The Experiment: How Steven Chu lost his battle with Washington
February 3, 2012
In August 2008, a week before Barack Obama went to Denver to collect his nomination, Steven Chu stepped onto a stage in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Cox Pavilion. The 60-year-old physicist was a towering presence in his field, a Nobel Prize winner and the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. But he was largely unknown to the Washington-centric crowd of several hundred, in town for a clean energy conference co-hosted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund. Trim and bespectacled, with wispy graying hair parted over a high forehead, Chu began his remarks with the nervous throat-clearing of a scientist who had not yet completed the transition to a more public life.
Chu invited the crowd to consider a temperature increase of five degrees Celsius, only slightly beyond what the world is expected to hit by the century’s end in middle-of-the-road climate change forecasts. “Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars,” he said, “over water, arable land, and massive population displacements.” This vision of planet-wide catastrophe was not new, but Chu’s flat cadence, his chilly laboratory demeanor, gave the picture an unsettling crispness. “We’re not talking about ten million people,” he continued. “We’re talking hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.”
Then Chu pivoted, arguing with the same matter-of-factness that the doomsday scenario he had described was entirely avoidable. Western Europe enjoyed a quality of life comparable to America’s with far greater energy efficiency, he explained; technological innovation had allowed California’s economy to double in size over the past third of a century even as its electricity use remained flat. Tighter regulations had made American refrigerators not just 75 percent more efficient than they were three decades earlier, but 60 percent cheaper and 20 percent larger, too. “Miraculously,” Chu deadpanned, “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers instead of the lobbyists. And this is what you get.” The audience applauded; Chu’s delivery, once hesitant, now had a confidence bordering on swagger.
In conclusion, Chu showed his audience the famous “Earthrise” photograph, taken by the astronaut William Anders from the Apollo 8 command module as it orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. It showed the Earth, a gleaming whorl of blue and white, emerging out of the moon’s shadow into sunlight. “A beautiful planet, a desolate moon,” Chu said. “And focus on the fact that there’s nowhere else to go.”
On the stage with Chu was John Podesta, CAP’s president, who would serve as co-chair of the new president’s transition team after Obama’s victory in November. In Chu, Obama’s team saw the potential to make a statement. “Science had really been abused and belittled in the previous administration,” Podesta told me. “The decision to try to go and get a number of high-profile scientists into the administration was all about telling this story about what the future of innovation could look like. And Steve was at the top of that pyramid.”
Shortly after the election, Obama asked Chu if he would come to Washington as his energy secretary. “I didn’t know him before that,” Chu told me. “He said, ‘A lot of people all over the place are recommending you.’ All I said was, ‘Who are these former friends of mine?’”
It was a good joke, but, by the time Chu told it to me in December, it had acquired some poignancy. The last several months have been the worst of his three years in Washington. Chu had arrived in town as one of Obama’s most celebrated appointees, with one of the new administration’s most ambitious missions: using a backwater of a Cabinet position—one better known as a sleepy sinecure for retired business executives—to reinvent America’s energy system.
Then last September, a California-based solar panel manufacturer named Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, and things suddenly went very sour. Chu’s department had signed off on a $535 million loan to the company two years earlier; it was the highest-profile showpiece for Obama’s campaign promise to kick-start the new green energy economy. Congressional Republicans pounced.
On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, and the GOP lawmakers kept Chu—the only witness—in his chair for five and a half hours. “You’re a very bright man—much brighter than I am. I know you didn’t leave your brain at the door,” Virginia freshman Morgan Griffith growled. Chu’s hands shook slightly as he handled the edges of his prepared testimony.
By the time we spoke a month later, Chu seemed to have survived the experience, though not without some bitterness; the hearing, he told me, “was not the high point of what I wanted to do with my time.” Still, the whole affair had cast a harsh light on a scientist turned policymaker for whom things had not gone as planned, even before the Solyndra bankruptcy. The president who brought him to Washington three years ago had promised nothing less than an environmental revolution, and Chu was supposed to be at its center, presiding over the most dramatic expansion of the clean energy industry the federal government had ever attempted. Now Chu may have no choice but to preside over its similarly dramatic retreat.
“OK, SO!” CHU SAID, taking a deep breath before plunging back in. We were sitting in his office, in front of a bank of windows opening out across the National Mall, and Chu was halfway through an impromptu lecture on the economics of converting the long-haul trucking industry to liquefied natural gas. I couldn’t remember how we had arrived here—I had asked a fairly narrow question about his department’s funding—but we were where we were. “You can go six hundred and fifty miles without refueling,” Chu was saying, “so you might want a station every three hundred miles.” He rattled off the cost of liquefied natural gas ($2 per gallon equivalent, give or take), the cost of the machine you use to liquefy the gas ($1 million to $3 million), the typical annual mileage of a long-haul truck (80,000 miles), and, running all these numbers in his head, how many years it would take for a company to recoup its investment on a truck (two).
Several minutes later, Chu’s press secretary reminded us of the time. “I’ll be shorter,” Chu said, a bit apologetically. But he wasn’t—and, honestly, I wasn’t sure that he could be. I had met Chu briefly before, at a reception hosted by a magazine that I worked for at the time. I had asked him then about a trip he’d made to China and ended up listening for several minutes as Chu expounded upon new developments in advanced battery technology. “He doesn’t lose track of the details,” says Holger Müller, a Lawrence Berkeley physicist and longtime collaborator.
This was the one thing that everyone knew about Barack Obama’s energy secretary when he took office in January 2009: that Steven Chu was smart. He was “possibly the smartest man in the federal government,” Washington Post science reporter Joel Achenbach wrote, “if not the known universe.” Obama, when he mentions Chu, rarely fails to bring up his Nobel Prize. “He likes to kid around about the rocket scientist thing when they’re together,” says a veteran Democratic operative who is close to the president. “There’s a little bit in Obama who’s like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I hired this guy!’”…
