Energy and the Earth's Future

President-elect Obama may intend to keep the same Secretary of Defense, but he sure is changing things at the Department of Energy. Dick Cheney must be rolling over in his political grave. Apparently Obama's pick to be the next Energy Secretary could be a bona fide scientist, Dr. Steven Chu. Currently Chu runs the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory(LBL). He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997.

Dr. Chu. Courtesy: LBL. Here's Chu's online bio from LBL's website. "Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy." CLIMATE TALKS CONTINUE

The international conference on climate change continues in Poznan, Poland. This conference is supposed to be one of the major stepping stones to an international agreement to be in effect after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Neither the US nor China, the league leaders in greenhouse gas emissions, ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

The whole conference is apparently waiting to see what happens in a second EU-only conference tomorrow and Friday in Brussels. Will that economic and political union come to any agreement on goals and greenhouse gas mandates?

It seems the tough economic times have caused some European leaders to be less than warm toward anti-global warming measures. Germany's Chancellor says she'll approve nothing that could hurt her country's economy. So we may be about to witness a complete reversal of the past eight years: Europe getting less active on reducing greenhouse gases while the US gets an administration that openly accepts global warming as a problem to be dealt with.

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