Image: www.freefoto.com
10 December was the day of many important announcements for political positions in the area or energy and the environment. President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary. In addition, he picked veteran regulators from a wide variety of backgrounds to become important members of his environmental and climate-change team, according to Democratic sources yesterday. Obama will likelyt nominate Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Bill Clinton for the full duration of his presidency, to ftake on a new White House postition that keeps oversight of energy, environmental and climate policies. The last important nomination was that Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, will headt he influential US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
This indicates a major shift towards policies combating global warming and developing greener energy supplies. In addition, the EPA is less likely to deny entrepreneurial states such as California permission to put in place more stringent automobile fuel efficiency standards that the federal law requires.
Source: Washington Post
