Obama Cabinet and Key White House Staff
12. Steven Chu (D) - Energy Secretary
Nobel Laureate, Physics
Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Nominated: December 15, 2008
Obama’s comments:
“Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has been working at the cutting edge of our nation’s effort to develop new and cleaner forms of energy. He blazed new trails as a scientist, teacher, and administrator, and has recently led the Berkeley National Laboratory in pursuit of new alternative and renewable energies. Steven is uniquely suited to be our next Secretary of Energy as we make this pursuit a guiding purpose of the Department of Energy, as well as a national mission. The scientists at our national labs will have a distinguished peer at the helm. His appointment should send a signal to all that my Administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action.”
Others’ comments:
“It is ‘game on’ from day one of the new presidency between Obama’s very liberal carbon policy advisers and US conservatives.
“While the new foreign policy and economic teams are notably ‘centrist,’ to use the Washington DC jargon, Obama has, to quote one media commentator, ‘stocked his shop with the greenest of greens’ in the energy and carbon policy areas.
“Some American power industry people note wryly that Steven Chu, the Nobel physics laureate named Energy Secretary and a scientist passionate about global warming, is a moderate in this team.
“In a month where Australian scientists—through the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering report issued last Friday—are calling for local spending on energy R&D to be lifted to $6 billion between now and 2020..., Chu will take office arguing that the $43.3 billion George W. Bush spent on climate-specific research since 2001 is nowhere near enough for America.
“But, it is pointed out, Chu is a conservative compared with Obama’s national climate advisor, Carol Browner, an Al Gore protégé and Clinton administration head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who was seen as one of the most left-leaning of the previous Democrat president’s officials. She is on the record at US Congressional hearings last year declaring that eliminating carbon in American energy use ‘need not bankrupt us.’”
—BusinessSpectator.com
Approved: January 20, 2009
Sworn in: January 20, 2009
Appointment Impact:
“Chu is the first working scientist to head the Department of Energy—which is a major source of physics research funding—since it was created in 1977.”
—Physicsworld.com
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