When Steven Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, he said, ‘It’s remarkable what simple curiosity can lead to.’ His appointment by President-elect Barack Obama as energy secretary breaks an eight-year gag on scientific curiosity at a critical time for the country and the planet. One of the Bush administration’s most egregious insults to America’s collective intelligence was the repeated deletion of scientific findings on global warming from reports and testimonies from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The omissions were meant to dull public understanding of the impact of autos and industries on global warming and of how climate change will worsen disasters, diseases, and disparities. Nearly every year brought fresh news of deletions. President Bush’s first EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, quit in 2003 amid the censorship. In 2006, top NASA climate scientist James Hansen said the administration tried to muzzle him on the need to reduce greenhouse gases. Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shared the Nobel for his work cooling and trapping atoms with lasers for more detailed examination. He would be the first energy secretary who is a current scientist. All […]