Climate 'Urgency' Declaration Comes With Ideas for Change

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Dec. 15, 2009— -- There is a "fierce urgency needed for a couple of decades" if dangerous global warming is to be controlled, U.S. Energy Secretary and Nobel laureate Steven Chu said Monday at the international climate talks, and he poured out what seemed a cornucopia of ideas and innovative technologies to accomplish that goal.

They ranged from more conventional projects, such as a new promise by the United States and other wealthy countries to spend $350 million over five years to help poorer countries develop non-polluting energy, to the more daring such as a newly invigorated ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy) that would encourage out-of-the-box thinking so advanced that, as he put it, we need to "be ready for some failures."

ARPA-E, he emphasized, is modeled on the Defense Department's famous DARPA program that was responsible for many space-age military marvels that were so advanced in their time, such as the Blackbird spy plane, they often remain top secret for years.

One of the new energy marvels in development he described is an enormous liquid battery -- like a swimming pool -- that for complex reasons of chemistry and molecular physics can hold unheard of charges "of tens of megawatts" for very little cost and, storing energy during off hours, could "power a whole building -- even whole communities."

Noting that special research funds were only able to grant a small fraction of the fascinating applications submitted, Chu said "there's a lot of pent-up innovation out there" among inventors he said were eager to help humanity wrestle with global warming.

Chu spoke in Copenhagen's vast Bella Center convention complex in a room jammed with delegates, NGO members and world press, all linked by teleconference to Beijing, London and Dublin from which he also fielded questions.

In the front row sat Harvard's climatologist John Holdren, President Obama's chief science advisor, and eminent marine scientist Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.