The Daily Climate: Obama Taps Dream Team To Lead on Energy, Climate, Enviro

by Emily Gertz

Published December 16, 2008 @ 09:47AM PT

 

The names of President-elect Obama's energy, climate and environment heads were "leaked" at the end of last week. (One wonders if they were strategically floated to administer a mild jolt to the final hours of the international climate talks in Poland.). Still, last night's official announcement has unleashed the dogs of reporting on these crucial appointments.

"Environmental groups lauded the appointees for their commitment to alternative fuels and fighting global warming. They welcomed them as symbols of science ascendant,", report Jim Tankersley and Tom Hamburger in the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Obama's selections offer reassurance that clean energy and curbing global warming will be as high priority as the Obama-Biden campaign promised in its campaign rhetoric -- along with the restoration of good science, and sound conservation and public health policies.

Secretary of Energy nominee Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. As director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Chu has focused the lab's activities on biofuels, solar power, and global warming. He is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, a collaboration between business and science creating momentum for the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009.

In a 2007 interview with The Washington Post, Chu minced no words on global warming denial:

He said people who said they were uncertain whether climate change is being caused by humans were "reminiscent of the dialogue in the 1950s and '60s on tobacco." (At that time, many argued that there was insufficient evidence linking smoking to cancer.)

I wrote a bit about Lisa Jackson in early December, when her name emerged as Mr. Obama's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Jackson is a chemical engineer who headed New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection for nearly three years -- where she took aim at polluters in low-income cities Camden and Paterson, brought greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energy into the state's energy master plan, and curtailed the state's controversial bear hunt. Prior, she worked for 15-16 years at the federal EPA on hazwaste cleanup as well as other issues.

She has been co-directing the incoming administration's EPA transition team, and will be the first African-American head of the EPA.

Carol Browner, a well-regarded EPA Administrator (and the longest-serving in history) under President Clinton, has been tapped to be the "climate czarina" for the new administration. Prior to joining the Clinton administration, she led the Florida DEP. Formally titled the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, it's a totally new role that reportedly involves coordinating the activities of the Energy, Interior, Agriculture, Transportation, and State departments, and the EPA in terms of response and action on clean energy, energy security and curbing global warming. Ms. Browner has called the Bush White House "the worst environmental administration ever."

Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) is President-elect Obama's pick to head the Department of the Interior. He was Attorney General of Colorado for six years, and also served as director of the state's Department of Natural Resources in the early 1990s. As a fifth-generation Colorado rancher and farmer with public service experience, he is knowledgeble in Western issues that are already policy hot spots, including water resources and public lands conservation. He has backed the goal of generating a quarter of the nation's energy from clean sources by 2025.

Nancy Sutley has been named chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She was a special advisor to Carol Browner at the Clinton EPA, and has held several official roles in California, including natural resource and energy positions. Ms. Sutley is currently the Deputy Mayor for Energy and Environment for the City of Los Angeles, and has been a senior adviser to the Obama transition team on environmental and energy matters.  "Cities are the first responders. If climate change causes more local forest fires, we have to deal with that on a city level," she said in 2007, blogged by Micki Krimmel on Worldchanging. We can’t afford to wait for national or international action"

Never heard of/forgotten about the White House Council on the Environment?  That might be because it's been effectively owned by industry under the Bush administration.

Links to reporting on the new energy-climate-enviro team after the jump...

Florida enviro-advocates are lauding the selection of Carol Browner, reports William Gibson in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "I can't think of anyone in the environmental world who isn't ecstatic about her appointment, particularly down here in Florida," said Doug Young, president of the Broward County Audubon Society. "There will be action on a very fast pace."

"Browner’s power will stem from her position as a symbol of the president’s will to push through climate and energy reforms," notes Plenty Magazine blogger Ben Whitford, "but as such, her influence will be contingent upon the president’s continuing support."

Sen. Ken Salazar "is known as a staunch conservationist and an opponent of developing oil shale on public lands," report John Broder and Andrew Revkin in The New York Times.

"Sutley, in her remarks, pointed out the progress that states like California and cities like Los Angeles...have made on climate and energy issues," blogs Kate Sheppard at Gristmill. "She pledged to help restore the national government's 'rightful role' in leading on these polices."

Steven Chu's "views on climate change would be among the most forceful ever held by a cabinet member," reports Steven Mufson in the Washington Post. In an interview last year, Dr. Chu told the paper "that the cost of electricity was 'anomalously low' in the United States, that a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gases 'is an absolutely non-partisan issue,' and that scientists had come to 'realize that the climate is much more sensitive than we thought.'"

 

 

Image: Sermersuaq (Humboldt) Glacier retreats. "Although the southern part of the terminus showed little change during the period, significant retreat is visible in the northern part, where a fast-flowing ice stream is located...A small amount of thinning or retreat at the terminus can trigger a rapid retreat once the glacier—too large to float—is ungrounded from the shoal. The initial thinning or retreat of a tidewater glacier may result from a warming climate, but the extremely rapid retreat thereafter has as much to do with topography and the laws of physics as it does with the current climate." Source: Nasa Earth Observatory