Asian Americans Key to Success in a Green World
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

The Asian American love of a new, improved model of life on earth will play a key role in America's quest to stay relevant in a rapidly greening world.

BP’s horrific Gulf Coast oil leak has created a once-a-generation opportunity. If we can use it as a slap in the face with an oil rag to wean ourselves of environmentally costly 19th-century energy strategies, the tragedy may ultimately save this oil-guzzling nation from becoming the world’s next rust belt.

The emerging clean-energy industry is almost certainly the world’s next major industrial revolution. It will change everything from what we eat to how we move to where we work and vacation. Our cities and suburbs will be remade as attractive new green zones emerge and once-bustling legacy oil zones fall into decay.

Forward-looking nations are already directing national resources to creating industries that will power this new era. In particular, China with its massive 15% annual growth in energy needs and a 1.3-billion population is turning necessity into virtue by directing its booming demand toward clean energy production. In 2009 China overtook India, Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines. It became the world’s biggest maker of solar panels as of 2010. It’s aggressively bulding dozens of new nuclear reactors and upgrading its coal power plants to the cleanest and most efficient types.

Because the U.S. is a mature energy market, it can’t simply rely on incrementally adding clean capacity to cover demand growth; it must make an accelerated push to power its transportation needs by electricity instead of oil. If it doesn’t, its clean-energy industry will be buried by the sheer scale of China’s and become irrelevant the way the auto industries of, say, France or Britain are irrelevant to the global auto trade. This isn’t conjecture but simple math. Economic growth will begin to pass us by if we insist on clinging much longer to our dirty, oil-stained ways.

Korea is building Songdo City near Inchon — an entire green city to serve as a model and a living laboratory for green innovation and to help set standards on which private industry can push ahead with innovation. Korean batteries will power the first mass-produced American electric cars. It’s smart-home technologies may become the brains of future American homes.

Against this aggressive and concerted Asian push to shape the world’s green future we in the U.S. are still debating whether the government should play a role setting standards or encouraging development of specific technologies. The future is being carved up and we’re sitting around wondering what’s for dinner.

There was a time when we could proudly show visitors from Asia around American cities and have them be impressed by what they see. Today it’s the other way around. Americans who visit Asia are awed by the sight of modernity taken to the next level, to a level we only read about in magazines and see on TV documentaries on innovation.

Why? That old-school we-won-World-War-2 complancency. That old-school mistrust of any governmental role, no matter how necessary for setting standards to allow development of consistent solutions for a future that’s rushing toward us. Old-school mistrust of anything not built with nuts and bolts and sheet metal.

Forturnately, we have a President who sees the need to act now to avoid future economic marginalization. It’s evidenced not only by his urgent calls to Congress to act on legislation to spur green-energy development but also in his choice of Energy Secretary.

Stephen Chu isn’t someone who has spent his life consorting with old-school oil executives, the type of person who has typically been put in that post in the past. Chu is a Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear physicist who has been parsing our universe at the atomic level and understands that the laws of nature are stacked against our current energy ecosystem. As Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Chu had become the most high-powered exponent of an aggressive shift in energy policy to cut carbon emissions.

In January Chu’s Energy Department awarded more than $1.37 billion in loan guarantees under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to BrightSource Energy, Inc. for the construction and start-up of three utility-scale concentrated solar power plants with total generating capacity of 400 megawatts. The plants will be located on federally-owned land in California’s Mojave Desert and use the desert sun to produce electricity for sale through Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison Company.

The development of that technology to concentrate solar energy to drive steam turbines is being carried out by engineers like Cliff Ho of Sandia National Laboratories. Ho won the 2010 Asian American Engineer of the Year award for his role as a principal investigator in SNL’s Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) team. There are literally thousands of Asian American engineers and researchers like Ho whose efforts are invested in a future weaned of oil and carbon emissions. They’re working in disparate fields like genetic engineering to produce organic fuel sources and geology to exploit the earth’s virtually inexhaustible supply of thermal energy.

And of course the energy food chain also requires a big enough economic base to justify the massive investments needed to stay on the cutting edge. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was in China last month heading up a delegation of 24 U.S. clean-energy tech companies trying to export clean energy technology to China. Locke has been vocal about the need for a strong, clear energy policy that will keep us ahead of China, Germany, Korea and other nations in the clean-energy sector.

We Asian Americans have few fond memories of the era of big oil and big smokestacks, driven by bluster and a callous attitude toward everything. We are eager to move the world toward something smarter and friendlier to our entire planet and everyone on it, not just the few who can exploit its resources while insulating themselves from the suffering they cause. That’s old-school thinking, and we Asian Americans are a very big part of America’s new school.