Steven Chu Declares Victory, Goes Home

In every way, Dr. Steven Chu was the perfect choice to be Obama's Secretary of Energy. Chu fervently believes that basic science and applied science (technology) can solve any problem, thus allowing unlimited growth to continue indefinitely. Among the problems which can be solved are those which result from unlimited growth itself (e.g. global warming). Chu is not the kind of person who might question the idea that Progress is inevitable—for him, it is, if only we throw enough dollars into basic research to achieve the breakthroughs required to get humanity off the hook.

Thus Steven Chu is a man of Science, but, more fundamentally, he is a man of Faith.

Reverend Chu announced his resignation last week. He will return to academia.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today he will leave his post once President Barack Obama names a successor. "I would like to return to an academic life of teaching and research," Chu wrote in a lengthy letter to employees at the Department of Energy (DOE), adding that he will stay on the job at least through the end of this month.

His leaving was much lamented by the type of person who thinks that renewable energy will be humankind's salvation, but one look at this chart might persuade us otherwise.

From the Energy Information Administration's 2013 Annual Energy Outlook (AEO, early release). The EIA is part of the Department of Energy.

Although many of you will be skeptical about whether we will actually get all those BTUs from oil and other liquids up to 2040, I call your attention to the BTUs we are expected to get from renewables and liquid biofuels. Yes, Brother Chu was very interested in achieving breakthroughs (and reducing costs) in solar electricity, or in producing better batteries for plug-in vehicles, but it seems to me that his first love was the basic science which would allow us to replace crude oil with advanced biofuels (from algae, switchgrass, etc.).

A long time ago, I wrote a post called The Secretary Of Synthetic Biology in which I criticized Reverend Chu's scattershot research approach to replacing oil with "4th generation" biofuels. I will not quote from that work today, but it is even more relevant today than it was when I wrote it in 2009, if only because more time has passed and we are still awaiting salvation from a biofuels miracle.

Despite the grim picture depicted in the EIA's Figure 7 above, and regardless of the real numbers going forward, most of America's future energy will come from fossil fuels. And despite this clear necessity, Reverend Chu wrote a defiant letter extolling his own achievements as Secretary of Energy. I'll quote the relevant part.

Four years ago, ARPA-E was a vision described in the report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. I was a member of that committee, but never dreamed that I would be asked to take the concept to reality. ARPA-E was designed to support high-risk, high reward technology development; to swing for game-changing home runs that can fundamentally transform energy technologies. The program has earned the respect of industry and academia for its outstanding funding choices, and active, thoughtful program management.

Its success was the result of the assembly of an extraordinarily talented group of individuals. This team would engage in active discussions that spilled into the evenings. They challenged each other with honest and frank discussions over their competing programs, and created an ARPA-E fellows program that was able to recruit some of the best recent graduates.

Did we hit any home runs?

What have been the early results? ARPA-E was described by Fred Smith of Fed Ex in his ARPA-E Summit Keynote address that in his opinion, ARPA-E was best government funding program he has ever seen. In the first few years, 11 of the companies funded with $40 million dollars have attracted more than $200 million in combined private investment. While it is too early to tell if we have home runs like ARPA-net, there are a number of investments that have certainly rounded second base.

Here Brother Chu claims we have hit some doubles, but it's too early to tell whether these 2-baggers will become round trips.

Despite the fact that Chu has declared victory here, I would remind him and all the others who think renewables will save us that it has been "too early to tell" for about 35 years now. And if we look at Figure 7 above, we see many quadrillions of BTUs from crude oil, natural gas and coal, but not nearly so many from solar, wind, hooch or cooking grease. (1 quadrillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000.)

I would further remind Reverend Chu (and all those other deluded people) that global warming and ocean acidification are not going to wait around to see how our science experiments turn out. This is not Baseball; this is Real Life.

Before I end this post, I would like to point out a specific contradiction in Brother Chu's final missive. In his Swan Song, Chu goes to great lengths to point out (to his "skeptic" Solyndra-obsessed political opponents) that climate change is a real and present danger to humanity. Ironically, he does not seem to understand the fundamental critique I've made in this post. Be that as it may, the specific contradiction I have in mind can be found in these two passages about the threat of global warming.

The average temperature of our planet is rising, with majority of the temperature increase occurring in the last thirty years. During the three decades from 1980 to 2011, the number of violent storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, as tabulated by the reinsurance company Munich Re, has increased more than three-fold. They also estimate that the financial losses follow a trend line that has gone from $40 billion to $170 billion dollars per year. Most of those losses were not insured, and the country suffering the largest losses by far is the United States. As the President said in his recent Inaugural Address, "some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms."

OK, now contrast that passage with this one.

Ultimately we have a moral responsibility to the most innocent victims of adverse climate change. Those who will suffer the most are the people who are the most innocent: the world's poorest citizens and those yet to be born. There is an ancient Native American saying: "We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." A few short decades later, we don't want our children to ask, "What were our parents thinking? Didn't they care about us?"

Did you catch it? On the one hand, the country suffering the largest losses by far was the United States. On the other hand, those who will suffer the most will be the world's poorest citizens. The United States is in sad shape, sorry to say, but it is still among the richest countries in the world in terms of the total size of its economy, even if many of its citizens are in a permanent slide toward grinding poverty, or are already there.

As usual, Reverend Chu wants his cake and he wants to eat it too by giving himself time to solve our problems—we'll be OK, it's the poor (current or unborn) who are (or will be) fucked. Nobody on Earth will be off the hook as the climate deteriorates in the future.

Goodbye, Steven, I will miss you—you were such an easy target

Comments

[Oliver]

The retards in those big-knob editorial offices (NYT, WSJ, etc) should reprint this crystal-clear posting word for word, right next to the usual mealy-mouthed 'farewell Dr Chu-Chu' article. He is not going back to academia because he particularly wants to grade student essays. He is bolting from public office before the import of the growth/warming contradiction strikes home and adversely affects his pension. I would bet my own pension on this - except that I ain't got one.

[John D]

Thank you Dave for stating the truth about this guy. I look at the MSM and other blogs and they're all fawning over him. He was a pro-growth corporate shill while he was in office; now he wants to warns us about the dangers that he kept silent about while he was Secretary of Energy.

[John D. Wheeler]

I can't believe the chart his agency produced: approximately steady BTU for oil, coal, and natural gas through 2040? What planet is he from?

I believe in renewable energy, not to save our consumer lifestyle, but as the only chance of not sliding all the way back into the Dark Ages. And I don't think it's quite fair to say that we have nothing to show for 35 years of research. We weren't really trying for most of them. To continue the baseball analogy, it's like we struck out in the first inning and decided to go for the walk for the next six. Finally we decided in the eighth to start swinging again and got some doubles, but it's now the ninth and we're still many runs behind. So in that sense it is too soon to tell, but it also may be too late to matter.

[adam]

I have become convinced that renewables can easily support a much lower energy, but still modern society. Maybe early 20th century levels of per-capita energy use. Unfortunately, I see no way for them to support the behemoth we've created - consumer culture, suburbs, etc. And socially, the government MUST support those things. Just listen to the hysteria that comes out when it's suggested that people live a bit more lightly.

I think John Wheeler's comment of "too soon to tell, but too late to matter" pretty much sums it up. It's like trying to get a morbidly obese smoker to quit smoking and get on health diet with exercise. They can't succeed unless they want to change. There is a good chance they will go back to their old ways, and even if they don't they may already have health problems that will continue anyways. But if they don't try, there's no chance they will see old age.

Our society is still binging on cheetos.

[Mike Roberts]

Thanks for posting an antidote to others' plaudits to Rev. Chu. I read a short such one on Climate Progress, by Joe Romm. Though he criticised Chu for not speaking out about climate change, he thought Chu was an excellent Energy Secretary and will be missed (for different reasons from your missing him). I couldn't see it and your post elucidated why. It is interesting that Chu sees success in ARPA-E as being raising funds, rather than doing anything notable.

The energy forecast chart you showed is typical of government agencies - if the current trend is flat or down, the future will always show rising trends (overall). That's how life is supposed to be and, therefore, it will be.

[Jim]

That chart is ALL anyone needs to know about the U.S. government's position on climate change and energy growth. Like him or not, Rev. Chu is as good as it can possibly get regarding an Energy Secretary that actually understands the seriousness of climate change. The United States, under the direction of Obama and Chu, are saying that we'll reduce oil and coal use by a few percent, increase natural gas use, and slightly increase renewables - by 2040.

If that's not an implicit acceptance that we aren't going to do anything about climate change, I don't know what is.

But there's another story there, too - on energy growth. There is a major disconnect there. The chart steadily rises to 2007 (except for the early 1980's recession), peaks, then plummets to now (really only being eased by added coal and NG use the past two years), then magically plateaus for 30 years. It's saying that energy consumption can't really grow (except natural gas and renewables by a few percent) for 30 years, but it's displaying complete wishful thinking that the likeliest outcome is stasis - defying all previous history, somehow we'll have a plateau period for 30+ years.

I think the U.S. government basically knows nothing really can be done about either climate change or peak oil. Extend and pretend. And I think Rev. Chu is cutting and running before the chart's direction really becomes clear.

[Alexander Ač]

Haha, this is funny!

"Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to
research on conspiracist ideation" published in FRONTIERS IN PERSONALITY SCIENCE AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES:

http://www.frontiersin.org/Personality_Science_and_Individual_Differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/abstract

Alex

[Alexander Ač]

Dave,

In a small defence of S. Chu - The Rich might suffer "largest losses" (I guess he meant financial losses?), but the "suffering" (in terms of loss of life) might still be bigger in the poorer countries (they have not much material wealth to loose).

Ultimately, we all will suffer...

Alex

[TinyEnergies]

I saw this resignation as a covert admission by the Obama administration that the reign of nuclear energy has passed.

[Stuart]

Steven Chu is an extremely smart man who put forth a Herculean effort against a tremendous Republican headwind. You give him grief because renewable energy technologies haven't solved our problems in the "35 years" they've been around. We've been exploiting oil for how many years? Over 100, at least.

It's really easy to shit on the efforts of everyone to improve the world. Your increasing anger and ranting over the past number of months has gotten ridiculous and tiresome. I'm a doomer, myself, and an extremely well educated one with a background in science and a first-hand knowledge of photovoltaics and energy efficiency. I've had enough of your angry rants throwing mud on everyone.

Reply to this note, or not, I won't see it. I'm removing your blog from my Bookmark list. It's time to start working together towards solutions -- even us Doomers -- and stop throwing mud. In particular on extremely smart individuals who did what they could in extremely difficult circumstances.