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On Monday, President-elect Barack Obama named Steven Chu, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, as his choice to lead the Department of Energy. It's hard to imagine a greater contrast between Chu and the man he probably will replace at the energy department, Samuel Bodman.

Bodman was nominated by President Bush in 2004. He is a former Texas businessman whose company was one of the Lone Star State's top five polluters. It released 54,000 tons of toxic emissions into the Texas air during 1997 alone.

That was the same year Chu received the Nobel Prize for the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light." In an interview last year with The Washington Post, the son of Chinese immigrants said he turned his attention to energy and climate change after earning the Nobel honor. "Many of our best basic scientists (now) realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation," he told the newspaper.

As head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu has been a champion of innovative approaches to solving climate and energy problems. He already has expressed support of a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, as well as for cleaner cars and greener buildings. Under Bodman and, before him, Spencer Abraham, the Bush administration's approach to energy issues has been summarized best by the chant at last summer's Republican National Convention: "Drill, baby, drill."

Obama also named Carol Browner, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under former President Bill Clinton, as senior White House adviser to coordinate environmental and energy policy. He chose Lisa Jackson to head the EPA and Nancy Sutley, who holds a top environmental post in Los Angeles, to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

In the Bush administration, the council has been stocked with former industry lobbyists. Rather than advancing environmental issues, the council frequently has been used to block efforts to address problems and suppress inconvenient scientific findings.

Obama's nomination of Chu signals a serious new approach to addressing global climate change. More fundamentally, it signals the return of respect for science and the scientific method in American government.

For the last eight years, the Bush administration has elevated its anti-regulation ideology over science, especially when scientific findings would hamper the pursuit of corporate profits. It also has downgraded scientific, medical and health concerns to curry favor with special interest groups in its political base. Thus, in the area of public health, information on the effectiveness of condoms in combating sexually transmitted diseases was removed from government Web sites. When it came to climate change, White House political appointees altered reports by scientists and silenced experts.

Now, as the president's term winds to a close, the administration has embarked on a fast-paced anti-regulatory spree. It has weakened the Endangered Species Act, opened public lands to drilling and mining exploitation, and approved rules to permit mining waste to be dumped into rivers and streams. No longer is there even any attempt to disguise its anti-environmental actions with such Orwellian labels as "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests."

The Obama administration's new focus on science doesn't mean that there suddenly will be simple or miraculous solutions to society's most pressing scientific and technological challenges. But it does indicate that the search for solutions will take place in the real world, not one ruled by ideology and wishful thinking instead of scientific principles.

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(c) 2008, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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