Steven Chu

Forget the fact for a minute that this is a Nobel Laureate in Physics ("for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light"). Or that he's a fellow University of Rochester alum. This dude is the real deal for running the Dept of Energy. Why? Because he is passionate about energy.

Here he is at the National Energy Summit:



The message is here:

Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds. [Emphasis mine]

Can you imagine such a thought amongst the Bushies? They're still fighting about whether evolution is a fascist notion, and can barely acknowledge that global warning has a manmade cause.

Thank G-d it is the adults running the show.