Obama to name Nobel physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary
More names leaking out for the Cabinet of Barack Obama and his White House team.
Our conscientious colleague Jim Tankersley over at the Swamp has just reported that at a news conference Thursday in Chicago the president-elect will name Steven Chu, the 1997 Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Berkeley, as his secretary of Energy.
He'll also announce the selection of Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson is New Jersey's former environmental commissioner.
Additionally, Tankersley says, Florida's Carol Browner, yet another familiar face from the Clinton administration, will join Obama's White House advisor's list.
-- Andrew Malcolm
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Photo: Associated Press
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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What an outrage. He should have picked an oil man or former lobbyist from a coal company. :)
Instead we get competence and sincerity.
Posted by: Stephen C. | December 10, 2008 at 06:41 PM
It's good that Chu is a scientist. But his alternative energy research initiatives are funded by British Petroleum through a controversial $500 million dollar contract with UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The emphasis at the BP-created initiative is on biofuels, nanotechnology and synthetic biology - and tends to involve "solar energy" in the sense of using biomass to produce fuels. Not an inherently evil enterprise, of course, but hardly free of distortion by economic interests. So, not to rain on everyone's parade, but just to add a little perspective. Super-smart, super-qualified guy - but no Amory Lovins.
Posted by: Janice Silverman | December 10, 2008 at 07:19 PM