What a difference an election makes. In a return to belief in the importance of science, President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Steven Chu, currently the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as his Energy Secretary, according to CNN.

Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is a former chairman of the physics department at Stanford University, will take over from the current Energy Secretary, Samuel Wright Bodman, a former CEO of Cabot Corporation, a Fortune 300 company with global business activities in specialty chemicals and materials. And while Bodman was also a Professor at MIT, his strongest ties did not appear to be with the scientific community.

Unlike his predecessor, Chu has been a strong advocate of addressing climate change and working toward replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.

In talking about the potential for a 5 degrees Centigrade change in temperature at the National Clean Energy Summit over the summer, Chu said:

Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We're not talking about ten thousand people. We're not talking about ten million people, we're talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently. - Huffington Post

Chris Bowers at Open Left says that Chu is "at the center of solar and biofuel research, meaning that industry lobbyists won't stand a chance when talking to him." This is critically important and a much needed change from the no lobbyists left behind - especially not fossil fuel lobbyists - mentality of the Bush administration. Yes, science makes a come back, and it couldn't have come soon enough.

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