Mike Grunwald’s TIME portrait of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu starts far afield — in China, where Chu had the chutzpah to lecture Chinese scientists about their country’s energy problems. It goes back pretty far as well — to Chu’s childhood on Long Island where both Chu and one of his brothers were, for a time, high-school dropouts . . . though all three Chu sons have gone on to significant careers. Chu earned a Nobel Prize in physics while at Stanford, and then cemented his reputation as the head of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Of course, since Chu got his start at the University of Rochester (which Grunwald, in a fit of temporary madness, describes as the place Chu “settled for”) it’s no surprise he has gone on to a spectacular career.
But what Grunwald’s irreverent and tightly-worded profile (Chu spent “spent phone-monopoly money” at AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey) shows most of all is that President Obama’s chose for energy secretary a creative and hard-driving soul, one whose intellectual abilities and interest in fixing things bode well for his work at DOE.
Chu is “retooling a sclerotic department to shell out about $39 billion worth of short-term stimulus projects;” he’s “pushing investment in wind, solar, and . . . a smarter grid to exploit them;” and he’s facing up to the challenges of Washington, D.C., where “a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion.” His idea is for U.S. energy policy to be “like Wayne Gretzky . . . positioning itself where the puck is going to end up.” A government agency that aims to be at the forefront of change? We could use a couple more cabinet secretaries with that kind of ambition. -NH