As Obama's new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu is probably the single most important figure in world environmental politics right now. Paul Quinn snags a 60-second interview for RSA Arts & Ecology at the Nobel Laureate Symposium to get a glimpse of the challenges he's facing — and finds a man who's singularly upbeat about the tasks ahead. 

When rumours started flying at the end of last year that Dr. Steven Chu was in the running to be President Obama's new Energy Secretery, green movements worldwide were lit up by the idea that Ombama's promises on climate might actually add up to something. Chu has a reputation not only a brilliant scientist, but as someone who is energised by the gravity of the challenge that climate change presents. 

His appointment, says Margie Alt, executive director of Environment America, "represents a 180-degree turnaround for the United States on the environment and energy policy."

He's a brilliant University of California academic, but can someone with as frank as Steven Chu — who was happy to declare as recently as 2007 that "coal is my worst nightmare" — survive the minefield of energy lobby interestes that is Washington? Five months into the job, with the American Clean Energy and Security Act starting to make its painfully slow progress to the House of Represenatives and then to the Senate, many enivornmentalists fear that too many compromises have already been made, and that the cap-and-trade approach at its heart is more about delay than action. Chu, however, stands by the Act as "our best shot".

Dr Chu is a Nobel Prizewinner for his work as a physicist, working on trapping atoms with laser light. Paul Quinn caught up with Chu briefly at the  Nobel Laureate Symposium on climate change's Gala Cultural Evening at London's Science Museum, to find him upbeat about his task, convinced he was going to emerge from his time at the Department of Energy "with integrity".

I know, I know. And there’s more. The Titanic’s sister ship went down a few years later and there’s concern that the steel and the bolts in both ships had an issue that in cold weather they became very brittle. But anyway, the issue is not the details of "glancing blows" or
anything… But I’m going to have to look for a better analogy. I still have these discussions with the messaging people at the White House, about what I think works and what they think works.”

Does it feel odd, having been part of the scientific lobby trying
to convince government on climate change, now suddenly being on the
"other side"?

Well, I’m still on the scientific lobby side, I’m just on the inside now. You have to try your best to work on the inside to get the desired effect you wanted on the outside.

But in the end, when I leave this job, I have to leave with my integrity — and the good news is, I will be able to do that.

http://www.nobelcause.org/