Secretary of Energy Steven Chu Talks Climate/Energy Challenge at ISU Tuesday

Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and U.S. Secretary of Energy, will talk about clean energy and climate change at Iowa State University Tuesday as part of the National Affairs Lecture Series.

Chu's talk "Solving the Energy and Climate Change Challenge" begins at 4 p.m. in the South Ballroom of the Memorial Union. It is free and open to the public.

Chu recently announced that he will resign from his cabinet position at the end of the February.

An article in the Atlantic, said Chu didn't have the typical profile of a Department head and was given the “monumental task of distributing $35 billion dollars to energy projects through the stimulus package. … to an outsider, to be the mix of "shovel-ready" (remember that term?) projects and longer-horizon research that you'd expect.”

In Chu's resignation letter to staff he discussed what the Department has done to accelerate the transition to new forms of energy and the importance of doing so noting extreme weather events.

“During the three decades from 1980 to 2011, the number of violent storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, as tabulated by the reinsurance company Munich Re, has increased more than three-fold. They also estimate that the financial losses follow a trend line that has gone from $40 billion to $170 billion dollars per year,” Chu wrote.

Chu said that the production of renewable wind and solar energy has doubled in the last four years and that the Country spent $430 billion dollars on foreign oil in 2012.

“Ultimately we have a moral responsibility to the most innocent victims of adverse climate change. Those who will suffer the most are the people who are the most innocent: the world’s poorest citizens and those yet to be born. There is an ancient Native American saying: 'We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.' A few short decades later, we don’t want our children to ask, 'What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?'

Read the full letter here.