Energy Secretary Steven Chu: Hire Brash Young Turks to Create the New Bell Labs
Luke Timmerman8/11/09Comments (2)Follow @ldtimmerman
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about the different political culture of the countries. Consumers in China don’t like paying extra on their utility bill, “but we explain how important it is,” Chu said his host told him.
Time started running out on Chu’s talk, so he only made passing references to a couple of other big initiatives. One was changing the system so that utilities aren’t rewarded with more profits for selling more energy, another was finding ways for the U.S. to get serious about investing in nuclear fission reactors in a safe, clean way, Chu said. “We are trying to start it up again,” Chu said of nuclear energy programs.
All this heady stuff obviously needs scientists and engineers working on it, and from the sounds of it, not just going through the motions and accepting “business as usual,” as Chu put it. He closed his talk by quoting Martin Luther King on the “fierce urgency of now,” which politicos will remember was a line that Obama used himself during the campaign. Even though Chu doesn’t have Obama’s charisma at the podium, his comments drew a hearty round of applause.
But whether all that good will from scientists gets channeled in a productive way will depend partly on whether Chu can recreate that magical inventive environment he once experienced as a young scientist at Bell Labs. “We want to lay the seeds now for transformational technologies,” Chu said.
Luke Timmerman is the National Biotech Editor of Xconomy, and the Editor of Xconomy Seattle. E-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ldtimmerman.
Aristides
9/3/09 4:19 pm
Chu’s mindless babbling illustrates just how clueless and out of touch with reality Chu and the regime he works for are. When Chu worked for Bell Labs, all telecommunications equipment was engineered and manufactured in the USA. Now virtually all of it is engineered and manufactured in China.
While the Obama regime cuts funding for vital defense programs, such as F-22, so it can fund nonsense programs, such as “carbon capture and sequestration”, the Chinese are busy amassing a military-industrial complex second to none, fueled by thousands of coal fired plants and financed by greedy Amelican capitalists.
As long as greedy Amelican capitalists continue to export, not just manufacturing jobs, but engineering and scientific jobs as well, no one in the USA is going to spend a fortune getting a higher education in either of those fields only to find out the only openings are for menial jobs in the service sector. Despite the lip service in favor of “Jobs at home instead of abroad” neither the Obama regime or the Democrat controlled Congress is going to do anything to halt the exodus, because they are beholden for their campaign funding to the very greedy capitalists who are exporting the USA.
Never has a country been so driven to commit stugreedicide as the USA. Stupid Amelicans, your pathetic nation is now little more than a Chinese colony. You need to learn Chinese so you can say “Yes massa!” correctly, when your Chinese overlords bark their orders at you.
Seriously?
9/10/09 12:08 am
Seriously? This is Xconomy, not Wackoconspiracy.com. I don’t even know where to start. So let me go line by line:
1) If all telecom equipment is made in China, surely we should look for a new industry, leading us to point 2.
2) CCS is not “nonsense”. It and other cleantech technologies are the growth industries of the future. Your fear of China is a good one – they are surpassing the US in green energy installations and dominance in this industry will be key for the next 50 years. Read “Hot Flat and Crowded”. It’s explained much better there than I could.
3) The remaining two paragraphs, with reference to “Amelicans”, the fact that *no-one* is going to spend a fortune getting a higher education, greedy capitalists (being huge DEMOCRAT supporters?!), and such are just babble.
The one saving grace I have is your reference to “your pathetic nation” – if you aren’t even an American, what’s with the uninformed, hateful dribble?