Energy and Environment Team Shapes Up

By Ben Trott

The New York Times report that transition staffers have announced Obama is set to nominate Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Nancy Sutley as White House Council on Environmental Quality. Obama's formal announcement of these and other energy and environment nominations are said to be scheduled for next week and will follow the closure of the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland.

Chu won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 and will be responsible not only for domestic energy policy, but also the maintenance and development of the US' nuclear weapons. Liberal blogger Michael Yglesias is pleased with the choice and has posted a YouTube video of a talk given by Chu on climate change. Sutley is currently Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles. According to a Politico article, she was a member of Hillary Clinton's California Lesbian, Gay and Transgender presidential steering committee.

According to the Times article,

'Mr. Obama also appears ready to name Carol M. Browner, the E.P.A. administrator under President Bill Clinton, as the top White House official on climate and energy policy and Lisa P. Jackson, New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection, as the head of the E.P.A.'

While we are on the issue of climate change...

Some of you might be interested in taking a look at the following document. It's called '20 Theses on Green Capitalism' and discusses the connection between the current world economic crisis (which brings with it the end of the hegemony of neoliberalism) and emergent spaces of accumulation and forms of political regulation (the 'Green New Deal') being discussed not only by some of those connected to Obama, but numerous green parties around the world. The text discusses the limits of what it calls 'green capitalism' from both a social and ecological perspective and offers up some ideas as to the ways in which the left could relate to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next year. The text was written by Tadzio Mueller (one of the Turbulence editors) and Alexis Passadakis (from attac Germany). It was distributed amongst NGOs and others attending the ongoing meeting in Poznań.