The rumors first sprouted last week.
President-elect Barack Obama confirmed them Monday when he officially introduced his green team of top energy and environment officials at a press conference in Chicago, CNET’s Martin LaMonica reports.
The team:
– Steven Chu, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was named Secretary of Energy.
– Lisa P. Jackson, former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, who has drawn praise and criticism for her time there, has been tapped to serve as the new administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
– Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor for energy and environment for Los Angeles, was appointed as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
– Carol M. Browner, EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton, has been nominated for a new position: assistant to the president for energy and climate change (aka “energy czar”).
– Still to be formally announced is Obama’s pick for Secretary of the Interior, though unnamed sources say Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) will get the nod, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Obama said his picks show how serious his administration is about supporting clean energy technologies, which will benefit the economy and the environment.
"One of the key points that I want to make at this press conference and I will repeat again and again during the course of my presidency is there is not a contradiction between economic growth and sound environmental practices," the president-elect said.
"I think that the future of innovation and technology is going to be what drives our economy into the future. And the energy economy is going to be part of what creates the millions of jobs we need," he said.
Placing the U.S. economy at the head of the green-tech revolution will be no easy feat, however. And plenty of challenges remain.
To start, the renewable energy industry has been hit hard in recent months by falling oil prices and the growing financial crisis.
Worse, many scientists say time is running out to act on global warming, and tackling climate change today is going to be much tougher than it would have been years ago.