academia because he is an epic failure as Energy Secretary.