Word: coal
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...politics, and most scientists are about as adept at Beltway Kabuki as most politicians are at freezing atoms. Chu has already created a miniflap by telling reporters it wasn't his job to badger OPEC about oil prices, and he has struggled to explain why he once called coal a "nightmare." Several of his scientific initiatives have stalled on Capitol Hill, victims of lackluster salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden responded to Chu's seemingly innocuous comments about...
...that well with Americans. They ranked global warming last in a national survey of 20 top priorities; in a global poll, only 44% of them wanted action to be taken on the issue, vs. 94% of Chinese. Most Republican leaders flatly reject prevailing climate science, while many Democrats from coal, oil and farm states are equally protective of the fossil-fuel status quo. This is why the American Clean Energy and Security Act - a far-reaching Democratic bill that would cap carbon emissions - has been marketed to a confused public on the basis of issues that poll far better...
...Environmentalists are generally ecstatic about Chu, but at a time when coal plants and heavily subsidized corn ethanol are creating huge environmental problems, some question his enthusiasm for "clean coal" and "third-generation biofuels," which do not yet exist, as well as his support for new nuclear power, which has become wildly expensive. They recall President George W. Bush talking up future technological miracles as an alternative to present-day action, and they want Chu to focus on proven technologies that can help boost efficiency and conservation to reduce energy demand now, plus on renewables to create zero-emissions supply...
...pocket and has expanded into a clean-energy conglomerate with more than 24,000 employees. Chu peppered his hosts with technical questions as he checked out a sleek factory churning out superefficient solar panels, a greenhouse where genetically engineered algae were excreting fuel, a prototype for a coal-gasification plant in Inner Mongolia and a research lab with 300 scientists. It felt like an only-in-America business story, except we were in Langfang, just outside Beijing...
...before we do - understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher - but they're preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they're developing more-advanced transmission lines. They're still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They're making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world's largest producer of renewables by 2010. "Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about...