I met the Secretary of Energy last night. He's really cool, and made a Monty Python reference
So Secretary Moniz came by Mumbai yesterday to talk to the Asia Society about US-Indian energy cooperation efforts. First off: this guy has the best hair of any Energy Secretary ever:
That's right... that guy has custody of our entire nuclear arsenal...
Anyways, the guy is an amazing speaker and really engaged the audience. Our civilian nuclear deal with India has been kind of stalled lately, and it's a bit of a sore point. Apparently the fact that the charges against the Indian diplomat were being dropped must have leaked to India, because there were a couple of government people there and they hadn't been meeting any US government people since December. I don't know the nuke story but apparently there have been some treaty issues neither side has wanted to fix yet so there have been a bunch of meetings that haven't really gone anywhere. There is some cool stuff going on where some Indian engineers have found a new material that may work better for the control rods, but they don't have the facilities to test it so the US is doing the testing.
The big questions were about bio, interestingly enough, which both the US and India are split internally about (and in both cases because of agriculture policy). He made the good point that bio is hard to call carbon neutral when you're using petro fertilizers to make the crops in the first place, but that there are still hopeful possibilities in the future. The "holy grail" of bio, he said, is artificial photosynthesis: sunlight, water, CO2, and (X, for some carbon-neutral value of X) yielding hydrocarbons. Later towards the end of the mad bum-rush to mob the speaker, I said the phrase "holy grail" always worried me, because in the story it's something Lancelot could never find and wound up killing whoever looked for it. He laughed a little and said, "Yeah, so far every time we thought we've found it, it's just been a grail-shaped beacon." I figure any cabinet secretary who makes a Monty Python joke is fine with me.
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