Steven Chu Nominated for Energy Secretary
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Obama starts filling his energy and environmental team, from Reuters.
Wed Dec 10, 2008 5:39pm EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama will appoint former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner to a new position coordinating White House policy on energy, climate and environmental issues, a Democratic aide said on Wednesday.
Obama will also nominate Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as his energy secretary, a Democratic Party official said.
Obama, who has said energy and environment matters would be important to his administration, is closing in on choosing the team that will oversee them.
He wants to spend billions of dollars to promote alternative energy sources and create millions of green energy jobs.
Earlier, a Democratic official said Obama had chosen Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles, to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Browner, a principal at global strategy firm The Albright Group LLC, heads Obama’s advisory team on energy and the environment. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, she became the longest-serving EPA administrator.
Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is a former chairman of the physics department at Stanford University in California and head of the electronics research laboratory at Bell Labs.
The Lawrence Berkeley website said Chu was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change and had guided the laboratory on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.
A spokesman for the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory said of Chu’s selection: “We don’t really know about it. Whatever contacts the Obama people have had with Steve Chu, he kept it offline from the laboratory.”
Chu could not be reached for comment. He is traveling in Asia and Europe and will be back at work on Monday.
(Writing by Tom Doggett and John Whitesides; Editing by David Alexander and Peter Cooney)
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jaehwan
2:27 am | Dec 11, 2008The dude is a Nobel Prize winning physicist. It’s great that the new administration is putting a scientist in charge of energy, a phenomenon which is based very much on…well..science. It’s going to be very relevant as we all work to fight global warming and pollution, and it looks like the fight against global warming is exactly where Chu finds his passion. Good pick.
papa2hapa
8:57 pm | Dec 12, 2008I agree, this man is brilliant. Two major Asian American players in the new cabinet make for an interesting administration. Perhaps Chu can help protect ourselves from ourselves.