Pants on fire

Joining the ranks of Denise Rich, Lynne Cheney, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and George W. Bush, Energy Secretary Spence Abraham was credited with a recent “Whopper of the Week” by the online mag Slate. “Some experts calculate the demands of the Internet already consume some 8-13 percent of electricity. If demand grows at just the same pace during the last decade, we’ll need 1,900 new plants by 2020 — or more than 90 every year — just to keep pace,” Abraham told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. His source: a study by the coal industry-backed Greening Earth Society. (Gotta love that name!)

But a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab study calculates “electricity used for all office, telecommunications, and network equipment (including the electricity to manufacture the equipment) is about 3 percent of total electricity use in the U.S.” A mere difference of opinion? Not for Slate, which reserves the Whopper prize for “an unambiguous lie” met by “an unambiguous refutation.” (The full discussion is at slate.com.)