Revenge of the nerds?

Three of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet picks – Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, former New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former EPA Administrator Carol Browner as the president’s “climate and energy czarina” – could be characterized as the “revenge of the nerds”.

An early advocate of a scientific approach to climate change, Chu has run Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility operated by the University of California, since August 2004. During that time, he has spearheaded a multidisciplinary mission to evolve the lab into a world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, among other things.

His Nobel Prize was shared in 1977, while he was still at AT&T Bell Laboratories, with fellow American William D. Phillips and Frenchman Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, for their work on ways of cooling and trapping atoms. Chu joined Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley in 1987 as a professor in 1987 and remained there until the Berkeley appointment.

A key player in the National Academies of Science ongoing America’s Energy Future project, Chu also co-chaired the InterAcademy Council’s report Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future and has published more than 220 papers. His appointment is in sharp contrast to the retired military officers and energy-sector executives who have been Energy Secretary in previous U.S. cabinets.

His environmental credentials can be summed up by remarks at a National Clean Energy Summit. He dismissed as a “myth” the notion that modern society has all the technologies needed to solve the energy challenge. “I think political will is absolutely necessary,” he said. “But we need new technologies to transform the landscape.”

Jackson, a New Orleans native, led New Jersey’s progressive efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and Browner, currently Obama’s transition team adviser on energy and environmental issues, headed the EPA during the Bill Clinton presidency and will coordinate policy from the White House as an influential link between Chu and Jackson.

Each has an impressive track record which could give Obama unprecedented leverage as he tries to make good on his key campaign commitment to a $500-billion economic stimulus plan he hopes to put in place shortly after his inauguration next month.