Chu on Cars: Consider the Refrigerator
For automobile manufacturers, a small parable told by energy-secretary-designate Steven Chu:
This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy—delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator.
Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.
[Elizabeth Kolbert, "Note to Detroit: Consider the Refrigerator", The New Yorker, 11 December 2008.]
Speaking of Chu, Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing ("Obama Selects Nobel Prize Winning Nerd for Energy Chief") loves the selection of Chu for all the right reasons, but she has a concern:
But he is not a politician. This fact worries some in Washington, because one of his first and most important tasks in early 2009 will be a landmark energy reform bill.
Well, maybe she's just relating others' concerns. But one should fear not, even though Chu is a physicist. He runs Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and he won a Noble Prize. Neither of those things happen to physicists who are not politicians.
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on Monday, 15 December 2008 at 04.35
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Great little story about the refrigerators, and about the typical business response to being told to make improvements. Just like the auto industry, regarding emissions, fuel economy and safety.
As for politics, there's some in nearly every human undertaking.