Obama Rounds Out Cabinet With EPA, Energy picks
President Barack Obama announced his nominees to lead a new U.S. push to tackle climate change on Monday, choosing an air quality expert to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a nuclear physicist to head the Department of Energy.
Obama selected agency veteran Gina McCarthy to replace Lisa Jackson as EPA administrator and scientist Ernest Moniz from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take over for Steven Chu as Energy secretary.
Obama also announced his choice to lead the White House budget office—Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the Walmart Foundation, a charitable group with ties to giant retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
McCarthy and Moniz Round out the team Obama hopes will carry out his second term energy agenda. They join Sally Jewell, nominated last month to run the Interior Department.
The trio will be at the forefront of divisive issues surrounding the extent of U.S. natural gas exports and a possible move into crude oil exports, hydraulic fracturing and climate change.
The president, whose effort to establish a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions failed in his first term, prominently raised the issue of global warming in his Inaugural and State of the Union addresses earlier this year.
He urged Congress to embrace a market-based mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or face executive action from his administration to achieve the same goal.
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Source: Reuters