A Conversation with Steven Chu | Webinar

greetings everyone and welcome to today's conversation with professor steven chu welcome also to the first full day of the biden administration today we'll be discussing the process of launching a new administration including people process and coming up to speed on the major issues i'm chris field climate scientist and director of the stanford woods institute for the environment the woods institute is stanford's primary mechanism for bringing people together to discuss develop and deliver practical solutions to pressing environmental challenges through research training and events like this we strive to chart a path for a sustainable future before we start the conversation i want to take a moment for a brief plug about the next woods environmental conversation on thursday march 11th at noon our guest will be pat brown founder of impossible foods i hope you can join us then i'm thrilled today to be joined in zoom world by professor steven chu in addition to all of you stephen chu is the william r keenan junior professor of physics at stanford and professor of molecular and cellular physiology at stanford medical school he's one of the world's leading physicists with extensive discoveries in atomic and polymer physics biophysics biology bio engineering batteries and other energy technologies dr chew's work has been widely recognized most notably with the 1997 nobel prize in physics for his contributions to laser cooling and atom trapping prior to his current positions at stanford dr chu was the 12th u.s secretary of energy serving from january 2009 until the end of april 2013. he's the first scientist to hold the cabinet position and the longest-serving energy secretary at the ue dr chu emphasized science and scientists one of his most important tasks at doe was leading the government contribution to stopping the deepwater horizon oil league prior to his cabinet post dr chu held positions as director of the lawrence berkeley national lab professor of physics and applied physics at stanford university and head of the quantum electronics research department at at bell labs currently dr chu is the chairman of the board of directors of the american association for the advancement of cycles the format for today's session is conversational with a role for all of you in the audience as well as for steve and me the plan is that i'll ask questions for about 25 minutes and then we'll turn to questions from you entered in the q a window for another 25 minutes my goal for today is to launch a shared sense of what it's like to launch a new administration what's the preparation like and what are the unexpected challenges steve maybe we can talk for a few minutes about the first day on the job when you go into the department for the first time or when secretary granholm does when she's confirmed what do you actually do first you introduce yourself uh and but really when i entered uh the economy was in free fall there was a large hunk of discretionary money about 34 billion dollars uh to stimulate the economy and the plan was to use that 34 billion allocated for the department of energy to to actually simulate economy in ways that could potentially have some uh importance and lasting impact but but really just get jobs going um and uh and so in that those first day or three you there's there are no political appointees there are roughly 140 political appointees in the department of energy of which you know secretary deputy secretary assistant secretaries uh are senate confirmed and and so i had been confirmed a week before the inauguration which was good uh and so i was able to start the very next day uh but but some of the other confirmations take a while and so you're really there sort of uh trying to maintain the ship in a very interesting way and i'll just end with this one story we were launching rpe this is advanced project research for energy something that had been recommended in a report that i would participate in 2005-2006 rising above the gathering storm i was sent by the national academies to congress to convince congress to authorize it also sent to the department of energy to convince the department of energy to embrace it and at the time they authorized it but they didn't appropriate funds from the department of energy the career folks did not want to embrace it because they were afraid it might make the department of energy more applied um and so uh so that was then 2006 and 2009 the new secretary had a very different view of rpe that was me and and we used recovery act money to fund a 200 million dollars a year for two years um and after that if it was successful the hope would be that congress would appropriate funds um in the first quarter for proposals there was nobody um and so uh in getting the staff rp i was actually making phone calls myself uh checking references uh and we sent a letter out to all the deans and provosts of research universities that would have research appropriate and said just give us names of people who you might think would be good referees don't don't ask them uh and we got a whole bunch of names and in some of these i actually called up too and so we got outstanding referees uh in this first go around while we were building up the staff of rpe the first um the first employee of rpe was a young graduate from mit who listed the president of mit as the primary reference so i said you got to be kidding me how does how does president mit know this um undergraduate but i knew the president of mit so i got a phone susan tell me about dave danielson and she said oh he's wonderful and she started talking about that and said oh my god we're you know higher number one done and so it was things like that uh um that when there's nobody around you've got to do a lot of stuff yourself can you help us a little bit understand what happens with acting people particularly since confirmations are kind of behind schedule now with the biden administration so for your senior staff who were not yet confirmed when you started as secretary what are they authorized to do what are they not are people actually doing their jobs as as as acting yes uh so uh i've also forgot yes very good question actings don't have nearly the influence and power the the career people in agencies don't really take them that seriously whereas if and so you've got to be very careful about actings um and so that was some of the things the uh now i did make some decisions the head of the event the nuclear national nuclear security agency uh um it's it's involved with all the nuclear and weapons stuff i thought that was person was a good person so i told you you can stay and he did stay for the entire time i was there and he was excellent this is a person who is a political appointee he was a political appointee so there were a few political appointees that were you know there was not an issue whatsoever um and so so uh and that was at the third level downs our secretary deputy secretary under secretary so it was quite high so so there's a few of those that you said oh no problem at all these are good people now just as president obama kept the secretary of defense from the bush administration and and when you went in on on the first day in a time of crisis just as we're in a final crisis now were the priorities pretty much set by the administration or did you have a wide spectrum of of decision making that was required in order to align the department of energy with the administration's priorities i i think it's a bit of both the amount of budget uh that we're getting for the stimulus package was set um how you execute on that was not said and so how how do you determine for example how much of that would be used for weatherization how much of that would be used for uh underwriting loans things of that nature the loan program actually had that required a congressional authorization of what sort of potential losses the country would be willing to tolerate they were willing to tolerate 10 billion in losses in the end we lost a billion but it's not as bad as that because uh we're gaining money on the loans that we're coming through the verdict is not in but it will be probably very close to zero uh less than a billion of losses or gains wow and so there are many things that were to be determined one of the first things i did do is i appointed a special advisor so let me not comfort senate confirmation and it was actually to help oversee specifically the stimulus package so so personally i got to know in their transition uh who was from mckinsey uh very very good person and so so those were some of the things that uh were happening and when when you think about running a big agency like the department of energy how much of what happens is is just the day-to-day activities that that continue more or less unchanged from administration to administration and how much is a result of the of the new initiatives that you bring in as secretary uh yeah that's a great question um rp was a new initiative um there were other things later on a program called sunshot was taking an existing investments within department of energy but under a few core new leaders that again were in part personally recruited by me and and so with this only four new members i started getting feedback and said what happened you revitalized you've totally changed the way we support solar energy did your budget double what happened and i said no i didn't we're spending more wisely we got rid of all the k street consultants the department of energy was built up over the years of you know not so good habits uh because i wanted the people in the department to actually do the work not to hire some consultant uh and and and that was actually actually it was a very uplifting uh thing for many of the members of the department uh maybe the lower five or ten percent didn't like that at all because all of a sudden you really had to work 30 hours a week and and those people transferred other agencies which was fine uh the people brought in some of them were work you know academic type hours 60 hours a week which is also unheard of in government uh but that's was kind of the spirit that was growing while the time i was there and and how much do you feel like uh being a scientist and and encouraging scientists like approaches to jobs change the culture and and how much of your job was sort of setting the culture versus setting these more concrete initiatives a lot of it was studying the culture um my philosophy was i tried to identify very very good people uh brought in people that normally would never consider working in the government aruma jamdar at stanford in the mechanical engineering is a good great example uh ramesh at berkeley uh in physics and material science is another example so there were you know roughly a half a dozen people who were in the national academies of science and engineering many elected when they were in their early 40s but a couple of them were still in their early middle 40s and so you can imagine uh someone who's getting elected to the you know the highest level uh honorific societies in the united states uh they don't usually work in government yeah uh and so we had and then those people with me we we say okay who else do we want and build up some key people it doesn't take that many and and then i said my job is mostly bringing good people don't second-guess them and block and tackle for them which means literally um keep the bureaucracy from stopping or slowing them down and and let them spread their wings uh and so the people uh room was a great example is just spread his wings um it but not ignoring what he was doing in fact we brainstormed a lot we brainstormed arun and i brainstormed with the program managers within rpe he also had a philosophy never to second guess but the way you actually have assert some influence is we would ask questions and and the type of questions were deep penetrating questions that kept everybody honest so so all of a sudden it's all technically based it's like as a scientist you're up there at a conference and you're proposing something that might be not within the center of the dogma that people are bleeding at the time you know you're gonna get a lot of questions and so that was one of the things the the other thing the culture thing i was really formed in the nine years i spent at bell laboratories where there was absolutely no rank you could have a postdoc be questioning a director executive director and disagreeing in a seminar setting and it was not your rank within the organization it was what you were saying it was the content of your ideas uh that ruled the day and that's what uh i wanted to establish uh at the department of energy and uh and it it was moving in that direction and it's something like rpe where you can create a full clause you just started that way and one person regard referred to as constructive confrontation uh it would be as blunt as no i think that's bs i don't believe that but there would be an open discussion about it it's not taken personally and roone did something very important friday late afternoons they all uh went to a favorite watering hole and became all good friends so you can have honest discussions without it getting personal and and and how pervasive do you think that kind of approach to management was in the obama administration and do you have a comment on on what we're seeing in the biden administration i have no idea in terms of the different agencies i think many uh of the others might kept the formal top-down approach uh you know in academia and or places like bell labs it's very flat organizational you know a professor doesn't feel like the the chair the dean the provost the president could you know say no you're wrong about something uh of in the academic debate right there is no rank in the university regarding that i mean they are still our bosses uh and they do control budget but but but i think uh the you know i think for the most part that there was this order people may not know this but when uh just as when the president walks into a room everybody stands up when the secretary walks in the room everybody's supposed to stand up and it took me about a month to beat it out of them no no no no don't don't stand up because and these are the career folks who were growing up with this yeah yeah i i want to ask about the big part of the department of energy that's that's associated with controlling the nuclear enterprise in the u.s and i know people often don't think of that as as in the center of the of the department's agenda but it but i know it's a big piece and and and how did you come up to speed and thinking of yourself as kind of the guardian of the nation's nuclear assets yeah well actually i had a head start um after there there was initial assemblies with juan holy potentially being a spy in the end those charges were dropped but but there was great political um introspection people protesting and there was a debate as to whether they should bring the nuclear part of the department energy out of department energy give it to the military and um calmer heads prevailed and they said we'll give it keep in the department of energy make it semi-autonomous uh when that was started and i think it was uh uh 19 1990 year 2000 somewhere around then they um they started an uh senior advisory panel to the director of the nsa and i agreed to join that uh it was actually condi rice who was twisting my arm and pete panovsky to to join this good choice and peaf also was a member and um and so it was during that time that i got to know about the nuclear issues the nuclear arsenal um you know the requirements the stockpile stewardship so when i became secretary of energy i had been an advisor for a couple of years and do you feel like that um that that part of the agenda has the resources that it needs and are there are there major decisions coming up in terms of the the nuclear assets that need to be made well there are two parts of nuclear one is what you're talking about which is the military aspect so so every year the secretary of defense and secretary of energy have to hand sign certify that the stockpile is safe secure uh and um reliable uh which means essentially um it's very hard to steal these weapons if you can steal the weapons you can't make them go kaboom but if we want to make kaboom there they're gonna go kaboom uh that all those things are important issues the kaboom part is important because we realize that much of the nuclear stockpile were based on designs three or four decades ago and there was a constant maintenance refurbishment of using the exact same parts as per an unofficial treaty but many of the parts actually involved tube electronics so that's how out of data was and so it is it's like really keeping some very old car in in top operating condition uh now since that time is recognized that you're not bending any treaties if you replace them with transistors because it doesn't give you any new capability the new capability debate is always one that continues um one example of a new capability that the military wanted that i pushed against was the ability to dial up and down the yield of the warhead you can actually we we understand these this technology well enough so you can actually dial down the five thousand five kilograms five minutes or up to you know 100 kilotons or more and uh i was against it because i did not want a five kills on nuke because the five kills in nuke could open up the possibility i think it might be more likely you might use it and now that at five kilotons you can use the conventional explosive uh so i was against it um uh now after i left after ernie left it's now done this new capability is there uh there weren't enough more people after i left pushing back hard against so that's the nuclear part and you know how do you maintain the safety security reliability that we have to certify every year then there's the civilian waste part that people don't realize these are our nuclear civilian reactors there's spent fuel uh there was a contractual obligation that the department of energy would take the spent fuel off the hands of the is usually utility companies that have these nuclear reactors uh at a certain date we've passed that date and there are penalties so we we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on penalties because we haven't figured out uh an effective disposition of the spent fuel there was a proposed yucca mountain repository that turned out not to be a good site it was politically selected not geologically selected and as soon as they started burrowing into yucca mountain they found the water dripped out of the tunnels into the tunnels water and nuclear waste are not a good mix this was done in the previous administration and we at lawrence berkeley lab did a lot of hydrology studies to figure out what would happen and the previous secretary deputy secretary were as shocked as i was and i remember seeing the deputy secretary the previous deputy secretary's office and he said steve you can't believe this you know you know this water dripping mess they're gonna their solution is to put a you know a 10 billion dollar titanium shield in the mountain to protect the water and we both and i said that's ridiculous that's not going to last 10 000 years let alone a million years so you know this is nuts we need a better place so so there were so that's an unsolved problem and and then finally an unsolved problem is the uh radioactive waste as part of the cold war legacy from world war ii into the 60s and 70s where we were making all these bombs uh there's a lot of radioactive high level radioactive waste that was generated seen in tanks uh for example in hanford washington that also needs to be disposed of these are big big things and uh not fully yeah we have to figure out a way uh we spend five to six billion dollars a year dealing with that waste uh but during the time and just before i was secretary the you know i think five billion dollars or six billion dollars then think uh if you had a small r d program that could find a much better effective cost effective way of doing it wouldn't it be worth it yeah okay and and so so you know think okay six billion dollars is what's a good r d program you know ten percent five percent it was being nibbled down to a hundred thousand dollars wow wow it's like in the third or fourth decimal place because the contractors who had these huge grants didn't want better ways yeah uh and they just wanted the billion per year coming to the state of washington going into tennessee going to south carolina literally uh because it it it greets the economy yeah um we're getting to the stage we're going to open it up to audience questions but there's a couple more things that i i i really want to get to so please uh audience members uh and our questions in the q a and and we'll get to those soon um one thing i this last uh comment you made about the way that pressure from big contractors and keeps things going sort of entrained and how hard it is to launch new initiatives that let people come up with more creative better solutions and what did you find that it's just kind of force of personality that lets you bring innovations in or or how do you deal with this complicated jungle of vested interests uh no i'm trained as a scientist so what i would do is i would uh start pretty intensive reviews technical reviews uh and the la in the summer of 2012 i started a big review of looking for better solutions uh to the cold war legacy waste uh at 2010 i think i recommended to the um president that he formed a blue ribbon commission to look at uh better solutions to the civilian waste problem it was and they came up with excellent recommendations uh i tried to sell it i was having having good success selling to energy and water the senate leadership um at the time lamar alexander lisa markowski on the republican side jeff bingaman and dianne franstein on the democratic side to try to actually rethink the nuclear waste act because that was preventing a lot of things from happening and uh and so those are some of the things um it's so um i wanted to senator feinstein said you know steve will back you this is very important i think you're going right there and if you promise to us you'll stay until the job is completed and said diane that might take 15 years you know how my wife feels about dc [Laughter] so i um i want to ask one more question before we shift to the questions from the audience and i know that a really big issue during the your early days in washington was the deepwater horizon oil spill and i think that many people regard that as a as a real model of how to solve a national crisis with a with a team effort and i know you led that help us understand kind of how that process came together and how it worked okay so um uh in late april uh there was explosion and it's the start of a very big oil leak i had made a suggestion to bp uh a technical suggestion just as interesting bystander because they didn't know the state of the valves this is a stack of valves one mile deep at the bottom of the gulf of mexico there were no sensors that tell you how much they were open or closed and so i suggested you use gamma rays from cold 60 you can go through this much steel and so just like a dental x-ray you can actually image the state of the valves now that was not looked upon favorably by the bp they kind of laughed about it made a joke well he's from lawrence berkeley lab and so he's into gamma rays uh the hulk was made but then a day later they said you know he may have a point there so they begin to think about it somehow i didn't tell the president uh he got wind of this and at the end of a uh cabinet meeting he goes under me says choo go down there and help him stop the leak which is uh yes sir and so i decided what did i want to do and i decided to form a little team of people now actually so that this is not a regulatory thing the the deepwater horizon uh the jurisdiction was in the department of interior because it was offshore uh and the president went to me because i was a practicing scientist and he knew i was an active scientist so so what i decided to do was to form an informal group of about a half a dozen people um that said look we're not i didn't want oil engineer experts i wanted people who really think out of the box um as uh and are quick learners and so again it was kind of i've talked to a few others and said okay these are the people i want call them up um and said you know this could be a half-time job for the next we don't know how long but uh it's an emergency situation um and everybody said yes yes and i said oh by the way or they said well i have to check with the chair of my department and i have to check with my spouse i have to do this uh this is fine uh and then the first meeting will be tomorrow 8 a.m in houston so everybody said yes and showed up and so what we did is we started with diagnostics but then i quickly realized that there was they were doing things that were kind of scary and adding more risk uh and so after an attempt a failed attempt to try to throw down junk into the oil well uh to counter the flow of the oil and gas coming up we had laid out a plan that they were going to make certain measurements they could only do while they were engaged in this process they didn't do it i had a little temper tantrum it was in the control room of bp you know 1 am in the morning so look we agreed that we're going to do it this way from here on in you have to take these measurements and that allen was there and they knew you know the secretary of energy had a direct line to the president so they said okay we'll do it now those measurements turned out to be crucial in getting solutions uh but after that i told pat allen said from here on in bp doesn't do anything until our little you know we give it approval so they had to run everything by us and we prevented them from doing a lot of things that would have been really increased the risk of of that my little team said you don't want to do this if you start doing that you're going to assume some other responsibility i said it's okay if i get fired for trying to do the best you know the information i had to do that that would be okay but you had to be in there on a day-to-day basis this is not a review panel looking looking at a historical record you're really trying to help them stop the leak now in the ensuing couple of months they began to really trust us started throwing some raw data and we're really in there and and a couple times they said you're right we that was too risky and you we look for other solutions um there were no votes in the committee uh we discussed it and then i made a decision but as i said look uh it will be on me i'm not gonna hide behind votes and and what most bureaucrats like to do actually is hide behind committees sure sure yeah and and and said look you know if i get fired for trying to do the right thing i get fired uh but so be it um thinking privately to myself someone will maybe hire me i i suspect that's a safe assumption but but it sounds like um you know what what you're really saying is that taking responsibility for launching new things is kind of the key to success and maybe the for the new administration it will be as well right i think i think if you want to get something done yes take responsibility things go wrong you know it's the old saying you know success has many uh fathers and mothers but failure is an orphan yeah you in order to get these designs you know the buck stops wherever it stops yeah well thanks so much for answering my questions let me turn to some of the audience questions which in in some ways are are much better and i i want to start um with one from a faculty colleague and she says i'd like to know how we at stanford can be better positioned to brief and inform the administration and agencies on solving some of the key challenges that our faculty are working on namely climate change explicitly include environmental justice and policy design innovation and r d for sustainable energy and transitions to low-carbon sustainable energy systems right so there are two ways it it's it usually works through either the agencies that are relevant to this this would be things like the department of energy but then you need to get inside the department energy but you really need the department of energy to ask right because advice given when you're when not asked is doesn't uh is quite often ignored and so so i think uh in it depending on how the department energy fills up uh i think there is a deep commitment by the new administration to to uh really mitigate the risks of climate change uh and also uh adaptation which is going to have to be part of this the other way is through ostp also science technology policy and through what's called pcas which is the presidential commission that advises um that that's more academic ground and so peak has especially uh could would look towards looking around at the resources of course including the intellectual resources of the united states to give advice on policy and so that is something and the good news is i'm very happy with the appointments that they made uh for the officers you know director of ostp is also a presidential science advisor and uh and they also took our advice among others uh where we said uh elevated to a cabinet position so that's now a cabinet position and so with those appointments um the buy administration it says you know we really want to tap into the science knowledge base in the assays and in the world to to help us solve those problems so that's a very good sign and and i um they had asked me in the transition i formed a little group to give them a very short list of names for both of those where we also advised that they elevate to a cabinet position uh uh and they seem to have taken our advice seriously [Laughter] [Music] so that's very good uh and so you know i'm so i'm very hopeful and i think that the question is very important because um you know and i can do what i can do in order to get get the agencies noaa department of energy epa there's a number of agencies related to environment climate things of that nature to try to get them to know there used to be a lot of committees that were one by one disbanded in the previous administration uh but not only just to have the communities to take them very seriously can i just follow up on on the question for me about the opportunity for scientists to be involved in things like advisory panels in capitol hill briefings in um sort of direct outreach and are would you encourage faculty to be more active in that sort of part of the space or or is it is it better to work kind of through the the more established you know if you're invited to be a part of an advisory panel or a national academy study i think there's a role if one wants to be more proactive certainly if you're invited to be part of an advisory committee do it and hope that will be taken seriously um uh but there's also a role that i think could be played among people who live in sciences who live in their communities um to go to high schools go to this go to that and and you know talk about some of the issues um uh in the aaas american association for the advancement of science we're trying to start a program uh sort of a grassroots program where in order to develop trust in science uh it's better to have your neighbor talking about this and not someone flying in uh from the east coast or the west coast or wherever uh landing for a day pontificating flying back out uh i think trust human trust begins by shared experiences you know your kids go to play soccer or band or whatever and and so in these informal events you get to know people of different political persuasions in a way and and that's with that trust that you can begin to communicate and and this communication is first of all so scientists yeah now this is kind of a quasi-non-issue of stanford professors in the sense that uh there are not predominantly two very different realities and a set of knowledge bases that we the nation now suffers from and so yeah so it's not as as important here as it would be in other places where you really have very divergent uh sets of beliefs and sets of quote data yeah super interesting but let me go on as this is a question from todd logan about the role of the private sector is that what priorities should the deal we have to contribute to addressing climate change and are additional large loans necessary to support companies and innovations to reduce carbon emissions in many areas of the economy for example industrial processes okay so now this is more of my policy philosophy rather than strict science questions that's great that's why why we have you uh i i personally think of public sector money taxpayer money is best been two ways one way is in research where companies are not willing to uh to do the fundamental research that creates a basis for technology that will help solve the problem example we would love to have uh diamond transistor by diamond transistors i really mean cvd diamonds that are doped because it has a very high voltage standoff it has very good heat connectivity you could you could do you could revolutionize dc transmission low loss high voltage transmission with diamond transistors you know the people who make high voltage transmission equipment are not going to do a lot of research and making it's a materials question how do you dope diamond when i was secretary of energy we were doing that but mostly on things that were more short-term achievable like nitride and silicon carbide transistors uh so research absolutely uh in many areas the other way is i think since most of the energy and carbon emitting industries including agriculture is a big one are private that you want to you want to set policies that stimulate investments in this private sector stimulate a farmer to adapt a lower means of agricultural production that dramatically lower the co2 and that's done again partly by research and using newer technologies that are now rapidly emerging and maybe some tax incentives with a sunset clause uh just as you know with the tax incentives for electric vehicles after a certain company sells a certain number of models their their tax and goes away it's to bootstrap it to get it going but after that you've got to live on the quality of your product um i'm more in favor of that than spending large amounts of money in direct expenditures to to subsidize you really want to get the private sector to invest their own money with sunset clauses the good news is right now there's a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines unlike 2009 where all the capital had vanished because they were gobbled up in bad loans we're in a different position so after we get out of covid uh and can go back to working full-time how do you stimulate the investment of that huge amount of private capital which you know you can greatly leverage now in terms of the loans the loan program turned out i think in hindsight to be a very successful thing wall street wouldn't touch loans to large solar wind projects these were 500 million up to a billion dollar loans they said no it's too risky so we invested in those they in large part paid off and we're getting back revenues from the low interest rate from the loans they're turning the loan program into the black that's all good we tesla survived in our loan they would have gone bankrupt within one month uh if we had not announced our loan within a month they would have vanished um nissan developed a leaf in part with our loan and so those things actually did pay off uh there were other things you know solyndra that failed that was a notable failure uh but but it did actually leverage money in a very effective way now the downside of the federal loan program is that there's lots of bureaucracy and it becomes very cumbersome and if we're going to do it again somehow we have to streamline the bureaucracy because it it's so uh companies it it's sort of a uh a loan of last resort to many private companies um and if you excuse this is when you have a federal loan like that during the whole time you have the loan the government has it's like a colonoscopy without anesthesia for the whole time of the loan it's a pain you don't want that to happen uh so you want to streamline it um uh as much as possible in some way because you have to be responsible but it can't be uh as cumbersome it is but it sounds like sort of a hyper vigilance about preventing things from getting too bureaucratic and making sure that you don't use the loan as a way to bail out failing companies that should fail that's right absolutely but it is it turned out to be very very good and uh and highly leveraged money um but you know in addition to loans the loans could be a possibility i think providing companies with sunset incentives uh so their business plan means they get into it but there's not so when the subsidy ends they get out but but with the intent of uh making us a sustaining business yeah let me ask another audience question that that follows up on this theme this one's from ellen chu do you think that changes in doe culture under you and ernie survive the trump administration and can persist under president biden yeah another good question i would say um [Music] uh a lot of the long-term career people were driven out through terrible means of you know the senior career people you can't fire them but you can transfer them and uh to different locations or very undesirable jobs and then they quit uh and these are people with you know as republicans democrats different administrations have different philosophies they could weather the storm but they couldn't weather this one um i think in the end uh you not only want to restore the culture you want to actually say that you know the a lot of the business of the government is done in the agencies which are in the executive branch and to build a core of federal civil servants who are truly excellent would be my dream uh and and you don't need you know when people get hired in the government jobs they think oh my gosh they're starting to think of pension you know usually 30 year olds don't think of pensions i know i wasn't thinking of pensions then and not only that you if you could get them for five years three years ten years and they move on uh that would be good it would be a good thing i wanted you know rpe was written into the program of rp they can only be there for three years and then they move out but it became such a well-run organization that it became a badge of honor to be an rpe very cool uh and this so i was saying by the time i was there this is what we want in the department of energy you worked at department of five or ten years you're one of the select few privileged enough and you learn so much while you're there that you become very much more employable and that's what you actually want you want people with this knowledge base to go back to the private sector academia industry wherever uh that would be the dream let me ask one one question that that sort of follows up directly on that this one's from bruce carney and it's about federal workforce what are the biggest barriers to recruiting mid-career scientists to work for the federal government either in management or individual contributor roles is it mostly about compensation or having to relocate or something else and it sounds like you're saying it's really about how empowering the job experience is at a large extent i i think what you and young you do could take a salary cut and people are willing to take a salary card if they think they're doing something very very useful the move you know the funds can be used to help relocate and it turned out i was not i was not in the top 300 of those people working in the department of energy in terms of compensation when i was secretary why because i couldn't get the relocation stuff so so people are willing to do that if they think that some real good can come out of it because in a government position in a in a well-run agency you have tremendous influence the ability to change the world in ways uh that you couldn't as an academic uh so it's the beer protecting you know their supervisors have to block and tackle for them and to really keep the bureaucracy from dragging them down and i remember in the first year i was secretary i had an all hands meeting just you know feedback and one people raised his hands mr secretary can you stop all the let me see if i can remember the exact words all the blood sucking soul draining that we have to put up with [Laughter] yeah wow and i said i'm working on it i feel your pain i guess that's probably the most important thing is is somebody who's there who the rank and file understand is on their side yes yes absolutely uh because that was the mood he said you know we we you know we're it's about doing the job and empowering people to do the job and knowing that they can become effective yeah we're we're right at the end here let me ask one more question that's about your personal journey and then um and just close with it thank you so uh this one's from steven shulkin um how did your contact be on academia to government first begin do you have advice for academicians who are interested in getting involved in government um i i can i suspect how i began uh i did not i wasn't in politics i didn't campaign for anybody i didn't know president obama uh i think when i was a director of lawrence berkeley national lab people began to take notice somehow and i think a number of people uh who were connected to the president-elect uh started saying you want to look seriously at this person they had as as you mentioned they never plucked a scientist to become secretary of energy uh president obama was a different president and so and so through through through that um people university of chicago knew me well uh things like that that i think i got on his radar screen uh but if you look at his appointment many of his appointments he was looking far and wide for uh not for the usual cast of characters not for the usual um either rich people or politicians who lent support early on those are many of the people who become secretaries uh he was he was trying to make different appointments um and you know and and i said you know my wife finally said i'm i'm going back to stanford i hope you join me uh so i had to tell the president that i loved working with him but i could not uh he said he understood and we talked a little bit about uh what would given the deadlock congress republican congress what um what he would recommend he should do and that the last night i said look you gave you get a lot of credit hiring me you didn't know me i was a scientist i didn't do politics i don't do politics i know a lot of people in your inner circle don't want that to happen because scientists feel you know they work in their compass is you know scientific truth and and and so it's uh and you know it's something maybe they felt it's harder to control uh uh and i said you get a lot of credit for it do it again and he did it again yeah well steve chu thank you so much for uh inspirational conversation and and really uh compelling advice about what what each of us can do and what each of us can aspire to to make government work better and address some key challenges so i i really appreciate the insight and i i i know that the rest of the audience and i i hope that the audience included many many people who have a chance to uh to be of service of the the way you've described before we close i want to just one one last closing comment uh you know going to government doesn't mean it's a life careers thing you can go on over two years four years five years ten years two years four years then you can go back to what you're doing and it's sort of national service uh uh now it turned out for me going to the government for the time four and thirty years was a growing enriching experience i learned so much i thought it was give back time but it turned out uh it was good for the way i saw the world and and opened my intellectual horizons even more and so so that's another thing that you can think of you know it's it's like you know going the armed forces for a brief amount of time not because you want to be a career soldier but it's time to you know national service and again if we we have people like that that would be great what a wonderful way to close thank you so so much reminder our next conversation march 11th pat brown impossible foods i also want to just thank the fabulous woods staff that supported today's conversation molly field athena cerapio plus justin evan from cypress media and thanks to everybody in the audience for a really wonderful conversation

Channel: Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Views: 1,114

Rating: 4.7142859 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: NQVdjDo8sT4

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021