Skip to main content

Obama's new Energy Secretary and EPA head

Image
By
The US has been abuzz with talk of Obama's picks for his cabinet. One very exciting guy coming up for Secretary of Energy will be Steven Chu, a strong advocate for alternative and renewable energy. He also happens to be a Nobel Laureate for Physics from 1997 (cooling and trapping atoms with lasers). Currently this guy serves as director for the Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory, pushing the governmental institution towards becoming a world leader in biofuels, artificial photosynthesis, and solar energy technologies, focusing on using carbon-neutral sources.

One particular quote stands out to me: "If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade," he told Reuters in a May 2007 interview. This really excites me because I think he will be able to push the US towards the forefront of the climate change issue. Personally, I'm also proud that a Chinese-American will be spearheading the effort. It may send a message to China, as well, to push them to change their policies towards reducing greenhouse emissions.

Further quotes from Steven Chu about climate change can be found here.

Another important cabinet pick will be Obama's choice for the administrator for the EPA. Lots of names have been thrown around, but it sounds like he's recently settled for Lisa P. Jackson. Her record as former head of the New Jersey EPA seems fairly green, although critics have argued that her record shows neglect of hazardous waste sites and weakening proposals to enact safer groundwater quality standards.

We'll have to see how these appointments turn out, but so far, I'm fairly excited to see the people that Obama has put his trust in. Let's hope that trust is well placed.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Other Words: A Life on Our Planet

By
I just watched this documentary together with my son and my wife. Different from David's typical approach of sparse objective commentary, this documentary movie is a personal witness statement that David Attenborough is making describing how our planet has changed in his life time. It's compelling, and urgent but still hopeful.   Please, watch this documentary and share with your friends so they get the message!
3 comments
Read more

Permaculture: nature is still smarter than us

By
Permaculture In the year 2010, there are many aspects of humans' daily life that would lead us to believe that we have dominated nature. Unlike the thousands of other species that have gone extinct, we have settled and thrived in almost every environment and every continent on this planet, aside from Antarctica. We have eradicated diseases like smallbox and subdued other diseases which previously decimated our populations on a massive scale (see The Black Death in the 1300s and Columbus' “discovery of the Americas in 1492). We have created chemicals that allow us to blast weeds and insects into submission and thereby cultivate thousands of acres of the same species on farmland; an environment that would be impossible in nature. But nature is still smarter than us. A lot smarter. And we still have much to learn from its processes. Permaculture is the idea of mimicking the ways that ecosystems work in the context of essential human activities: house and settlement design, farming...
3 comments
Read more

Freely-Speaking: Quick note on bio-based antennaes

By
With my thesis defense coming up this Monday, I really did not have as much time to share all the interesting things I came across lately. But I did not want to miss the chance to make a quick note to myself and the readers of this site of an interesting paper, titled "DNA-based programming of quantum dot valency, self-assembly and luminescence" just published in Nature Nanotechnology . Grigory Tikhomirov et al. report "the self-assembly of quantum dot complexes using cadmium telluride nanocrystals capped with specific sequences of DNA. Quantum dots with between one and five DNA-based binding sites are synthesized and then used as building blocks to create a variety of rationally designed assemblies, including cross-shaped complexes containing three different types of dots...Through changes in pH, the conformation of the complexes can also be reversibly switched, turning on and off the transfer of energy between the constituent quantum dots." In other w...
3 comments
Read more