I Am A Scientist

(apologies to Thers for borrowing his shtick)

Here's the expected energy team for President-elect Obama:

Obama will name Steven Chu his choice for Energy secretary, Lisa Jackson for EPA administrator and Carol Browner as energy "czar" reporting to the president.

It is unclear whether the Browner position is cabinet level.

This will not be officially announced this week.

No Blagojevich in there? Proof that he was all set to hire him before the scandal broke. When will Obama resign???!!one!?questionmark???

Carol Browner is a former regulator who administrated at the EPA under Bill Clinton, and believes that government action to regulate the climate can create economic opportunity. Lisa Jackson was New Jersey's environmental protection head and then chief of staff to Gov. Jon Corzine.

But I want to focus on Steven Chu because he's something quite novel for Cabinet-level government work: a scientist.

If you look at the history of the Department of Energy, you'll find that there's never been a Secretary who actually was an expert on energy. The closest we've ever gotten was Charles Duncan who had a chemical engineering degree and had a cup of coffee out of school at Humble (later Exxon). For some reason it just never occurred to the President to install a person who was qualified for the position.

Instead we've been subjected to a long line of career politicians, military men and folks that were as far away from energy as you could get (Reagan's first Secretary of Energy was an oral surgeon) . Is it any wonder that our energy policy is set by industry since the person who is supposed to do that doesn't have a clue?

Not only does Chu have a clue, he's a Nobel-prize winning scientist and is already working under the auspices of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. A scientist, ya'll. As the Secretary of Energy. Oh. My. Gawd.

He moved from the arena of quantum physics to political advocacy for admirable reasons.

Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

And he is optimistic about what we can do about this crisis, through energy efficiency, through developing new technologies for fuel, through building a new energy economy at home. This is a guy who is rooting around in bug entrails looking for new sources of energy, with decent results. And this is a godsend of a quote:

Applause broke out when he described how companies, after claiming efficiency gains and lowered costs were impossible, “miraculously” achieved them once they “had to assign the jobs from the lobbyists to the engineers.”

There has been no greater sea change in Obama's cabinet selections than this choice of an engineer, a scientist, to head the Department of Energy, after eight years of an Administration that waged war on science. It's the difference between having a serious conversation with the American people about a new Apollo Project for renewable energy and a post-carbon future and "Frosty the Coalman."



Yes, that's real. Go ahead and look.