Can Steven Chu Win the Fight Over Global Warming?

Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning Secretary of Energy, says people caused global warming. He also says people, with science's help, can solve it

  • Jose Mandojana for TIME

    Chu at the Hanford nuclear-waste site in Richland, Wash.

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    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.

    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.

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