A few evenings ago, I caught the one hour interview of Stephen Chu (朱棣文)on the Charlie Rose program on PBS. I don't know when it was taped, but it was after Chu has become secretary of DOE. In the interview, Chu said he believed with his heart and soul that science can and will find ways to solve the energy crisis and the carbon emission issue. He said science is to seek truth, and truth should not be influenced by politics.

He proceeded to give the example of the Haber-Bosch process of making Ammonia at the turn of the 20th century, that literally saved the soil nutrient depletion problem in Europe.

"Nature" and " Science" (by the way, these 2 highly visible journals I do not read often, nor regularly) called the H-B process the most significant scientific invention of the 20th century ( I would have thought the " invention of the transistor " was, but no matter).

In this interview of Chu's, I can see how confident he is in science, in the intellectual brain power in the US ( he has his bias), and in the conviction in applying science to pull the US/world out of this misery of being held captive to the oil producing regions of the world . He may just be right.

What is the H-B process ?
Please read on should you be interested.

The Haber-Bosch process:
Under high temperatures and very high pressures, hydrogen and nitrogen (from thin air) are combined to produce ammonia.

Nearly one century after its invention, the process is still applied all over the world to produce 500 million tons of artificial fertilizer per year. 1% of the world's energy supply is used for it (Science 297(1654), Sep 2002); it still sustains roughly 40% of the population (M. D. Fryzuk, Nature 427, p 498, 5 Feb 2004). Billions of people would not even exist without it. And our dependence will only increase as the global count moves from six to ten billion people or so.

Fritz Haber ( Nobel prize in 1918) and Carl Bosch (Nobel prize in 1931) have probably had a greater impact than anyone in the past 100 years, including Hitler, Gandhi, Einstein, etc.

Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century (e.g., V. Smil, Nature, July 29 1999, p 415) as it "detonated the population explosion," driving the world's population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.

Bosch was a co-founder of IG-Farben, the world's largest chemical company. After WW II the allies broke it up into three smaller parts, each still larger than any foreign chemical company.
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Steven Chu, Ph.D (born February 28, 1948), is an American physicist and currently the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. As a scientist, Chu is known for his research in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he 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.[1] He is a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.