Energy Secretary Chu: Progress Needed in Batteries, Solar and Biofuels

Articles — By forcechange on February 13, 2009 8:13 am

Energy Secretary Steven Chu discussed the ways the U.S. should fight climate change in an interview with the New York Times.  Chu noted that while President Obama and much of Congress has endorsed a cap-and-trade system similar to that in-place in Europe, alternatives could still emerge like a simple tax on carbon emissions or a modified cap-and-trade. 

Chu highlighted three fields in particular that would require significant scientific breakthrough to combat climate change: electric batteries, solar power, and biofuels.  Of course, batteries and biofuels are keys to shifting our automobiles off of petroleum, and solar could eventually replace dirty coal.

However, (taking a page from Friedman’s playbook) Chu noted that countries like India and China, which have large coal reserves, will not abandon that cheap energy source, so the U.S. better lead the world in finding a way to burn it cleanly. 

Chu noted that while the technology may not be there yet, these feats are far from impossible.  He analogized the situation to the turn of the nineteenth century when European scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch made scientific discoveries that allowed the development of cheap nitrogen fertilizers that saved Europe from starvation.