President-elect Barack Obama was set Monday to name his energy and environmental chiefs and vow a new dawn for US leadership against climate change after eight years of Republican "denial."
After talks with his national security team, Obama was to name more cabinet lieutenants at a news conference where he was also facing questions over Illinois's scandal-hit governor.
Obama's transition team said the press conference in Chicago would "discuss the nation's energy and environmental future."
Obama was reportedly to nominate Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary, placing the expert in renewable energy on the frontlines of climate change policy.
Joining Chu in Obama's new team was expected to be Lisa Jackson, chief of staff to the New Jersey governor, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Obama was further to announce that Carol Browner, who served as EPA administrator under president Bill Clinton, would become the White House "climate czar" overseeing the battle against global warming.
And Nancy Sutley, a senior adviser to Obama's transition team, was expected to be named chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Last week, after a meeting with former vice president Al Gore, Obama said the "time for denial is over" on climate change.
"We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way," he said.
"That is what I intend my administration to do."
Despite an economic recession hitting the United States, Obama is promising to unwind the environmental policies of President George W. Bush, whose refusal to ratify the Kyoto pact on climate change disgusted green campaigners.
Chu, a scientist and Washington outsider, won his Nobel in 1997. Since 2004 he has been running the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, which has a budget of 645 million dollars and a staff of 4,000.
As energy secretary, Chu is expected to lead Obama's ambitious agenda to generate 2.5 million new jobs through "green" and new technologies aimed at making America more energy efficient and less reliant on foreign oil.
Jackson, who trained as a chemical engineer, is likely to restore teeth to the EPA, which during the Bush administration saw its funding slashed, scientific findings censored, and enforcement efforts downplayed.
In one notorious example, the EPA backed off a finding that said climate change was a risk to public welfare. The findings would have led to the nation's first mandatory global-warming regulations.
Despite the costs to industry as the US recession bites, Obama has promised to set caps on domestic emissions of greenhouse gases and reposition the United States in the vanguard of international action.
At UN climate talks in Poland last week, many delegates were delighted at the passing of the Bush administration as the international community attempts to craft a successor to the Kyoto pact.
"This climate conference will go down in history as the retirement party for the Flat Earth Society of the United States of America," said Edward Markey, the senior lawmaker on climate change issues in the House of Representatives.
But analysts also warn against over-expectations. Obama's room to manoeuvre may be limited by the US recession and also the limited time before the deadline of December 2009 for completing a new UN climate treaty.
Source - terra daily
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Perhaps, at some convenient stage, (no rush) Obama might listen to some scientists instead of politicians. All the IPCC models have failed to match real data in the past 11 years of cooling, despite increasing CO2 levels. There is no hard evidence to support the hypothesis that increased CO2 concentrations is significantly changing our climate, but plenty to the contrary.
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