Energy Secretary Chu, on Power Sources Old and New

Steven Chu has likened his arrival in Washington as President Obama’s energy secretary to being thrown into the deep end of the pool — and he boasted this week that he hadn’t yet drowned. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and PhD moved from running a research lab in California to taking over a sprawling federal agency with a $70 billion annual budget and 114,000 employees. “I still have my head above water,” he joked in a wide-ranging interview in his office.

His expertise is in developing alternative forms of energy, such as solar and wind power, and he believes — for starters — that the country needs to take better advantage of existing technologies. Most important, he says, scientists have come to appreciate that the energy crisis is such a huge economic and environmental problem that many are changing careers to help. “So with more intellectual, top-quality intellectual horsepower going into this, the possibility and the probability of a really transformational breakthrough will be much higher.”

Romano: Do people get it? How would you rate our nation’s understanding of the energy crisis?

Chu: I think virtually all Americans are uneasy about our growing dependency on imported oil. . . . [But] it’s hard for people to actually think deeply about what will be happening 30, 50 years from today [on global warming]. Most societies have not had to grapple with the fact that something 50 years down the road can have some grave consequences.

Washington Post