WASHINGTON — President- elect Barack Obama on Monday named an environmental and energy team that he said signaled his determination to tackle global warming quickly and develop alternative forms of energy.
He vowed to “move beyond our oil addiction and create a new hybrid economy.”
Obama selected Nobel Prize- winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Browner headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration.
Chu, 60, is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and is a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources.
The selection of Chu, a Chinese-American who shared a Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, received widespread praise on Capitol Hill.
“His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action,” Obama said at a news conference in Chicago.
Obama also announced his choice of Lisa Jackson, former head of New Jersey’s environmental agency, as EPA administrator and Nancy Sutley, a deputy Los Angeles mayor, as chair of the White House Council on Environment Quality.
Obama made clear he plans take energy policy in a sharply different direction from President George W. Bush, promising aggressive moves to address global warming and pump money and support into research into alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and biofuels.
Obama said the dangers of being too heavily dependent on foreign oil “are eclipsed only by the long-term threat of climate change, which unless we act will lead to drought and famine abroad, devastating weather patterns and terrible storms on our shores, and disappearance of our coastline at home.”
