Steven Chu: The Nerd in the Cabinet

By Marc Gunther - Greener World Media

Once a professor, always a professor.

Steven Chu, the energy secretary, winner of the Nobel Prize and former physics teacher at Berkeley, spoke tonight at a Washington fundraising dinner for Conservation International, the global NGO.

Actually, he delivered a lecture, deploying a long, detailed PowerPoint presentation, with charts and graphs explaining temperature fluctuations over decades, rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 800,000 years, changes in sea levels, payback for investments in energy efficiency, even a diagram of a new battery technology that included this caption:

Battery about to charged: Positive Mg ions and negative Sb ions are dissolved in electrolyte (green)

Battery fully charged: Mg (blue) and SB (yellow) become the anode and cathode

It was another one of those all-too-frequent moments when I wish I had taken more science classes in college. And remembered why I hadn't.

By coincidence, Michele Obama visited the energy department earlier in the day and said, "My husband loves his Cabinet. He was extremely excited that he had a real nerd on his team. He talked about it for weeks on end."

It's easy to see why the cerebral president and his brainy energy secretary would bond.

Chu wasn't spellbinding at the CI dinner but in this city of politicians and special interest groups, with climate change legislation again on the front burner, it was actually refreshing to study a Power Point instead of being bombarded with talking points. Spin doctors marshal facts to support their arguments. Chu starts with the science and works his way from there to solutions.

He argued for three broad approaches to the climate crisis – a major commitment to energy efficiency requiring government regulations and financing, changes in forestry and agricultural practices and still-to-be-discovered breakthroughs in clean energy technology. Some highlights:

Energy efficiency: Chu said market failures –- among them lack of knowledge and lack of financing -– stand in the way of efficiency to commercial and industrial buildings and to homes which deliver relatively quick paybacks.