By MICHAEL GRUNWALD / Beijing
"What the U.S. and China do over the next decade," declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize – winning physicist who is leading President Obama's push for a clean-energy economy, "will determine the fate of the world."
Chu had gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the "MIT of China," to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change. In his nerdy professor style and referring to "Milankovitch cycles" and the "albedo effect" as well as melting glaciers and rising seas, Chu methodically explained that the science is clear, that we're boiling the planet — but also that science can save us, that we can innovate our way to sustainability. He acknowledged that the developed nations that made the mess can't tell the developing world not to develop, but he also warned that China is on track to emit more carbon in the next three decades than the U.S. has emitted in its history; that business as usual would intensify floods, droughts and heat waves in both countries; that greenhouse gases respect no borders. This earth, he concluded, is the only one we've got; it would be illogical and immoral to fry it. "Science has unambiguously shown that we're altering the destiny of our planet," he said. "Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?" (Read "The Global Warming Survival Guide.")
It was a tough message to deliver to the Chinese — basically, "Do as we say, not as we did" — but it's hard to imagine a more credible messenger. It's not just that Chu is a Chinese American whose parents both graduated from Tsinghua before attending the real MIT or that he's the most qualified leader ever at the Department of Energy (DOE) — which is a bit like being the most likable character ever on NYC Prep. It's also that Chu is the kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers. "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people. In China, it's scholars," Chu told me during his trip to Beijing. "Here, Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Britney Spears."
That's one reason Chu's message doesn't resonate all that well with Americans. They ranked global warming last in a national survey of 20 top priorities; in a global poll, only 44% of them wanted action to be taken on the issue, vs. 94% of Chinese. Most Republican leaders flatly reject prevailing climate science, while many Democrats from coal, oil and farm states are equally protective of the fossil-fuel status quo. This is why the American Clean Energy and Security Act — a far-reaching Democratic bill that would cap carbon emissions — has been marketed to a confused public on the basis of issues that poll far better: gas prices, foreign oil and green jobs. It narrowly passed the House, but it's in trouble in the Senate, and the President, while supportive, is now preoccupied with health care. (Read "Getting Your Slice of the Cap-and-Trade Pie.")
Anyway, Americans usually don't pay much attention to Energy Secretaries, who tend to be political loyalists with little energy expertise; President Ronald Reagan once appointed a dentist to the job. Since its founding during the last energy crisis, in 1977, the DOE has become a bloated backwater of the military-industrial complex, primarily responsible for safeguarding nuclear weapons and cleaning up nuclear waste and generally ignored between security breaches at its nuclear labs. But now there's a new energy crisis, and the appointment of a global-warming Paul Revere who's also a green-tech Albert Einstein has signaled Obama's desire to put the E back in DOE, to have a first-tier brain reinvent a second-tier agency, to keep his Inaugural Address pledge to "restore science to its rightful place." With Obama publicly committed to an economic transformation designed to slash U.S. carbon emissions 80% by 2050, Chu will be America's first Clean-Energy Secretary — a job that's part green evangelism, part venture capitalism and part politics.
He's perfect for parts one and two. The fate of the world, in Chu's calculation, hinges on part three.
Watch an interview with Chu.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
Mr. Outside
The Bush Administration generally followed a "Drill, baby, drill" approach to energy and a "What, me worry?" approach to climate change. Obama promised the opposite on both counts.
For the Obama Administration, change begins with the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency, pursued through mandates and incentives to get vehicles to use less fuel and get appliances, buildings and factories to use less power. It's also pushing investment in wind, solar and other renewables, along with a smarter grid to exploit them. At the same time, Obama wants massive increases in federal energy research and development, plus a cap-and-trade regime that would accelerate private-sector advances by putting a price on carbon. The overall goal is to reduce emissions as well as U.S. dependence on foreign petro-thugs and a pesky vulnerability to volatile gas prices. To Republican critics, it's a radical scheme to destroy jobs and raid wallets, cooked up by élitists like Chu, who was once quoted calling U.S. gas prices too low. But Obama's message is that saving the planet makes economic sense. "We're trying to communicate that climate change is very, very serious, but hey, by the way, this is an incredible economic opportunity," Chu said. (Watch a video on vanishing salt marshes.)
Chu is becoming the public face of this agenda, sounding the alarm about emissions while preaching the good news of a new Industrial Revolution — to Americans and Chinese, through Facebook and PowerPoint. If White House energy czar Carol Browner is the little-seen Ms. Inside, Chu is Mr. Outside, mixing plain English with arcane data to make the case for twisty lightbulbs, white roofs, geothermal heat pumps, electric cars, advanced research and carbon-pricing. He sounds like Al Gore but with unimpeachable scientific credentials, a nonpartisan aura and a rumpled charm. At 61, he still radiates boyish impatience as well as boyish enthusiasm, with a megawatt smile that appears without warning.
Chu is also becoming the chief financier for the U.S. clean-energy sector, retooling a sclerotic department to shell out about $39 billion worth of short-term stimulus projects — nearly 150% of its normal annual budget — while reorienting its long-term research and development toward artificial photosynthesis, advanced batteries and other technologies he envisions as low-emissions "game changers." Chu plays up his geeky image — he gave Jon Stewart a Nerds of America Society T shirt on-air — but he's no ivory-tower ingenue. "Energy," he says, "is all about money." He cut his teeth in the entrepreneurial culture of Bell Labs and spent the rest of his career around Silicon Valley; he's served on the boards of a battery company, a semiconductor firm and two biotech start-ups. In his last job, he shook up the bureaucracy of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to tackle real-world energy problems, while becoming a leading expert on energy innovation. "He's brilliant, and he understands the full breadth of the energy portfolio," says Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "There's no precedent for that."
But Obama's ambitious plans will ultimately depend on politics, and most scientists are about as adept at Beltway Kabuki as most politicians are at freezing atoms. Chu has already created a miniflap by telling reporters it wasn't his job to badger OPEC about oil prices, and he has struggled to explain why he once called coal a "nightmare." Several of his scientific initiatives have stalled on Capitol Hill, victims of lackluster salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden responded to Chu's seemingly innocuous comments about energy efficiency by publicly chastising him for straying off message. "He won a Nobel Prize," Biden told the crowd. "I got elected seven times."
Chu does have an inconvenient habit of speaking his mind. At Tsinghua, he told audience members they ought to limit their driving to the weekends, a nonstarter in U.S. politics if ever there was one. In our interview, he suggested that Americans should get over their need for gas-guzzling speed ("Believe me, 0 to 60 [m.p.h.] in 8.5 sec. is fine") and meat-heavy diets ("We really don't need 12-oz. steaks every day") before he realized he was making energy transformation sound like a bummer — and abruptly changed the subject. "I don't want to deliver too many messages," Chu said, more to himself than to me. "I need to focus on 'Let's not let this incredible opportunity slip away.'"
See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
A Real-World Scientist
When Chu was a second-grader in a Long Island, New York, suburb, his father told him, Don't get married until after you get your Ph.D. It was that kind of family; even an aunt whose feet were bound when she was a girl in China became a chemistry professor in the U.S. "It was always assumed that all of us would be science professors," Chu recalled. He has two brothers and four cousins in the U.S., all with doctorates. When I asked how many advanced degrees they have, he asked if a law degree counts as advanced.
As a boy, he diverted his lunch money into parts for homemade rockets. But he says he was a mere A-minus student, an "academic black sheep" — at least compared with older brother Gilbert, a straight-A valedictorian who studied physics at Princeton and is now a biochemistry professor at Stanford. After quitting school for a while in ninth grade — "I was tired of competing with Gilbert" — he didn't make the Ivy League, so he settled for the University of Rochester. His father once told him he'd never succeed in physics. "What he meant was, compared to Gilbert," recalls younger brother Morgan, a high school dropout who still earned four advanced degrees by the time he was 25 and is now a renowned litigator. (Read "Energy Secretary: Steven Chu.")
It's easy to see how Chu ended up as a workaholic. At times, he hinted at an emotional price, mentioning offhandedly that a son from a previous marriage quit school and was "trying to find himself." But Chu found his niche in the lab, building state-of-the-art lasers from spare parts to tinker with quarks and "high-Z hydrogen-like ions," preferring the rigor of experiments that either worked or didn't to abstract theoretical physics. At Bell Labs, he spent phone-monopoly money playing with electron spectrometers, gamma rays, polymers and other gee-whiz stuff few of us can understand; he once accidentally discovered an important pulse-propagation effect. But even his most obscure technical work had practical applications; his Nobel-winning breakthrough — supercooling atoms into "optical molasses" — inspired improvements in GPS data and oil exploration. "He's a real-world scientist," says physicist Carl Wieman, who won a separate Nobel using techniques that Chu pioneered. "He's very, very intense, and he's very, very good at solving problems."
After winning his Nobel while at Stanford in 1997, Chu gradually concluded that global warming was the biggest problem facing mankind and decided to change fields to help solve it. He admired the Nobel laureates whose discoveries sparked the agricultural Green Revolution that averted a global hunger crisis, and he couldn't justify fiddling with molecules when a new Green Revolution was needed to avert a climate crisis. LBNL scientist Art Rosenfeld, Chu's mentor on energy issues, can relate: he was once a star particle physicist, the last student of Enrico Fermi's, but during the crisis of the 1970s, he reinvented himself as an energy-efficiency pioneer — and ended up developing much of the technology behind green buildings and those curlicued compact fluorescent lightbulbs. "The stakes are so high and the opportunities so vast," Rosenfeld explains.
Chu took over LBNL in 2004 and immediately refocused the lab on researching commercially viable solutions to big energy problems. He set up two bioenergy institutes — one funded by a controversial $500 million grant he secured from British Petroleum — and spearheaded a major project to investigate solar energy. "Steve is a visionary, and he really galvanized the lab with his vision," says Paul Alivisatos, who was Chu's deputy there. But some scientists bristled at Chu's demand for dramatic scientific breakthroughs — brand-new ways to store energy, sequester carbon or fuel cars — as opposed to incremental engineering improvements. "Chu likes flashy, sexy technological fixes that attract a lot of attention. He gets bored when they aren't nano-this or bio-that," says University of Texas engineering professor Tad Patzek, who left the Berkeley Lab after clashing with him.
Environmentalists are generally ecstatic about Chu, but at a time when coal plants and heavily subsidized corn ethanol are creating huge environmental problems, some question his enthusiasm for "clean coal" and "third-generation biofuels," which do not yet exist, as well as his support for new nuclear power, which has become wildly expensive. They recall President George W. Bush talking up future technological miracles as an alternative to present-day action, and they want Chu to focus on proven technologies that can help boost efficiency and conservation to reduce energy demand now, plus on renewables to create zero-emissions supply.
Read "Clean Energy: U.S. Lags in Research and Development."
See pictures of the effects of global warming.
In fact, Chu is already an efficiency nut. His California house was so well insulated, it barely needed air conditioning, and he's now weatherizing his D.C. home. He's pushing 24 new appliance standards that languished under Bush; at Tsinghua, he explained that existing efficiency rules for U.S. refrigerators alone save more energy than the controversial Three Gorges Dam in China's Hubei province will produce. He's especially obsessed with promoting white roofs and light-colored pavement, constantly citing Rosenfeld's calculation that having them throughout the U.S. would save as much carbon as taking every car off the roads for 11 years.
But Chu is thinking far ahead, and he doesn't see existing technologies producing an 80% cut in emissions. At a recent appearance with Obama, he said the U.S. needs to be like Wayne Gretzky: not just chasing the puck but positioning itself where the puck is going to end up. "Very cool metaphor," the President said.
Does Science Matter?
In China, I watched Chu tour the headquarters of a company called ENN — the name is a hybrid of energy and innovation — that was founded as a tiny gas supplier in 1989 by a cabdriver with $200 in his pocket and has expanded into a clean-energy conglomerate with more than 24,000 employees. Chu peppered his hosts with technical questions as he checked out a sleek factory churning out superefficient solar panels, a greenhouse where genetically engineered algae were excreting fuel, a prototype for a coal-gasification plant in Inner Mongolia and a research lab with 300 scientists. It felt like an only-in-America business story, except we were in Langfang, just outside Beijing.
My notebook quickly filled up with scribbles like "nanostructure??" and "Chu recommends polymer" and "don't think Hazel O'Leary got this briefing." Chu's only simple question — aside from "Will this explode?" — was "What percentage of your profit goes to science?" About 15% to 25%, the CEO explained. "That's very good," Chu said with a sigh. The entire visit reminded Chu of the futuristic spirit he loved at Bell Labs. "This was a power company, but it had the flavor of a high-tech company," he told me later. "They're looking at the long view." In short, they're Wayne Gretzky — and Chu is obviously worried that we're not, that we've lost our ability to focus on long-term problems.
The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won't accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they're preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they're developing more-advanced transmission lines. They're still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They're making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world's largest producer of renewables by 2010. "Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions," Chu said. "Some U.S. policymakers still don't think this is a problem." (Read "One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.")
In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are "almost comical," that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious, almost plaintive: "You know, it's totally irresponsible. You're not supposed to make up the facts."
Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner's opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It's tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu's plan to create eight "Bell lablets" to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He's trying to make DOE's bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote about "the fierce urgency of now" — one of Obama's favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There's still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won't tolerate.
The Chinese don't seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he's a big fan of democracy. "We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves," he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: "Let's be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people."
See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.
See TIME's special report on the environment.
