What Chu Means as Energy Secretary

Posted by: Steve LeVine on December 10

By appointing Steven Chu as energy secretary, President-elect Barack Obama appears to be making concrete his campaign pledge to focus on alternative energy. Obama also is continuing his streak of favoring serious personalities with star power in the cabinet.

Chu is the first Nobel laureate to serve on a presidential cabinet. (He won the prize for physics in 1997.) As the current director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has been a high-profile advocate of an accelerated program of weaning the U.S. off of fossil fuels.

Expect a highly active, non-ideological and scientifically focused drive to develop alternatives to oil and natural gas.

I talked to Chu in May, when he described being part of an attempted “revolution” since taking over the directorship of the Berkeley lab in 2004. He said:

When I came to the lab, I came with the idea that there are a lot of brilliant scientists here. If I could get the intellectual brainpower to come up with new technologies on the energy supply side, that could be as efficient but less costly than oil, and on energy efficiency and energy storage, that that is something we do need and need quickly. We can’t wait a half-century, given what we fear with climate change.

… Do I want my guys to stop basic research and work only on energy? No because they are also working on other revolutions to take place 10 years down the road. But given the magnitude of the problem, it’s okay to have some of our best and brightest working on it. In the end, the quality of the solution will depend on the quality of the people working on it.