A big, muscular, smart, and frank portrait of Energy Secretary Steve Chu classes up the June 25 issue of Rolling Stone. Writer Jeff Goodell (largish PDF – more easily read in the magazine so please buy one when they hit the stands) hits a home run with a well-detailed, occasionally breezy, and continuously high-velocity trip through the life and times of this brainy, energetic, confident, ambitious, and perhaps over-possessed-by-tech-dreams boss of a $65 billion enterprise. While DOE is mostly about nuclear weapons, the Nobelist in charge is all about nano and biofuels and efficient buildings and thin film solar panels on just about everything we build out where it catches some rays. The piece sets up the tension from the start.

It has enough biography to reveal Chu’s roots and boyhood, and enough nuance to suggest that for all of the DOE Secretary’s refreshing faith in truth and honesty as his first choice during public conversation, there remains a fragility to his ambitions for a remade American way of life. Politics is brutal – even more than academic infighting. Again, read this, and come out knowing a great deal more about the world’s energy pickle and about one important man in the struggle to fix it.

There also is news, of a sort, here. Among the refreshments is Chu’s belief that, for all the talk of tipping points and the need for fast action to steer clear of turning Earth into a different planet and high flying hopes for a new Post-Kyoto era of adult behavior, he says there is slim chance the world’s nations will come up with a way to prevent the atmosphere from blowing right through 450 parts per million CO2 in the next few decades. He apparently expects it to reach 550 ppm. I’d guess that’s TWO tipping points’ worth of climate forcings. Another news break: it says here he didn’t mean it when he seemed to take back some nasty things he said about American coal. He may be pie in the sky on the transformative power of research and development of near-magical technologies, but not about the certainty of exceedingly difficult times to come.

Minor quibble dept: Goodell dismisses in a line the Bush administration’s infatuation with hydrogen cars (a program kiboshed by Chu) as a mere effort to deflect attention from that White House’s absence of immediate ambition on clean energy. That might have been true of the motivation, but anybody who read Robert F. Service’s piece in the June 5 Science Magazine on fuel cell automobile potential might decide such cars really are worth continued nurture. I was surprised. The link goes to a summary. The full piece isn’t easily linkable. If anybody sends me a public link, or  a pdf, I’ll add it.

-CP

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