Four years after his appointment as part of President Barack Obama's scientific dream team, US energy secretary Steven Chu is about to step down. How well did he perform in office, and who should fill his shoes? With budget cuts and continued attacks by climate sceptics likely to dog Obama's second term, a politician might be a better choice than another scientist, some observers say.
As the first Nobel laureate appointed to a presidential cabinet, Chu ensured that science informed decisions about clean energy and the funding of new research programmes. He was "good at knowing science is about taking risks", says Marchant Wentworth of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which aims to bring science to bear on solving the planet's problems.
In 2009, Chu and the Department of Energy (DoE) inherited a number clean-energy research and development initiatives that had been part of the previous administration's stimulus programmes. Among the most interesting programmes that Chu jumpstarted was ARPA-E, a $400 million fund for high-risk, experimental renewable energy research.
A politician might not have seen promise in the nascent programme, and ARPA-E has yet to deliver any game-changing technologies, but Wentworth hopes that Chu's successor will expand the programme. "It's the seed corn of our energy future," he says.
One debacle will cast a shadow over Chu's legacy: the bankruptcy of solar giant Solyndra, a company that had received $535 million in federal loan guarantees from DoE. The backlash, fuelled by a Republican-controlled Congress, quickly spiralled out of control and raised distrust in renewable energy schemes.
Could a more experienced politician have handled the situation better? Eileen Claussen of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a non-profit based in Arlington, Virginia, doubts it. "Getting someone who really believes in the importance of doing this was more important than the political skills," she says, although she also says Chu could have done more to highlight the many successful companies that profited from DoE loans totalling $36 billion.
Different world
But in Obama's second term, vision won't necessarily be as important as management and communication skills, says Claussen. "It's going to be a different world," she says, not least because of serious budget constraints.
DoE's clean-energy budget is likely to be cut by 8 to 10 per cent this year, Wentworth says: a major hit for an already shrunken program. If the next secretary hopes to help Obama with his promises to address climate change, he adds, he or she cannot expect more money to do it with.
And with the animosity against clean-energy programmes unlikely to disappear, says Wentworth, the biggest challenges for Chu's successor will be to aggressively attack myths about the high cost of renewable energy, and to counter lobbying from the fossil-fuel industry.
Energy analyst Scott Sklar, president of the Stella Group, feels that Chu was weak in this area.
For the next secretary to build support for renewable energy programmes, "they need to articulate why what they're doing is important", he says. The next secretary will also need to tackle problems associated with energy generation, such as massive water use by power plants in the midst of a drought, and the air and water pollution they cause.
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