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Nobel Prize Winning Physicist As Energy Secretary
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Dec 11, 2008 06:57 AM
from the the-man-for-the-job dept.
from the the-man-for-the-job dept.
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."
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Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow.
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Is it wrong of me to find this troll absolutely hilarious?
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we need a scientist (Score:5, Insightful)
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
i understand the downside of nuclear and electric (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis (Score:5, Interesting)
Salon has a story today on Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis [salon.com]:
Re:Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [fora.tv]
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Re:Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Try to put aside your prejudices and look at the actual facts on the ground.
If one were to draw a break between Secretaries of Energy, it ought to be drawn in 2004.
The Secretaries under Clinton and Bush's first term -- namely, Hazel O'Leary, Federico Pena, Bill Richardson, and Spencer Abraham -- were essentially a bunch of politicians and lawyers. They had little or no scientific or engineering background, and showed little interest in any matters far beyond politics or big business.
But 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.
Steven Chu is a Nobel prize winning physicist whose best known work is a technique for the supercooling of gases. As Director of LBNL, he must also have picked up quite a lot of administrative experience and political savvy.
They are both much more qualified and capable than their pre-2004 predecessors.
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Re:Chu's goal: solve the energy crisis (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Chu probably has political skills... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's Frinktastic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You just described the vice president. And never was this description best fitted than in this case, with the VP being more experienced than the president himself.
I completely support the appointment of a Nobel laureate scientist to important govt positions. The problem is not the scientist's lack of political experience, the problem is the system - which is not just broken but fetid-rotten.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Mankind needs to get over its delusion that some sort of priesthood exists to tell them the One True Way.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Any real policy involves trade offs between what's best for a large number of different groups, each of which has different needs, goals, tolerance for risk, etc. Deciding how to make those tradeoffs and select who's interests take priority in any given situation is largely subjective. While science can help determine how feasible a given proposal is (and even then, it's more in the realm of engineering than science), it's silent on which solution is best.
I'd like to direct you to Dr. Chu's opening speech [youtube.com] from UC Berkeley's California & The Future of Environmental Law & Policy event. While 45 minutes is far too short to go over everything (and far too long for a crowd that almost never bothers to RTFA), he addresses some of the points you make. This is from back in 2005 or so, I gather, but it's clear he has a good grasp on the challenges and potential solutions to be found. I can only imagine that he's refined his positions and proposals since then, but is the first related thing I found when I looked this morning. There's probably something more recent and relevant out there.
In any case, I applaud this choice. It sure beats the venture capitalist/CEO/treasury wonk we've got now (in his credit, he does have an Sc.D. in chemical engineering - but it seems like he's never used it, preferring to go into the financial sector instead). Before him, we had a law professor. Before that, someone who studied French/poli-sci/foreign affairs. Before that, another lawyer. I'm sure you get the idea... There has never been someone with anywhere near his credentials appointed to the job.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Informative)
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 [gustavus.edu] which as the title suggests, is very relevant to this discussion.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Just because you can split the atom of a molecule doesn't mean you can lead the nation with a microphone.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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*Very good, I'd say... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Pfft, Al Gore got one of those by making a PowerPoint presentation. How tough can it be?
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Do you have one? ;)
I bet if I search my computers at home I could find a couple old PowerPoint presentations.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody has limitations, and it would be better to get someone who can listen to scientists and engineers and also be a great administrator.
So you mean this one can't?
Just because scientists can be poor politicians, it doesn't mean all are, and this bright guy could just maybe have skills in both departments. These are things they may have found out before moving their eyes to this guy. I'm far from certain Obama in person looked at Nobel prize winners and said "Hey, let's try this guy!"
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because someone is a Administrator or politician does not mean they are a GOOD administrator or GOOD politician.
After seeing the corrupt and just plain old EVIL members of the senate and house, let along cabinet positions. If he does his job honestly he will be better than those that were in the position for the past 8 years.
Cripes we have people in other countries comparing Dick Cheney to Saddam Hussein. And from some of his actions, I dont think a great scientist will have any problem doing a fantastic job in that position.
I just hope he has the intestinal fortitude to tell members of the congress and other parts of the government that they are flat out stupid when they make a suggestion that is absurd.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Informative)
Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis [salon.com]
"You should interview Steven Chu," the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. "He already has one Nobel Prize. [nobelprize.org] 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. [nanohub.org] To get a sense of the man's interests, here's the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. [lbl.gov] (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. [climateprogress.org] 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 [salon.com] 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 [salon.com] 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, [salon.com] right
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
New laws always cause more crime (by definition).
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Terrible Idea (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Jesus 2.0? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Al Gore would have been a better pick (Score:5, Insightful)
He also has a Nobel prize and has become a moral authority on climate change and energy
I saw Al Gore speak less than 2 hours ago (at Polska Akademii Nauk, introducing a presentation by Wieslaw Maslowski, an expert on the arctic ice cap) and during his remarks, he repeatedly pointed out that although he's worked to improve his understanding of things, he is a layman. Yes, he has a Nobel prize - but it's the Peace prize, not one in the sciences. That makes him a moral authority, but not a scientific authority, as he isn't a scientist.
There is no doubt in my mind that he's a brilliant politician and policy guy, and great at raising public awareness, but I'm sure all the scientists at the numerous Department of Energy labs will be happier with Chu in charge.
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