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."

Comments

Terrible Idea

[capt.Hij]

Just because someone is a great scientist does not mean the person is a good administrator or a good politician. The sad truth is that politicians will not care if he has a Nobel Prize and will think nothing of tearing him down for no reason other than they can. Everybody has limitations, and it would be better to get someone who can listen to scientists and engineers and also be a great administrator.

Re:Terrible Idea

[sam0vi]

it is far easier to appoint a technocrat to the cabinet position and surround him with brilliant academics

And that's exactly what they are doing. It's just that the technocrat in this case would be the President, and the academics would be his staff, whose primary goal is to advise him. How far along the chain of command do you want to place the smart guys? Down on the basement? Don't forget they are just coming with the ideas; every single decision is the President's.

Re:Terrible Idea

[gravesb]

There is too much for the president to handle for him to be in that role. That's why they created cabinet positions, OPM, and the like. The executive branch is too large for the president to be the main political player. Besides, you need someone playing the political games when the President is doing figure head stuff. Someone with some savvy needs to be down in the weeds why the president is glad-handing.

Re:Terrible Idea

[Chrisq]

Much as I hate Margret Thatcher nobody could say that she was not an able politician. (I hesitate to use the word good). Thatcher had a BSc degree in chemistry. Her one redeeming feature was that she did take global warming seriously and could see through the petrochemical industries FUD.

Re:Terrible Idea

[Vellmont]

Just because someone is a Administrator or politician does not mean they are a GOOD administrator or GOOD politician.

That's true of any job. I guess I don't really understand your point. That we shouldn't assume someone we don't know will be good at a job they've never done?

I don't know if he'll be any good at being Energy secretary. I did see him speak a couple years ago at the Nobel Conference on Energy, and he was a great speaker with very good ideas. From what I recall one of his main messages was "Fail fast", in other words try a lot of ideas and see which ones work and which don't quickly. IMO that's really _exactly_ what we need to do. I will say this though. The past Energy secretaries certainly haven't done jack-squat for energy policy in this country, and the vast majority of them were politicians. So it's not like the politicians have some great track record that Chu has to live up to.

Re:Terrible Idea

[Colonel Korn]

Your mistake is assuming that a great scientist isn't a great administrator. Chu has been leading LBL with incredible success for four years, and under his leadership LBL has become the most focused national lab, and that focus is on alternative energy generation and storage. I've never met anyone who had a better understanding of both the science and practicality of alternative energy than Steven Chu. Picking Chu is Obama's best choice to date.

Re:Terrible Idea

[fugue]

All to often, academics is too far removed from the real reality of things that they can at times be detrimental to sound policy.

Almost by definition, academics are the people who look at evidence before coming to decisions, and revise their decisions when they receive new information. Sorry if that's removed from your reality--it's certainly alien to Bush's. And what do manuals have to do with academics?

Carter's failure is a good point--if you ask people to act intelligently, they will resent it (I assume that's what you're referring to?). I have no doubt that Obama is quite aware of the parallels; I think that he is a more careful politician, but time will tell whether this country is worthy of him.

Apparently what this country needs is a gangsta president.

Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis

[jamie]

Salon has a story today on 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...:

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

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.

Re:Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis

[jamie]

And hey, here's more. I'm just 8 minutes into this talk and I'm already on his side.

Steve Chu: A New Energy Program