As the United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to April of this year, Steven Chu was tasked with implementing President Barack Obama’s energy agenda.

Investing in clean energy, reducing the US dependence on foreign oil, addressing the global climate crisis and creating millions of new jobs were the aims. He says that the US, as the world’s second largest carbon emitter behind China, needs to be a leader in reducing carbon dioxide emissions which contribute to climate change.

Chu was also a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997, for his work on developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.