This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy—delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator.

Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. “I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is,” he said.

Chu is an inspired choice to lead the Energy Department, but he’s clearly going to have his work cut out for him. Among the many groups that have failed to absorb the lessons of the refrigerator are Congress and its new ward, the American auto industry.

The same day that word of Chu’s appointment began to leak out, Congress backed away from a provision of the auto-bailout package that would have forced the automakers to abide by new efficiency standards that California—once again—is trying to set. California’s Clean Car rules would require vehicles sold in the state to become roughly twenty per cent more efficient by 2020. The U.S. automakers have been fighting the standards in court for years. Some drafts of the bailout bill would have forced them to drop these lawsuits in return for federal assistance; the Bush Administration, however, said that it would not agree to any package with that provision.

At this point, it looks like the legislation doesn’t have enough votes in the Senate to pass. But the saga isn’t over. Even if the measure is approved, Congress will almost certainly have to return to the issue next year, as the money in it—fourteen billion dollars—falls far short of what nearly every knowledgeable source says is needed to keep the automakers out of bankruptcy. One can only hope that, by that point, Chu has had more success getting his message out. If taxpayers are going to foot the bill for the automakers, at the very least their dollars ought to be going to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.

(Photograph: Max Vadukul)