Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.

As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions. The same opportunity lies before us with energy efficiency and clean energy.

Pick the right sized pot, don't pick a pot five times bigger, twice as big.

I've always been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, who articulated his Dream of an America where people are judged not by skin color but "by the content of their character." In the scientific world, people are judged by the content of their ideas. Advances are made with new insights, but the final arbitrator of any point of view are experiments that seek the unbiased truth, not information cherry picked to support a particular point of view.

Sustainable energy is the equivalent of the U.S. moon shot.

Just refrigerator efficiency saves more energy than all that we're generating from renewables, excluding hydroelectric power... I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is. It doesn't mean you eat lukewarm food and your beers are lukewarm. You can still have it; you just make a better thing

The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country's energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That's where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.