Obama nominates heads of EPA and Energy

Petroleum News

On March 4 President Obama announced his nominations for key cabinet positions: Gina McCarthy to replace Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and Ernest Moniz to replace Steven Chu as secretary of energy.

McCarthy has been running the air pollution division of EPA during Obama’s first four years as president and people have been commenting that her nomination appears to re-enforce Obama’s stated intent to focus on global warming as part of his environmental agenda during his second term in office. When announcing his nomination of McCarthy, Obama said that, as “a top environmental official in Massachusetts and Connecticut,” McCarthy had “helped design programs to expand energy efficiency and promote renewable energy.”

Moniz, a nuclear physicist, is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Obama said that Moniz had served as under-secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration and since then has directed MIT’s Energy Initiative, a program that “brings together prominent thinkers and energy companies to develop the technologies that can lead us to more energy independence and also to new jobs.”

—Alan Bailey