Steven Chu urges graduates to prosper and save the planet

President Obama was not the only American official addressing an audience today. After the president said “assalaamu alaykum” to the Arab world, Energy Secretary Steven Chu admitted to being a nerd and sent Harvard graduates off with a greeting that was faintly Vulcan and decidedly green: “May you prosper and help save our planet.”
I almost wrote that he sent Harvard graduates into the real world, but Chu turned the real world/ivory tower dichotomy on its head: “After nine years at Bell labs, I decided to leave the warm, cozy ivory tower for what I considered to be the ‘real world’, a university.”
Bell Labs was almost perfect in every way, Chu said, but it produced scientific papers instead of scientific children. He wanted to teach (and did teach, at Stanford and UC Berkeley) to give back, but he received more than he gave, which emboldened him to ask something more of the Harvard graduates assembled before him: “It’s a call to arms and about making a difference. In the past several decades, our climate has been changing.”
What follows that sentence in the Nobel laureate’s speech is an excellent global warming primer for a general audience that you can print and distribute to the skeptics you know, instead of, say, jailing or executing them. And following his climate-change argument, Chu’s talk culminated in a plea to graduates across the disciplines:
The Obama Administration is laying a new foundation for a prosperous and sustainable energy future, but we don’t have all of the answers. That’s where you come in. In this address, I am asking you to join us. As our future intellectual leaders, take the time to learn more about what’s at stake, and then act on that knowledge. As future scientists and engineers, I ask you to give us better technology solutions. As future economists and political scientists, I ask you to create better policy options. As future business leaders, I ask that you make sustainability an integral part of your business.
Finally, as humanists, I ask that you speak to our common humanity. One of the cruelest ironies about climate change is that the ones who will be hurt the most are the most innocent: the world’s poorest and those yet to be born.
via U.S. Dept of Energy