The New York profiled on Sunday my favorite Cabinet member, Nobel laureate Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy. Secretary Chu is ready to tackle several of the Obama Administration's top priorities: stopping global warming; ending our dependence on carbon-based fuels, such as coal and petroleum; and making us a more energy-efficient nation. Excerpts from NYT:
President Obama has assigned Dr. Chu to carry out some of his central priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the nation’s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change.
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Yet as he takes on one of the toughest policy and management challenges in government, Dr. Chu brings certain assets that none of his peers or predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize, a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (“Dr. Wu” by Steely Dan). He is a major celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific achievement is rewarded with rock star status. He is a member of Academica Sinica, Taiwan’s most distinguished scholarly society, as was his father.
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Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, said that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a little time to adjust.
“A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,” Mr. Leistikow said.
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Dr. Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the glacial pace of his department. He is eager, he said, to get on with what he sees as his main task: finding and financing the scientific breakthroughs that will end the nation’s dependence on carbon-based fuels and solve the climate change problem.
Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in Washington, Newton’s first law — a body in motion tends to stay in motion — does not apply. “In a bureaucracy, if you start something in motion, it either stops or gets derailed,” he said. “You have to keep applying force.”
He intends to keep applying that force, he said, because it could help solve the world’s energy and climate change problems.
“If we don’t spend this money wisely and invest in new technology that addresses these challenges,” he said, “we will have failed the country. We will have failed the world.”
I hope, for all our sake, that Dr. Chu succeeds.
h/t angry asian man.
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