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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."
For the first time in *at least* 8 years, I am quite jealous of you US guys. If you ask me, people in senior positions are are not 'politically savvy enough' is *exactly* what the world needs right now.
It's dangerous to tear down someone who is vastly smarter than you, especially when they're right about something. The danger of doing it may temper some of the sillier political games.
Just because someone is a great scientist does not mean the person is a good administrator or a good politician.
Out of curiosity; do you think current politicians make good politicians?
So you'd prefer to see yet another career politician shoe-horned into a job which they are barely qualified to understand? I'd much rather see people who understand the implications of their policies. It's time to end the idiocracy and get on with fixing things.
Not really. Someone without political savvy won't see the games until it is too late. I hope that he does well, and that his experiences encourage this kind of meritocracy in the future. However, it is far easier to appoint a technocrat to the cabinet position and surround him with brilliant academics. Let them provide him with the best courses of action, and let him go through the stupid political games to accomplish those. Of course, that requires a president who is willing to force their secretaries to listen to the academics. But if you are willing to appoint an academic to a cabinet post, then surely you are willing to make a cabinet secretary listen to his advisors.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
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?
we have to move beyond coal and oil, for all of the obvious environmental and geopolitical reasons. we can't keep dumping carbon into our atmosphere, we can't keep funding saudi wahabbism, russian neoimperialism, and venezuelan blowhards. the only we are going to do this is through science
so hopefully, we'll get the following out of washington dc:
1. more nuclear power plants
2. more funding for fusion research
3. now that we have nationalized the car industry, we put a gun to the heads of the fuckers and detroit and force them to make more, cheaper electric cars. force this on them as a priority
4. the infrastructure to allow for battery swapping nationwide
of course, the american consumer has to be dragged kicking and screaming out of his SUV and into a post-oil and coal future. so be it. the only person who is going to be the visionary to do this is a scientist. he has plenty of support in his bully pulpit role from those of us who "get it". we finally just elected an administration it seems that also gets it
where it= oil and coal need to go the way of history
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Salon has a story today on Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis:
Chu must have reasonable political skills, as he the director of the Berkeley Lab, an organization with 4000 people and a budget of half a billion. The management of a scientific organization of this nature is usually quite challenging, if only because many of the people employed by it are (necessarily) independent-minded and headstrong. There is more back-stabbing in academic labs than in Washington DC.
Putting a scientist in charge of energy policy is a good idea. A factually justified, realistic energy policy is urgently needed.
Besides, during the last few years people in the public research departments have been demoralized by a political leadership that made it clearly felt that it couldn't care less about scientific data and factual reality. The DoE needs a leader who has the confidence of its staff. Chu could be that leader.
Certainly, there's a whole lot of skills there that he's not necessairly got. However he's not just some Nobel-winning basement-dweller as one might assume, he's got some serious credentials when it comes to organising and funding research efforts, which is a pretty substantial proportion of the DoE's work. I'm surprised there hasn't been a scientist of any kind in that position before.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
I would rather see an inventor run a business than a marketer. Too much of what is wrong with business today is related to the inevitable shift away from decisions favoring integrity and quality to decisions about what is thought to improve the "bottom line." Dell has always made good computers and was the leader in service. They have since moved the vast majority of those key advantage points out of the country and the result has made them less competitive. It is simply a bad business decision that has resulted in a loss of a loyal customer base. And I don't care what business school you went to, in business, there is NOTHING more important than keeping your customers.
Placing experts in their fields in control of policy making is smarter than putting politicians in those seats for the very same reasons.
And to be fair, it is true that some people with one skill set may not often have others. But I have also known many technical experts ALSO have good skills with people. They are rare, but they exist. I work for an architectural firm. My CEO is an architect, not a marketer. He understands marketing and is also an outstanding speaker. But he will not compromise on quality nor on integrity because he sees clearly where that leads. And in today's business environment where construction is slowing and even halting, our office has work stacked up for the next two to three years to come. The reason for this is that he works and plans for the horizon and he has a reputation for taking very good care of his clients with non compromise in honesty or quality of work and he owns his mistakes completely. And yes, I thought he was too good to be true as well. But I have seen it all happen and there is no faking actions. My company has --zero-- debt. My CEO is a multi-millionaire. He is the unquestionable picture of success and he is an Architect, not a salesman.
I am not claiming that technical experts are ideal choices, but I will say that non-experts making decisions about things they don't fully understand is ALWAYS a mistake waiting to happen... and while the experts with social and political savvy are rare, they are not extinct. I've got one right here.
Yes, but administrating a group of scientists and grad students is nor the same as running a cabinet level agency. That is especially so if he ends up being alone and politically isolated. This kind of thing takes different skills.
Because we all know, of course, that there are no politics in decision making at research facilities and educational institutions (or the research journals that help advance such careers).
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear
An anonymous source says that Chu has solved the pickle matrix, and has made significant progress on the rebigulator. DOE should be a piece of cake.
If you mean what common parlance means by "politics" -- i.e. "getting elected"
If you mean "running a social unit, such as a state" then most of them suck.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
but all of the downside, including what you listed above, is not as big a downside as that of oil and coal
environment: we pollute our air
geopolitics: we fund our enemies
those two take the cake when compared to nuclear and electric being "messy" and all the other minor issues you list. especially regarding nuclear: lookup pebble bed reactors. we can get 10x the amount of energy out of uranium, and thorium, and produce 1/10th the waste that lasts 2 centuries rather than 10,000 years. nuclear is a no-brainer. the french and japanese have been doing it for decades, deriving most of their energy from nuclear
the french and japanese need to show the way to americans who, like you, seem to suffer from tunnel vision. it doesn't have to be oil and coal. we are using a suboptimal source for our energy needs. all of the downside to nuclear and electric do not stack up as much as the downside of oil and coal
and then we really need to master fusion, in a century, at least. because oil and coal sources are just going to get deeper and more expensive, and uranium and thorium sources aren't going to last forever either
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And another important point is that this appointment says quite clearly that Obama expects the DOE to use scientific methods and procedures as the basis for what it's doing. When you're charging an organization with the task of fixing the US energy problem, that's exactly what you want.
Imagine, if you will, a Department of Energy focused on keeping the oil, coal, and gas companies happy. Oh wait, you don't need to imagine that, because that's what we've had for several decades.
I am officially gone from
When I look at his appointments so far, I see three extremely respected economists, an absolutely superb and forward thinking Defense Secretary, a Nobel laureate for Energy, a woman with international recognition and appeal for State, a HHS secretary with a record of working for universal health care, and a tough bastard as CoS to push the agenda through. That's what I want.
I don't know what change you were looking for, but I'm happy.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
It's such a shame that he'll be unable to learn them, what with being such a notorious doofus.
We should instead continue to appoint loyal political apparatchiks who - as we all know - can pick up all that silly old "science" stuff overnight, should they ever feel the need.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think that having a scientist rather then an administrator is key for change in the Obama administration because it shows that people who actually know their fields will be chosen to lead them. Also, as a Nobel winner, he has been proven to be extremely intelligent and a good choice
Pfft, Al Gore got one of those by making a PowerPoint presentation. How tough can it be?
Let me explain something to you. After the U.S.A. developed nuclear weapons during WWII, they made a very smart decision, they decided that the potential destructive power of these weapons was far to great to entrust them to the military. Thus they created the atomic energy commission to be responsible for the weapons and development and to provide some checks and balances on the military industrial complex. The waste from nuclear power is goverened by the DOE as well, do you really want corporate america disposing of all your waste for you? Any sane person would look at how corporate america spends vast amounts of money to dodge responsibility for hard decisions and would say no.
All Carter did was roll this functionality as well as the nuclear power waste disposal into a single agency. As for the extended missions of alternative energy, I'd say we need someone to do this because private industry has been sitting on their ass for the last three decades and spending more time developing marketing campaigns about alternative energy than actually developing the energy sources.
I can't believe I bothered spending ten minutes writing this comment, libertarians are so blind, it's pathetic.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Do you have one? ;)
I bet if I search my computers at home I could find a couple old PowerPoint presentations.
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.
I think its more likely that Steven Chu was chosen to head the Department of Energy because he is an effective current administrator of a major Department of Energy research facility who, in that role, has done lots of work (including establishing partnership with outside entities) on policy issues that are important to the President-Elect than because the President-Elect views scientists as a mystical priesthood and Chu as the priest most in touch with the deity "Science".
Chu is a Nobel laureate, but he's not just a Nobel laureate.
well, part of the reason it's broken is because we have career politicians/lawyers/corporate executives running everything. i think one of the smartest moves made by India as a society was to elect a scientist as president. and while that may never happen in the U.S., having science-related cabinet positions filled by scientists is the next best thing.
in itself this may not fix all of the problems inherent to our political system, but it will at least put people who have some intelligence & integrity in positions of power. also, by putting policy decisions in the hands of scientists/academics rather than conventional politicians, you introduce the possibility of change/reform for the first time. otherwise, if every government official fits the same mold of the archetypal politician you're just setting yourself up for more of the same.
the idea that someone needs to be a career politician who knows how to "play political games" in order to be a good politician is patently false. you might need to be experienced in making backroom deals, giving kickbacks, pandering to interest groups, etc. in order to sleaze your way up to the top in politics, but if someone is simply being appointed straight to the top, then that clearly isn't requisite anymore. and in this case it would indeed be better to appoint a non-politician who hasn't been corrupted by years of being in Washington (and political fund-raising) and will not compromise their morals so easily.