Frank talk on U.S. energy innovation
As a theoretical physicist by training, Steven E. Koonin PhD ’75 might have been expected to focus his talk at MIT on Wednesday, Sept. 22, on the scientific and technological aspects of energy policy. But he made it clear right away that business and economics are the real keys to progress in the energy frontier.It’s the economics that are “absolutely essential if the technologies are going to have an impact,” he said at the outset of the annual Henry C. Hottel lecture sponsored by the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, before a packed hall in the Stata Center.“There is an urgency” about dealing with the problems of energy just from a national-security perspective, even apart from the dangers of climate change, he said, pointing out that the United States currently sends about $1 billion a day to other nations to feed our petroleum appetite. That makes us “subject to the...