For years, Steven Chu argued that leadership on climate change should be wrested from the politicians and turned over to the scientists. But on Capitol Hill this April, on Earth Day, as Chu testified on the scientific merits of the most ambitious climate-change bill ever to come out of Washington, you might have wondered whether he regretted getting his wish.
The opposition attacked immediately. Representative Fred Upton of Michigan suggested that a greenhouse-gas "cap and tax" bill would lead to the loss of American jobs. Lee Terry of Nebraska asked some amusing questions about regulating methane emissions (produced in high volume by the cattle industry in his home state) and wondered if the bill's emission standards met "the administration's goal of bankrupting coal plants." John Shimkus of Illinois shook a few props he'd brought — a hard hat and a piece of coal — and called the bill "the largest assault on democracy and freedom in this country that I've ever experienced." Michael Burgess of Texas asked for proof linking human activity to the rise in greenhouse gases. That's when the scientist took control of the debate. He politely told Burgess that he'd be happy to explain the connection in private. It sounded as if the congressman, having fallen behind everyone else in the room in his understanding of the matter at hand, had been asked to stay after class for extra help.
Before his appointment in January as secretary of energy, Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning quantum physicist most recently in charge of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was more accustomed to giving lectures on the laser cooling of atoms than patiently smiling through a barrage of grandstanding. Chu had better get used to it, though, because the political challenges he will face as President Obama's energy secretary are unprecedented. Like the career executives and military officers who held the post before him, he is still responsible for the the job's standard, massive managerial chores: maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile and oil reserves, running a 16,000-employee bureaucracy, funding research at the country's national laboratories. Chu's immediate predecessor, Samuel Bodman, insisted that emissions targets were a bad idea and that global warming would be solved by future technologies. Chu has been much more proactive. His biggest task in his new job is to help enact the Obama administration's sweeping goals for transforming America's energy economy, to turn the country responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions into a model for low-carbon sustainability. Chu accepted the position of secretary of energy; his successor will almost certainly be the second secretary of climate change.
At the Earth Day hearing, Chu's primary responsibility was defending climate-change action of the kind proposed in the Waxman-Markey Bill, a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which sets strict greenhouse-gas reduction targets — reducing them to 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2050 — and creates the framework for a national greenhouse-gas cap-and-trade system. Meeting these targets would require an average annual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions of about 4 percent nationwide starting next year.
The larger goal behind this and other initiatives is to stimulate nothing less than what Chu has called "a second industrial revolution." The aggressive timetable for reductions in emission levels that Chu and Obama would like to see enacted will inevitably rearrange the list of winners and losers in American business, and that's where Chu will run into trouble. Opposition to this project has been coming from both Republicans and moderate Democrats, especially those from coal-rich states, who are worried about its economic impact in their districts. Overcoming that opposition will require all the persuasion Chu and his colleagues — including Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation — can muster.
Chu's performance that day on Capitol Hill boded well for his chances. During the hearing, his colleagues often yielded the floor to him, especially on scientific matters. This obviously didn't stop all the political showboating. But often, when Chu took the lead, something very un-Washington happened: The tone of the discussion shifted from divisive debate to studious consideration of a scientific challenge. Maybe it's just the natural deference that anyone, Republican or Democrat, feels the need to show a Nobel laureate. But in Washington, every advantange helps.
Chu, 61, is the second of three boys born to native Chinese parents who immigrated to the U.S. to pursue advanced studies at MIT. He says education was the family's highest purpose, and the Chu brothers have seven advanced degrees among them, from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley and UCLA.
Chu speaks precisely, with few hesitations or mid-course corrections, and he doesn't slow down for, say, thorny concepts from quantum mechanics. Listening to his lectures is the intellectual equivalent of hitting with a tennis pro: Even when he's making it easy for you, it's still as fast as you can handle, maybe faster.
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