By KENNETH CHANG and ANDREW C.REVKIN


EMERYVILLE, California - President- elect Barack Obama’s choice for the next energy secretary has been unambiguous in stating that carbon dioxide emitted by cars, power plants and industry is a direct cause of global warming. He has said that urgent action to slash emissions is needed to avoid upheaval of the planet’s climate.

Steven Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in nearby Berkeley, California, and Mr.Obama’s pick, said at his confirmation hearing on January 13 that American families do not want to pay an increasing fraction of their budget for energy costs. He said that the answer is greater efficiency.

His actions as Lawrence Berkeley’s director, including the creation of the Joint BioEnergy Institute, offer hints of how he might harness the 17 national laboratories - or at least the ones not dedicated to nuclear arms research - to address climate and energy issues.

Dr.Chu has often said that free markets will not be enough to drive the necessary changes in energy use, and Mr.Obama highlighted Dr.Chu’s efforts on renewable fuels when he announced his selection.“Steven is uniquely suited to be our next secretary of energy as we make this pursuit a guiding purpose of the Department of Energy, as well as a national mission,”Mr.Obama said.

In Dr.Chu, Mr.Obama has selected someone who possesses unquestioned scientific credentials - Dr.Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for using lasers to cool atoms to temperatures just above absolute zero - and management experience within the Energy Department. Lawrence Berkeley has 4,000 employees and a $650 million budget.

JBEI, whose mission is to use so-called synthetic biology to convert plant cellulose into fuel, moved into its Emeryville home last May. The institute has the look and feel - and organizational chart - of a startup venture, not a federal research laboratory. But JBEI is financed by the Energy Department - $135 million over five years.

It is one of several major forays by Lawrence Berkeley into alternative fuels, an area where the lab conducted almost no research before Dr. Chu became director in 2004.

Unlike most federal research laboratories, whose budgets have been flat or slashed over the last four years, Lawrence Berkeley’s has grown about 20 percent during that time.

Researchers at the laboratory traditionally explored a variety of basic sciences like physics, chemistry and biology. Since the 1970s, the lab has had a division working on energy conservation - developing energy standards for appliances, for instance. But most researchers worked on their own particular interests.

Dr.Chu decided the lab should undertake a more concerted effort on energy. He motivated the staff and recruited scientists to raise attention to the need to replace fossil fuels.

“He came with that vision, and I think it’s really energized a lot of people here and changed their research directions in very good ways,”said A.Paul Alivisatos, the deputy director. Dr.Chu has also shown willingness, perhaps zeal, in shaking up the traditional ways of the national laboratories. A second biofuels research center set up under Dr.Chu’s watch is financed by $500 million from BP, the petroleum company, in a collaboration of a magnitude unprecedented for a national laboratory.

In mid-2005, about nine months after becoming director, Dr.Chu called Jay Keasling, head of the lab’s physical biosciences division, and Dr.Alivisatos, then head of the materials sciences division, together for a meeting.“He said,‘I want to work on energy,’”recalled Dr.Keasling, who now also serves as chief executive of JBEI.“And he wanted to work on transportation fuels.”

Biofuels, fermented and distilled from plants, may offer a solution. Although the burning of biofuels still emits carbon dioxide, it is the same carbon dioxide that the plants had sucked out of the air.

But the growing of plants for fuel competes with the growing of food. In addition, corn-derived ethanol, the biofuel in use today in the United States, takes considerable energy to produce, and that greatly diminishes any ecological benefits.

Dr.Chu hopes to find (or engineer) better biofuel plants and to develop processes for breaking down cellulose and transforming it into fuel at costs competitive with gasoline.

“Steve was out in front of this long before there was this $4 gasoline,”said Dr.Keasling.