When last we heard from Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas (Thursday), he was defending the “traditional, incandescent light bulb” against government regulators who want to replace it with “the little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones.”
It seems Barton– the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and possibly the next chairman– has a history when it comes to, um, controversial remarks about energy.
At a 2009 Congressional hearing he questioned whether expanding wind power might actually cause the planet to heat up. Or at least I think he did. You be the judge:
Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.
Well perhaps, but probably not for more than five seconds. Or am I being unfair? Perhaps our scientifically-minded readers can tell us if this makes even minimal sense.