Senate confirms Moniz for energy secretary
Source: CNN
(CNN) – The Senate on Thursday confirmed Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Ernest Moniz to be the next Secretary of Energy, replacing Steven Chu.
The vote was 97-0, with three Senators (Roy Blunt, R-Missouri; Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma; and Jerry Moran, R-Kansas) missing the vote.
Read more: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/16/senate-confirms-moniz-for-energy-secretary/
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what is most remarkable about him is that his hairstyle never changes after all these years, and I lost most of my hair. 
Moniz has come under fire for his outspoken support of nuclear power, hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"
for shale gas and the overarching "all-of-the-above" energy policy advocated by both President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent in the last election, Mitt Romney.
Watchdogs have also discovered that Moniz has worked as a long-time corporate consultant for BP. He has also received the "frackademic" label for his time spent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At his MIT job, Moniz regularly accepted millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry to sponsor studies under the auspices of The MIT Energy Initiative, which has received over $145 million over its seven-year history from the oil and gas industry.
I just threw up in my mouth a little right there. No wonder the vote was 97-0; he's a GOP shill.
So much for taking Obama's claim that he actually wants to tackle global warming seriously.
On the one hand, you have incredibly limited data. Researchers have to admit that there's a high variability between one field and another... and the data set is simply too small to extrapolate to the entire industry. On the other hand you have far more comprehensive data, but it comes largely from the industry (though it's a stretch to just paint the EPA with a broad brush since they don't exactly have a track record of "politically motivated" in that direction).
They also aren't as contradictory as some have claimed. The range of uncertainty in the NOAA data was so large that the bottom end of their estimate actually overlaps the upper range of the industry data. So it's a very real possibility that the "real" number is within both ranges.
Lastly... the industry response does make some sense. If they were mining for gold and the byproduct was a "chemical X" leaking into local streams, it would be hard to take on face value their own estimates of how much chemical X was being released. But if "Chemical X" was actually the gold they were mining for? Their own profit motive would drive them to far more accurate estimates and give them every reason to implement controls that reduced the release of the product they wanted to sell.
