Speaking of good interviews with important environmental appointees, via James Fallows comes a long and substantive chat with Steven Chu.
Good stuff. Fallows also makes a point I haven't heard before, saying, "in karmic terms it doesn't hurt that Chu, who was born in St. Louis of Chinese parents, will head the very department that, under then-secretary Bill Richardson, was involved in the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio in the late 1990s. (In brief: Lee, who was born in Taiwan and who worked at Los Alamos, was accused of massive theft of U.S. nuclear secrets on China's behalf. The NY Times loudly trumpeted this story. Eventually nearly all the charges were dropped, and the presiding federal judge apologized to Lee for government excesses.) Again, this is not a reason to have chosen him, but it's worth noticing." Fallows doesn't quite come out and say this, but there was a lot of latent anti-Chinese sentiment embedded in that controversy, as if his ancestry rendered Wen Ho Lee inherently suspicious.
