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Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke are both in China today, forming a new joint research program for US/China cooperation on clean vehicles and buildings with China's Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang. (The very fact that Chu and Gang are sitting down to talk is reason for some hope: They are cut from similarly brainy optimistic technocratic cloth and before government both spent a long time at the cutting edge of private industry's research. Chu was at Bell Labs, where he won a Nobel. And Gang was at Audi's research center in Germany. Having interviewed both of them, I can easily imagine them having a beer. But if they do, there will be a leapfrog under the table, testing out its first hops.

Chu and Locke are on a unenviable chore of a mission to get China to publicly commit to reducing CO2 emissions. The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital Blog points out that the tensions in this mission are evident in the difference between the WSJ headline ("Chu Warns China on Emissions")  and the China Daily's: "Chu Says US Ready to Lead on Climate Change." The less public truth, as Chu knows from his stint at LBNL, which works extensively with China, is that China is very concerned about the environmental and competitive impacts of climate change and legislation and is preparing extensively and helter skelter, but not talking about it much. (Here's an article I wrote about the extent of China's energy efficiency program and its 20 year cooperation with LBNL.) Numerous bureaucrats told me that they were coming to see carbon reductions as a competitive strategy, particularly against the slower moving US, and a way of breaking out of the trap of low-cost labor as the country's competitive advantage. In the Reuters article, Locke rightly points out that China needs far more than energy efficiency. 

And that's where Wan Gang comes in. He returned to China from Germany after writing a highly influential paper saying that the only way for China to dominate the auto industry of the future is to be a pioneer in alternative fuel vehicles. Aka Leapfrogging.  (Here's an article I wrote about that mission for Wired. Substitute hybrid and electric for hydrogen and note that Wan Gang's fortunes have risen considerably.)

China can't bet its future on leapfrogging anymore than the US can bet its competitiveness on preventing the worldwide adoption of emissions standards. Will Chu and Gang figure out a collaboration that satisfies the competitive urges of both?

We've come to expect that the "solutions" to Climate Change will be high tech--floating windmills, underwater generators, and nano solar in the Jules Verne/James Bond tradition--or at least high concept (carbon credit trading). But this week Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Steve Chu is in Europe extolling the benefits of ... white roofs. The concept is simple but the numbers he cites are massive: Making roofs and pavement more reflective could offset 44 billion tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking all of the world's cars off the road for 11 years. (While these numbers appear huge, there's no mention of the time frame, so they're not comparable to other numbers.)

Even so, these numbers are an interesting reflection of how much we've re-engineered the planet and climate already, and how we might start to mitigate that. Chu seems to want us to understand this as a category-jumper, working on climate in a different way than changing energy sources or sequestering carbon, and so he describes increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of buildings and pavements as "geo-engineering."

I guess it's predictable that some media are already making fun of Chu. Perhaps the idea is too simple and sensible, or just too eggheaded. (In California a related proposal to require that car roofs be more reflective as part of the state's climate policy became controversial. There's something about the brainy dumbness of the idea that doesn't float politically.) Over at google's geo-engineering forum, though, they're worried that the reception for Chu's idea is an indication of the ridicule the public may heap upon heavier geo-engineering against climate change--things like stratospheric aerosols and cloud whitening. A few years ago, discussing geo-engineering in polite company was pretty much off limits because it muddied up the discussion about when to take action on climate change. But as action has been delayed, and fear has grown, the concept has moved steadily towards the far outskirts of the center. Chu's use of the term geo-engineering in this relatively benign context is an indication of where the discussion is headed.