December 10, 2008
Reuters – … 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.
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