ASSU Bringing In Van Jones and Steven Chu

According to the ASSU Sustainability executive team, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and former Special Advisor to the President Van Jones will be giving speeches at Stanford in the next few months.

[](http://blog.stanfordreview.org/content/images/2010/02/vanjones.jpg)

Secretary Chu will speak at a March 8th event concerning issues facing global energy. Chu taught at Stanford in the early 1990s and again at theturn of the century, but he spend most of the past decade as the director of the [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory](http://www.lbl.gov/ "Lawrence Berkely Laboratory") at UC Berkeley. For more info on some of his research foci, check [here](http://www.energy.gov/organization/dr_steven_chu.htm "Stephen Chu"). He has also [received a Nobel Prize](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/chu-autobio.html "Chu's Nobel Prize") for his work in cooling atoms with lasers.

Chu advocates for alternative energy sources, specifically nuclear energy sources. He has voiced concerns over the United States falling behind in the clean energy race and is worried about swapping “a dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on foreign technology.” Concerned about global warming, Chu has predicted a future “global glucose economy” where plants would be grown in the tropics, converted to glucose, and then shipped around the world to be converted into biofuels.

Van Jones will speak at the ASSU executive’s FutureFest occurring on April 17. Jones was Barack Obama’s green jobs “Czar” before his resignation in the Summer of 2009 due to commentator Glenn Beck’s effort to reveal evidence of Jones’ history in activism. According to a Washington Post article, Jones signed  a petition questioning if the Bush Administration may have let 9/11 happen. He also called Republicans by an expletive and was involved in Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (a radical Bay-area group).

Van Jones worked as a civil rights activist before advocating for environmentalism. He founded both the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change.

The *FutureFest *was described in a handout at the State of the Association as:

A social movement that addresses sustainability issues by celebrating the
influences and accomplishments of our culture (or local and global
community) and demonstrating it in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

The event will also involve “the transformation of White Plaza” (just what that will look like was not mentioned), a concert from “a prominent musical artist,” and community outreach.