Look West, Obama

For the Bush administration, saving energy was not only a fool's game — it was a threat to the American way of life. "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," former vice president Dick Cheney declared in 2001, "but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

In the world of politics, everyone knew exactly whom Cheney was mocking: California. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, the state was one of the first to recognize that promoting blind consumption of energy was a dangerous idea. So California started experimenting with policies designed to increase energy efficiency and force utilities to buy more electricity from renewable sources. Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, the state may turn out to be the template for a new national energy policy. California produces climate-warming pollution at half the national rate, leads America in solar-energy production and ranks second in wind energy. But its most stunning achievement is in the very area that Cheney ridiculed: Over the past three decades, while per capita electricity usage in America grew by more than 50 percent, California's consumption stayed flat, even while the state's economy doubled. "California is proof that you don't need to choose between growth and sustainability," says David Roland-Holst, a resource economist at UC Berkeley.

President Obama, who has pledged to fight global warming and to create 5 million new green jobs, clearly plans to draw on California's success. The biggest signal is his choice for energy secretary: Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who headed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In the past, the job has gone to party hacks and political cronies, men certain not to disrupt the Energy Department's traditional emphasis on building weapons and recycling nuclear waste. Chu, by contrast, is a hero among clean-tech entrepreneurs, an innovator who can barely mask his disdain for Big Coal and other dirty-energy industries. In Berkeley, he remade one of the nation's top physics labs into a cutting-edge research center on alternative energy. "He saw it as a project of the same magnitude and urgency as building the bomb in World War II," says Eddy Rubin, director of the lab's genomics division. Under Chu's leadership, the lab won $500 million for bioenergy research from BP, one of the world's largest energy companies. "By picking Chu," says Joe Romm, a former assistant energy secretary, "Obama makes clear that he understands the dire nature of the climate problem and wants to pursue an aggressive, technology-based strategy."