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Nobel Prize Winning Physicist As Energy Secretary
bledri writes "Officials close to the Obama transition team say that
Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Chu is the likely candidate for Energy Secretary. Some are worried that Chu is not politically savvy enough,
but I'm hopeful that a scientist will base policy on evidence.
Discuss among yourselves."
He's director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, a 4000-staff, 1000-student (ish) research facility with a half-billion dollar budget. I'd say he's got the "administrator" part down.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_Energy
Contrary examples everywhere. Noteworthy scientists are used to being "torn down" and often it IS personal.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is great news coming from an administration that chooses people based on competence rather then connections and theocratic similarities.
The current buddy-buddy system got the US in the biggest hole in over 3 decades ( we may even have to go back a century ).
I admit I don't know too much about the apointee but winning a Nobel in Physics is not a small feat and indicates a factual based personality, which is exactly what we MUST have right now, and something that we always should have in any higher position.
There is hope ...
The DOE was one of the few things Carter did right. Several issues have been solved that wouldn't of without this kind of organization. Besides, do you really want the military building their own nuclear weapons and reactors? As it is now they have to ask the DOE if they can have one, or any. They're all owned by the DOE and the DOE can just say no if they feel like it.
For most businesses, that's actually less important. It's usually much cheaper to get repeat business from an existing customer, than it is to seek out new customers.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I should correct myself here, Bodman (current DoE secretary) is a former MIT professor of chemical engineering. So there's a precident here for putting high-ranking academics in that position.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Note that national labs didn't have anything like the focus on renewable energy that Chu created at LBL until he did that a few years ago. This man is a very effective politician, a great scientist, and a real visionary.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Not much, if you have to quit your job in order to tend to it, in which case you're going to starve to death sooner or later because you can't afford to buy the other 50% of your food.
Fresh veggies to supplement your diet during the growing season doesn't take up much time or space at all, though. A good product (which is not difficult to build on your own if you're so inclined) is EarthBox, a container with built-in watering and fertilizer. A couple of those and a sunny spot (or an indoor growlight) can give you quite a bit of fresh produce.
the current Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, was a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. As a chemical engineer, his work had much to do with the practical side of energy technology. He's done a good job during the last four years.
I agree; Bodman is no dummy. But practically speaking, he's spent very little time working in science, and almost all of that before 1970. From 1971-2004, he was working in finance - heck, he did a stint as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury! It's good to be well-rounded and all that, of course...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
He would possibly have been a better pick, but he didn't want the position.
c++;
Do you have any evidence to support that opinion? Look the DOE is great at running big science projects. Ones that involve tunnels, cryo, massive underground detectors, etc. The DOE almost always does it under budget and on time (the big disaster was the SSC but that fell apart because of politics from the Congress and president). Compare that to the record of the NSF and NASA. NASA is great at large projects at well, but the project management comes in over budget and late more than 50% of the time and anytime the NSF has done anything big approaching the scale of medium DOE, it has always been late and over budget.
If it was not for the DOE big physics outside of astro and cosmo would be run by the military and NSF. Finally the office of science is only one aspect of the DOE.
Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis
"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis."
That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.
Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)
Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama's bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.
That said, Steven Chu is no stranger to Big Oil. He was instrumental in helping U.C. Berkeley land one of the biggest corporate bonanzas ever -- $500 million from British Petroleum to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute, an ambitious joint venture that has been controversial from the get-go at Berkeley because of its plans to use oil money to do research and development into energy crops and other biofuel wizardry.
And, as I noted after seeing him talk in early 2007 at a symposium titled "Domestic Bioenergy: Weaning Ourselves From Foreign Oil Addiction," held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is on record as being a bit hyperbolic as to the potential of biofuels.
You can find plenty of scientists who will dispute such assertions, right
Gore's Nobel Prize isn't in a scientific category.
Right, because there have been so many new nuclear reactors built in the last thirty years.
If it weren't for the DoE, we'd probably get 50%+ of our energy from nuclear now, and we'd be reprocessing our spent fuel rods, giving us an unending energy supply for the next 10000 odd years.
Instead we're going to war for oil and choking on CO2. Good job, Big Gubamint!
There is also a video of his 2007 Nobel Conference lecture titled "The World's Energy Problem and What We Can Do About It" available http://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2007/chu-lecture.php which as the title suggests, is very relevant to this discussion.
Steven Chu is an expert on the technical side. He also runs LBL, so he knows how to make decisions. Why get two people when you can get one who can do both?
Also, Steven Chu is probably smarter than you. Nobel Prize winners aren't *necessarily*, but in this case, Chu is a very, very sharp guy.
What scientists are politicians? And which one of those are poor?
The chancellor of Germany holds a PhD in theoretical quantum/molecular mechanics.
Marx ist die Theorie, Murx ist die Praxis
Lets be clear here, the Cabinet secretaries are not the "advisors" of the President in any way but as a formality. The functional component of their advisory role is presenting reports compiled by their subordinates.
Additionally, Secretaries are not simply responsible to the President, they are also confirmed by the Senate and they will frequently be called afterwards to give testimony to Congress.
These people are executives in their own right running large government bureaucracies. That is a huge reason why the corporate executives that many love to hate frequently end up in charge of Cabinet departments. Their past experience is often just as applicable, and possibly more applicable to the realities of running a department.
There is no reason to believe that a Nobel laureate cannot run such a department, and many such scientists do go on to run large research projects with a decent number of colleagues and staff, but the point is entirely valid that you do need a skillset beyond sheer research ability to be a cabinet secretary.
Indeed, the true answer to most of the dreams of those who would try and see science be less politicized would probably be someone with the skills of a consummate bureaucrat whose one necessary redeeming quality is the faith in the well-researched reports of his expert scientist subordinates. This individual would then have the savvy to get that report into the hands of the president and get him to act on its well-researched recommendations. The individual would also have the ability to cause the bureaucracy to actually carry out the President's and his intent.
It is possible that in 1789, one man in the Secretary of State or Treasury or Energy (had it existed then) would have been selected and useful for his own knowledge and skills rather than bureaucratic finesse or political adeptness. That is not the case today and it is important for people to bear that in mind.
No. No. No. Not in the slightest. I'd be surprised if the president makes more than 2% of the actual decisions that operate the government. If you think he does, please obtain a copy of the National Budget and try and read it and understand every page of it before the next budget is released. And I mean the proposed budgets, not the ones that are adopted AFTER Congress gets its hands on it.
The President sets policy, just as any executive does, but he can only act on the information he is given, he only has so much time in a day to make decisions, and he simply has no way to adequately supervise the people who implement his desires.
The cabinet secretaries make *real* decisions every day, just as real and important as the President's, if perhaps more limited in scope. The President can order whatever he likes, but he can't do it himself. He can't even give orders to the military unless they are passed through the Secretary of Defense to the unified Combatant Commanders. There are probably huge swaths of governmental actions that a president technically controls that he doesn't even think about more than once a month. Who is making decisions independently in that time? The cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries.