Powering the Planet
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I am humbled and honored to be here to tell you about a topic that is dear to everyone’s heart—and vital to the future of our planet. My colleague, Richard Smalley, gave a presentation1 on this topic several years ago, at a similar MRS plenary session. Over the last few years of Dr. Smalley’s life, he and I worked together, traveling across our country to deliver a message about a subject that we—like many others, both scientists and lay people—have come to believe is unequivocally the most important technological problem in the world: our global energy future. That is an incredibly powerful statement, one that during the next hour I hope to ably defend. My presentation will offer a perspective similar to Dr. Smalley’s, although through a different lens. In this talk, I will not focus on the science that my team is doing in the laboratory. That will be left for the specific venues where we, as scientists, talk about science. Instead, I am going to talk about the bigger picture of our energy challenge. I believe that we researchers, the modernday spokespeople for this challenge, have a responsibility to understand it and its terms so that we can help communicate why it is critically important, do something about it through our own research efforts, and present our message effectively to the general public. Compared with all the other technical issues facing us in the world today, why is energy the most important? I believe that energy, not the dollar, is the currency of the world. It is the joule that drives every economy and gives people a way out of poverty. Without energy, we cannot find or administer medicine to cure disease, we cannot purify water, we cannot drive our cars; we cannot go to work, operate computers, or even study at night. Because our modern lives run on various forms of energy, we need to find a way to manage our energy challenges before they begin to manage us. To provide some balance to this talk, I would like to state that I am not the only one saying that energy is the most impor808
tant technological problem in the world. Scientists are saying it, journalists are saying it, the pundits are saying it. Dr. Smalley testified in Congress that energy is indeed the most critical of currentday issues. He stated that it “is the single most important challenge facing humanity today.”2 Chemical & Engineering News described energy as “the single most important scientific and technological challenge facing humanity in the next century.”3 Author and syndicated public affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman believes that the need to achieve energy independence in America is “blindingly obvious.”4 Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in her inaugural address, said that “it is our responsibility to lead in [this] mission” to deal with the energy problem. As a country, we are not pursuing solutions to our energy problems with anywhere near the same intensity that we are, for example, leading in efforts to cure disease. It is up to researchers, therefore, to help formu
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