“We live in a truly magical time,” said physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as he opened his testimony in March before the US House of Representatives Committee on Science. “With the flick of a finger, the power of 10 horses flows from a small wire in the wall of our homes to clean our carpets.” Chu was trying to convince skeptical committee members to support the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) as an innovative way to help solve the growing US energy crisis.
Chu, one of the authors of last December’s National Academy of Sciences’ report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (available from the National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11463.html) that recommended the creation of ARPA-E, continued to extol the virtues of energy for the committee, noting that abundant energy supplies have allowed us...
