Watch a Q&A with Steven Chu, who’s devoted a large part of his scientific career to searching for solutions to our climate challenges.

• 0.06 – What does sustainability mean to you?
• 0.34 – What are the present challenges in sustainability?
• 1.50 – How can we help every person see the importance of being sustainable?
• 3.24 – What can I do to be more sustainable in my everyday life?
• 5.22 – What’s the most sustainable form of energy in your opinion?
• 6.44 – How do you try to do research in the lab in a sustainable way?
• 8.34 – Where do you see our world’s climate status in 50 years?
• 10.19 – Do you feel hope in humanity when it comes to tackling climate change?

Steven Chu born February 28, 1948) is an American physicist and a former government official. He is known for his research at the University of California at Berkeley and his research at Bell Labs and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.

Chu served as the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Chu resigned as energy secretary on April 22, 2013. He returned to Stanford as Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology.

Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. He has conceived of a global “glucose economy”, a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today. On February 22, 2019, Chu began a one-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Bio from Wikipedia