I have gotten bombarded by too many people asking me if the story headlined above is true. It isn’t. Not even close.

Science magazine, which published the supposedly “major discovery” by MIT’s Daniel Nocera headlined their story, “New Catalyst Marks Major Step in the March Toward Hydrogen Fuel” (subs. req’d). Doh! But who needs a major step towards hydrogen? (see “This just in: Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still dead” and the links at the end for a general debunking.)

And Science seems to be having problems with the laws of physics, as we’ll see. I thought I had explained this to Scientific American, but given their puff piece — the findings “help pave the way for a future hydrogen economy” — I obviously failed. Let me try again.

MIT had the sexier headline on unleashing the solar revolution. Too bad that headline isn’t accurate for two mains reasons — The solar revolution already has been unleashed, and if it hadn’t been, this technology wouldn’t do the trick even if were near commercial, which it isn’t. MIT reports:

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative [!] into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

As we’ll see, they have not developed an efficient storage process — and we have no idea if it’s cheap because they don’t have anything near a commercial prototype (indeed, they have not even solve all of the scientific challenges). But in any case, we already have an inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy — it’s called solar baseload (see here and here).

Yes, solar PV would benefit from cheap storage, but PV’s biggest problem is simply its high price, which is expected to drop rapidly in the coming years. And, in any case, for industrialized countries, you can’t get too excited about storing daytime PV electricity — which avoids expensive peak power — and shifting it to the nighttime, where extra power is almost worthless.

But I digress. It is the details of this “major discovery” that render it quite unexciting and unmajor:

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Our guest blogger is Kevin Grandia of the DeSmog Project.

With major corporate donations in the past from big players like Monsanto and ExxonMobil, I apologize for being more than a little cynical about the Congress of Racial Equality’s latest “Stop the War on the Poor” campaign.

To say that CORE has enjoyed a cozy relationship with big industry would be an understatement. In fact, this photo is a picture of Monsanto’s Chairman and CEO, Hugh Grant chairing CORE’s celebratory reception in honor of Martin Luther King Jr in 2005.

The visit to CORE by Monsanto’s president coincided with a conference organized by CORE decrying environmentalists and their opposition to the use of genetically modified crops in Africa. Just so happens that Monsanto is the largest producer and supplier of genetically-modified seed in the world.

You can check out the an archived version of CORE’s website where they once proudly touted Monsanto as the corporate sponsor of their pro-GM food campaign. I saved a screen capture of the Monsanto/CORE site archive just in case it goes “missing.”

Then there’s the $275,000 CORE has received from the largest oil company in the world, Exxon Mobil, most of the money tagged for public policy work in the area of climate change. Roy Innis, the head of CORE, has a long and well-documented history of attacking the environmental movement over the issue of global warming.

For example, in March, 2008 Innis spoke at a press conference in New York claiming that:

We are slowly destroying the energy system we have, and we are promoting an expensive, environmentally harmful, illusory energy system that exists only in theory and environmental rhetoric. Worst of all, we are harming our poorest families; we are rolling back the civil rights we struggled so long and hard to achieve; and we are sending many minorities to the back of the energy and economic bus. This must not, and cannot continue.

Again, pardon me for being a little cynical when an organization that took $250,000 from ExxonMobil comes out against investing in renewable energy.

But I’m not the only cynical one. There’s a lot of us. For example, the original founder of CORE, James Farmer has accused Innis of:

"renting out CORE's historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil."

Looks like they’re right. Here’s the full story on the Congress of Racial Equality that I have put together in a briefing document and entered into DeSmogBlog’s climate denial industry database.

Originally posted at DeSmogBlog.

Record Big oil profits from record oil prices and taxpayer subsidies — where does all your money go?

With ExxonMobil’s report of a $11.68 billion haul in the second quarter of 2008, the world’s top five oil companies are now on track for more than $160 billion in profits this year…

I know what you are thinking: Surely, Big Oil will take those staggeringly immense and almost immoral profits from the suspiciously fast rise in oil prices [you just love adverbs, don't you!] — along with the $33 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies you’re going to give those politically powerful and remarkably greedy companies over the next five years (see here) — and invest in both new drilling and new energy technology. No it won’t, no it won’t, and stop calling me Shirley.

In fact, the AP reports:

The five biggest international oil companies plowed about 55 percent of the cash they made from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year, up from 30 percent in 2000 and just 1 percent in 1993….

Hmm, 55% of $120 billion is a staggering $66 billion used to pump up their own stock price.

But some critics say Big Oil focuses too much on boosting stock prices, in an industry that sometimes ties executive pay to stock price.

“Some critics”? “Sometimes ties executive pay to stock price”? Don’t forget that the industry always gives mega-stock options to executives.

The percentage they spend to find new deposits of fossil fuels has remained flat for years, in the mid-single digits….

What about R&D?

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