Now that US President-elect Barack Obama has picked what some are calling the “green dream team”, National Geographic asks environmental leaders what they think the administration’s greening priorities should be. Their wish list: building a green economy, climate legislation in the first 100 days and a focus on water. And that’s just for starters. Read more here.
The new team includes former US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Carol Browner, who’ll be in charge of a special council on climate, environment, and energy — the “climate tsarina”; former New Jersey governor’s chief of staff, Lisa Jackson, who will head up EPA; and Steven Chu, “a Nobel laureate in physics who was awarded the cabinet-level position of energy secretary. Chu has called coal one of his ‘worst nightmares.’”
The appointment of Chu is testament to Obama’s pragmatism, writes David Roberts on Grist. As one commenter at The American Conservative observed, Chu is an “actual expert scientist in charge of energy research and development”.
More than that though, writes Roberts, Chu is a “green” progressive environmentalist. And that’s because he “actually knows science.” In other words, “given the state of the world today a scientific temperament leads inexorably to progressive environmentalism.”
Browner’s old boss, one Al Gore — Browner was Gore’s senior legislative aide for two years before leaving to head up the Department of Environmental Regulation in Flordia – will host a “green ball” on January 19, the night before Obama takes office, to celebrate the inauguration of the new green economy, notes Rowan Hooper on The New Scientist.
And there’s an interesting aside:
You can’t move for green balls in DC these days. A couple of days before Al Gore’s bash, at the Andrew W. Mellon auditorium, there’s another one, this time with 100% organic catering (though whether that makes it “greener” than conventional food is debatable), and the footprint of the ball will be offset with wind power and carbon credits (though the effectiveness of carbon offsetting is doubtful too).
Let’s hope people won’t fly their on their private jets…
One Comment
The appointment of Steven Chu is a very exciting prospect for clean energy worldwide.
He has described coal as his “worst nightmare” and says that the so-called clean coal solution is not likely to be feasible due to the economic challenge of storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/12/11/steven-chu-coal-is-my-worst-nightmare/
At the risk of perpetuating this meme, I’m aboard the Chu-Chu train!