Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

My note of November 22 2008 about Barack Obama being the climate change agent has been borne out with the environment team he has nominated, subject to US Senate’s confirmation, when the new administration takes office on January 20. 

Unlike the current president with his failed policies- Bush’s current director of the environment protection agency recently approved seven new coal mines, the new team all have green credentials, and there is not a single coal or oil person among them. It is a refreshing change from the climate change sceptics, who dominated the key Washington roles in energy and environment policy, and who regularly censured government scientific reports on global warming.

Steven Chu, Nobel Prize recipient in 1999 for physics, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and director of the department of energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be the new energy secretary. At Berkeley, Chu led research on storage of solar energy, and on the development of other renewable energy sources.

Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer and former environmental policy official from New Jersey is to head the environmental protection agency. The most important move of all is the appointment of Carol Browning, who headed the EPA under President Clinton as White House energy and environmental policy “tsar.” This role is to co-ordinate the different government agencies involved in energy policy.

Still another appointment is for Nancy Sutley, Los Angeles’s Deputy Mayor for energy and environment as chair of White House council on environmental quality. Another very friendly person to environment is Hilda Solis, Californian congresswoman as Labor Secretary.

As a member of the House of Representative’s environment and commerce committee, and of the House select committee on energy independence and global warming, Hilda Solis’ major legislative achievement was the 2007 “Green Jobs” Act. As part of the overall 2007 energy act, it mandated federal funding for green collar job training, energy efficiency retrofit and service, green building construction, and solar panels.  The Wall Street Journal’s environmental capital blog suggested that the aim is to create three million new green jobs over the next decade.

It will be interesting to see how well the new green team performs. A lot is going to rest on their shoulders.