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.
