Who Is Steven Chu? A Nobel Physicist Who Believes In Bold Energy
Transformation
Numerous media outlets are reporting Dr. Steven Chu will be
President-elect Obama's choice to head the Department of Energy. Chu,
a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is the director of the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory in California where he has been
addressing the climate crisis by pushing breakthrough research in
energy efficiency, solar energy, and biofuels technology.
Colleagues who know Chu best say "he's not a manager, he's a leader."
In an interview with the Wonk Room, David Roland-Holst, an economist
at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at UC
Berkeley, described Chu as a "very distinguished researcher" and "an
extremely effective manager of cutting edge technology initiatives."
This past summer, Dr. Chu spoke at the National Clean Energy Summit in
Las Vegas, convened by the Center for American Progress, UNLV, and
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).
In one of the lighter moments during his remarks, Chu claimed that
efficiency gains and lowered costs have been shown to be possible when
the jobs were assigned to engineers, not lobbyists. Chu also laid out
in stark terms the climate crisis that we now face:
"Consider this. There's about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts
tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three
degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn't seem a lot
to you, that's 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C
means that
it's the difference between where we are today and where
we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United
States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.
Five degrees Centigrade.
So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very
different world. So if you'd want that for your kids and grandkids, we
can continue what we're doing. Climate change of that scale will cause
enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive
population displacements. We're not talking about ten thousand people.
We're not talking about ten million people, we're talking about
hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.
Joe Romm cautions that the 3°C figure is just a mid-range warming if
we're able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Links here: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/10/chu-energy-secretary/
