Steven Chu Quotes
If there is a regulation that says you have to do something—whether it be putting in seat belts, catalytic converters, clean air for coal plants, clean water—the first tack that the lawyers use, among others things, and that companies use, is [to claim] that it's going to drive the electricity bill up, drive the cost of cars up, drive everything up. It repeatedly has been demonstrated that once the engineers start thinking about it, it's [the cost is] actually far less than the original estimates. We should remember that when we hear this again, because you will hear it again.
This is a very unusual quotation in that a cabinet secretary tried to discuss the method or the opposition’s analysis and thinking regarding man induced climate change. At the time the overwhelming proportion of scientists in the world had concluded that the data showed that in addition to the normal vicissitudes of climate change, there was a definite additional warming effect. Some conservatives, opposing any government action regarding global warming, found a few scientists, mostly unaccomplished who themselves did not believe the data supported the global warming hypothesis. Chu gave this rhetorical analysis.
Steven Chu, Physicist & Nobel Laureate, United States Secretary of Energy, Press Conference, National Press Club, September 17, 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Many pollution control standards are created by specifying a maxilum allowable proportion of a toxic substance in any waste. So what many polluters do is to dilute their toxic waste with enough water to lower the pollution proportion to meet the standard and then dump the waste into the ground where it runs into the streams, rivers, bays and aquifers. This is “pollution by dilution”. When this is done, the same amount of toxic material is dumped and nothing is improved.
Clinton won a second term, but then a Republican, George W. Bush, won the presidency, and rolled back many of the environmental protection gains that the Clinton administration had achieved.
This was a common refrain by 2005, but this was written 80 years before that. Few had this prescient vision.
Most environmentalists limit the vision of their solutions to using less of our precious natural resources which is very important but just as important and perhaps more so in the long run is increasing the supply of these resources. Food is an example. The major reason that there is no serious food shortage world-wide is that we have increased the productivity of agriculture requiring less labor, less water, less fertilizer, less land, and less dependency on weather. Distribution has also improved, but there is no very good way of distributing something for which there is a great shortage.
Steven Chu is an American physicist, Nobel laureate, and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
