Chu is wise choice for US energy secretary
By Cong Cao, UPI Asia.Com - Column: Notes on China, December 30, 2008
New York, NY, United States, — The nomination of Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama for the position of energy secretary is to be applauded. If confirmed, Chu will become the first professional scientist to run the Department of Energy, thereby bringing fresh scientific thinking into the agency.
The nomination, along with the selection of other top science advisors, shows the determination of the Obama administration to end eight years of official hostility to science and “restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” as Obama himself phrased it.
The nomination of Chu, a Chinese American, has also been hailed by the Chinese American community, which had been angered by Obama’s choice of Bill Richardson as secretary of commerce. Because of Richardson’s involvement in the Wen Ho Lee case, his selection had created a rift between Obama and this group of Americans.
In 1999, Richardson, energy secretary-designate Chu’s predecessor, publicly named Lee, a Taiwan-born scientist working at the DOE-managed Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a suspect who might have given nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Later, Lee was cleared of espionage charges and won a settlement against the federal government.
While former President Bill Clinton issued a public apology, saying that he had been “troubled” by the way Lee was treated and the federal judge who heard the civil case that Lee brought against the government remarked that “top decision makers in the executive branch … have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen,” Richardson has been so stubborn as to never issue an apology or express regret over the incident.
The Chu nomination, therefore, is seen as a gesture to calm the outrage of the Chinese Americans toward the Richardson nomination and a signal that Chinese Americans are trustworthy.
Moreover, Steven Chu could facilitate cooperation between the United States and China in energy research and beyond. Born in the United States to a family of two Chinese students, Chu became the fifth ethnic Chinese Nobel laureate in 1997. He is well respected in China, not only because he has won a Nobel Prize and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but also because he has trained many Chinese scientists, including some active in the research frontier of international science.
He is influential in China – the establishment of the Bio-X Center at Jiaotong University in Shanghai to bring together scientists from physics, chemistry, biology and engineering under one roof, was inspired by Chu, who is also the center’s honorary director.
Given his stature and connections, Chu has had and will continue to have access to China’s scientific as well as political leadership – he met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during his 2007 visit to Beijing. Indeed, he has visited China almost every year recently.
Since becoming director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a DOE facility, in 2004, Steven Chu has encouraged scientists to develop technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on one hand and pursued collaboration with industry on the other.
Leveraging this experience and his significant research portfolio in the DOE, from energy efficiency to renewable energy, Chu is expected to work with his Chinese counterparts and scientists on energy research collaboration, and more importantly to push forward in China the agenda of combating global climate change. These will be of particular interest to China, a developing country facing imminent environmental meltdown.
With these two countries sincerely joining hands, it is possible to ameliorate, if not completely solve, the global climate change challenge. Steven Chu is on a historic mission.
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