The Obama Green Team. By Steven Mufson and Philip Rucker, WashPost, December 14, 2008. "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, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said Wednesday. Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, EPA administrator for eight years under President Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama's transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group. Obama has also settled on Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Job Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to head the EPA. Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The appointments suggest that Obama plans to make a strong push for measures to combat global warming and programs to support energy innovation.
"Steven Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the 'development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.' But, in an interview last year... Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. 'I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed,' he said. 'Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation'... He sought and won the top job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, leaving the Stanford University faculty to focus on energy issues. Chu... has been, in the words of his Web site, on a 'mission' to make the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 'the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.'
"Carol Browner, a lawyer and native of Florida, was legislative director for then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) and later head of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection under then-Gov. Lawton Chiles (D). As the top administrator at the EPA under Clinton, she pushed for tough air-pollution standards that the agency defended against industry lawsuits all the way to the Supreme Court, where the EPA prevailed. In her new role, Browner will need her legislative and administrative experience in a job that will cover everything from climate change to energy policy.
An African American native of New Orleans, Lisa Jackson grew up in the Ninth Ward, the poor and largely black neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Jackson's mother, stepfather and godmother fled the city as the 2005 storm approached. A few months later, in her swearing-in speech as New Jersey's environmental chief, Jackson said the devastation wrought by Katrina put her environmental work in a new perspective... Environmentalists in New Jersey describe Jackson as a pragmatic but consistent ally who has pushed Corzine to adopt a greener stance during his time in office. In the summer of 2007, Corzine signed the Global Warming Response Act, an ambitious climate measure that pledges to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050... Democrats familiar with the incoming administration's thinking say Jackson's administrative skills were considered important for an agency they see as in 'disarray' because of the Bush administration's record on environmental issues. Before moving to New Jersey, Jackson worked for the EPA in Washington.
Nancy Sutley, who has a long record on environmental and natural resources policy, will head a group that has a very limited regulatory role and a small staff. But from its offices on Lafayette Square near the White House, Sutley could be a player in shaping the new administration's policies on climate change and the environment. Sutley, a top aide to Browner at the EPA dealing with air-pollution issues, supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. She previously served in California as an energy adviser to then-Gov. Gray Davis (D). Sutley, whose mother is from Argentina, identifies herself as a Latina. She was a member of the California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender steering committee of Clinton's campaign and is the first openly gay nominee for a top job in the Obama administration."
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