WASHINGTON—President-elect Barack Obama has his green team. And for environmentalists, it is a dream team.
Obama on Monday selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Lisa Jackson, the former head of New Jersey’s environmental department, to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, will lead a White House council on energy and climate. Browner, the longest-serving EPA administrator in history, headed the agency during the Clinton administration’s two terms.
And while it wasn’t officially announced, a transition official said Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado was Obama’s choice to run the Interior Department, which oversees oil and gas drilling on public lands and manages the nation’s parks and wildlife refuges. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting Obama’s announcement.
The president-elect said he picked a team that signaled his determination to tackle global warming quickly and develop alternative forms of energy, vowing to “move beyond our oil addiction and create a new hybrid economy.”
Salazar would probably bring an approach that Obama has said he wants—balancing the protection of natural resources while tapping the nation’s energy potential.
Salazar, 53, has opposed drilling in the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as well as the Bush administration’s efforts to set up a program for leasing Western lands for oil shale development. It will be up to the Obama administration whether to go ahead with leasing.
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.
Obama also announced that Nancy Sutley, a deputy Los Angeles mayor, would lead the White House Council on Environment Quality.
The president-elect 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.
“America must develop new forms of energy and new ways of using it,” he said.
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.”
He rejected the notion that economic development and environmental protection cannot go hand in hand.
“We can spark the dynamism of our economy through a long-term investment in renewable energy that will give life to new businesses and industries with good jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced,” he said.
Congressional Democrats and environmental groups praised the selections.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., referred to the picks as “an extraordinary ‘green team’ that is more than equal to the enormous task of protecting our planet, launching a clean energy economy with millions of green jobs, and providing a more affordable and secure energy future.”
Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said, “This team is a new partnership for the environment in the federal government, one that can work with Congress to make quick progress on global warming.”
Even industry groups were impressed by the team’s credentials.
John Engler, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a statement that Obama’s announcements reflected “his continuing determination to bring highly qualified people into his administration.”
Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, said in a statement that he hoped the team balances their environmental zeal with economic realities.
Calling Browner “a proud liberal” and saying Chu has made “troubling comments,” Inhofe said his “concern is Team Obama may be now ready and willing to restrict realistic energy supplies and drive energy prices higher.”
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Associated Press writer Liz Sidoti contributed to this report.
