Steven Chu Quotations

Since I walked in the door as secretary of energy, I've been doing everything in our powers to do what we can to reduce these gas prices. ... So, of course we don't want the price of gasoline to go up; we want it to go down.

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent - I remember this number - one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will - some of them will disappear.

The ideal protective layer for a lithium metal anode needs to be chemically stable to protect against the chemical reactions with the electrolyte and mechanically strong to withstand the expansion of the lithium during charge,

I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, "That's nice - and when are you going to see me next?

Just refrigerator efficiency saves more energy than all that we're generating from renewables, excluding hydroelectric power... I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is. It doesn't mean you eat lukewarm food and your beers are lukewarm. You can still have it; you just make a better thing

If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade.

While we cannot accurately predict the course of climate change in the coming decades, the risks we run if we don't change our course are enormous. Prudent risk management does not equate uncertainty with inaction.

The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country's energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That's where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.