Energy Secretary: Paint the World White

by David ClaiborneJune, 4 2009

Even if you haven’t been on board with everything he’s done since his inauguration, there’s one thing you really have to give President Obama credit for – he knows how to pick the right man for the job. Our current Energy Secretary is Professor Steven Chu, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997.

By way of contrast, George W. Bush appointed two men to serve as Energy Secretary – the first, Spencer Abraham, is a conservative activist lawyer with no scientific education worth mentioning. The second, Samuel Bodman, held a degree in chemical engineering but spent the majority of his professional life working in venture capital, and for several years was the COO of Fidelity Venture Associates. With all due respect to these two men, neither was fit to serve as the head of the Department of Energy.

Steven Chu lives for energy as a physicist. His life’s work is the study of matter and its motion through spacetime – energy - through a general analysis of nature. He spends his days pondering the simplest of things in order to arrive at the most profound conclusions.

Like Newton’s legendary eureka-moment with the falling apple, for some odd reason it often takes a learned genius to realize the most basic truths, that after the fact seem so obvious it’s amazing no one realized it sooner – what goes up must come down, every action has an equal and opposite reaction… or, white paint can save our climate.

Last week at the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, Dr. Chu presented a solution so simple and so elegant, it’s nearly impossible to find it credible; paint the world white to stop global warming. According to Chu, lightening the color of all the world’s roads, paved surfaces and roofs would be the equivalent of taking every single car off the road for 11 years.

(The Times of London has more here, but note the author incorrectly states this would “cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off” – this is a matter of reflection, not emission – shame on you, Mark Henderson, ‘Science Editor’)

Obviously this is not a panacea for climate change, as there are household heating and cooling issues that come into play, and our environmental concerns go far beyond absorption and retention of solar heat – but it should serve to illustrate a few key points:

Leave science to the scientists – educated, intelligent, non-dogmatic, curious explorers, and not to businessmen, ideologues and politicians.
The simplest solution is often the best – elaborate government regulations have often caused more problems, pollution and wasted energy than they have alleviated, particularly because they didn’t leave science to the scientists.
Government regulations should be as non-intrusive and low-impact as possible – global efforts to ban the use of CFCs in order to preserve the ozone layer had an unintended side-effect of increasing deaths from starvation in the developing world, where it was used a cheap refrigerant. We have to keep the big picture in mind.
Humanity is unendingly resourceful – which is terribly convenient, because we are also unendingly greedy and expedient. But if we simply make a concerted effort to find simple, painless, effective methods of improving our environmental situation (something everyone wants), there is no need to result to either the zealous religiosity of the cult of Global Warming, or the arrogant denials of the “everything is just fine” know-nothings.

Kudos to Dr. Steven Chu for another in a string of world-changing ideas, and kudos to Mr. Obama for the wise appointment.

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