Obama Picks Team to Guide Energy, Environment Agendas

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and STEPHEN POWER
President-elect Barack Obama has picked a Nobel laureate, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and officials from New Jersey and Los Angeles to run his energy and environmental initiatives, putting heft into roles likely to dominate domestic policy in his first years in office.
Associated Press

Steven Chu, 60 years old, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, will be nominated as secretary of energy, Democratic officials said Wednesday. Carol Browner, 52, who headed the EPA under President Bill Clinton, will coordinate energy policy from the White House in a new "energy czar" role.
Lisa Jackson, 46, a former environmental-policy official in New Jersey, will be EPA administrator, and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley is to be named chairwoman of the president's Council on Environmental Quality.
With the appointments and nominations, Mr. Obama is signaling his seriousness about combating climate change by curbing emissions of greenhouse gases and spending heavily to boost energy efficiency and promote renewable energy.

Obama's Advisers
President-elect Barack Obama has named his choices for some key jobs in his administration, and other announcements are expected soon.
He also appears to be moving to the left with some of his new choices -- at least on business issues -- after his early cabinet choices were widely seen as centrist and moderate. "What you've got are people who are committed to moving forward with regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which we believe is a huge mistake," William Kovacs, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview. "If we're embarking on a new infrastructure program that's going to involve building a lot of roads and bridges, the last thing we want to do is hold it up with CO2 regulations."
The choice of Ms. Browner is particularly significant because the new post is expected to coordinate the many federal agencies that have a hand in energy policy. Ms. Browner has said publicly that the next president's priority should be to direct the EPA to reconsider the decision by President George W. Bush's current administrator, Stephen Johnson, to deny California a waiver from the Clean Air Act that would have allowed the state to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles.
The auto industry and the United Auto Workers union have aggressively opposed such state-level controls.
Ms. Browner also has called for letting the EPA reconsider whether greenhouse gases "endanger" health or welfare -- the legal trigger for regulating them under the Clean Air Act. The EPA last year tentatively concluded that such emissions do endanger welfare, but later opted not to make the finding official. Business groups are lobbying the agency not to try to regulate such emissions under the Clean Air Act, warning it will lead to a cascade of unintended regulatory consequences covering bakeries, breweries, schools, places of worship and other relatively small emitters.

Carol Browner, head of the EPA under President Clinton, was picked to be 'energy czar' in the Obama White House.

Ms. Jackson -- currently chief of staff to Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey -- previously was commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A New Orleans native, she has led New Jersey's efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles and other sources. She is the third African-American nominated for a cabinet post, following United Nations Ambassador-nominee Susan Rice and Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder.
Officials familiar with the selections say Mr. Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War. Ms. Browner will coordinate renewable energy and energy efficiency policy from the White House, two areas that will feature prominently in a half-trillion-dollar economic-stimulus plan the new president hopes to sign into law as soon as he is inaugurated.
Mr. Chu brings sterling credentials as a scientist to a job that often has gone to former politicians. As an Asian-American, he also brings more ethnic diversity. He would inherit an agency that, despite its name, has little power to set energy policy, compared with agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates air quality, and the Transportation Department, which sets automobile fuel-efficiency standards.—Ian Talley and Neil King Jr. contributed to this article.
Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com and Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com