Goofball Bill Gates just won't stay the hell out of the news lately. Like the geek who wins the student body elections to prove he's popular, Gates is no longer content to just be an eccentric quadrillionaire, he's got to prove he's "cool" too.

Now that the Microsoft commercials with Gates and Seinfeld got nixed, and the high-profile campaign for Windows morphed into some weird ouroboros of PCs making fun of Macs making fun of PCs, Gates turns his nerd gaze towards the future of of renewable fuel:

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The Chesapeake Energy Corporation owns interests in approximately 38,500 oil and gas wells. That's about a two billion cubic feet equivalent of natural gas per day. So when the company says it wants to own stake in the coverage of a giant shale rock formation (and gas producer!) in Texas, something begins to stink like sulfur.

Enter Shale.TV, a streaming video site debuting in October, which will be a reporting epicenter for the Barnett Shale rock underneath the Texan earth, which just might be hiding a huge energy reserve. And whoops, Chesapeake owns a really big portion of Shale.TV, evidenced by their pretty little logo on the website.

Trying to control the message about a topic you have a huge financial stake in? That's the sort of thing that gets ethicists whining. So now Chesapeake Energy is on amber alert for damage control to reassure treehuggers and viewers that it's not a conflict of interest to have a oil and gas subsidiary cover news about the exact part of the environment it's looking to exploit.

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If you ask Howell Raines, the last time this country saw any decent reporting about the energy industry was in 2003, when Don Barlett and Jim Steele shined a light on Big Oil's back room dealings and the government's complicit role in it for Time. They won two two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards for their work. Outside of their reporting, however, all we're ever treated to is the typical "Gas is expensive!" headline, which is sometimes rewritten as "Pain at the pump," "Consumers cut back on holiday travel," and, "Tax rebate cheques go toward filling up the tank."

Blame general assignment reporters and their editors, says Raines, who all too easily go after the "consumer suffering" angle of the story — and not how companies like Chevron, ExxonMobile, and BP are raking in glorious profits while doing little to nothing to actually reduce oil dependency, find alternative energy sources, or exert any energy to driving down gas prices to below $4 a gallon.

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