Top Environment Appointments Seen for Browner, NJ’s Jackson
By Sean McNally and Eric Miller, Staff Reporters
This story appears in the Dec. 15 print edition of Transport Topics.
President-elect Barack Obama reportedly has settled on an experienced team to lead in environmental and energy policy areas, including two women reasonably well-known in trucking circles.
Lisa Jackson, the former top environmental regulator in New Jersey, is slated to be named to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, sources reported last week, while Carol Browner, former President Clinton’s EPA administrator who established federal standards to drastically cut heavy-duty truck emissions, has been selected as the top White House official on climate and energy, these sources said.
Obama also is expected to name Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be energy secretary, and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
A formal announcement on the selections was expected soon. Jackson and Chu must be approved by the Senate.
Jackson, who is chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), also served in the EPA under President Clinton.
Gail Toth, executive director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, said her group has had a good relationship with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
“Under her . . . the state of New Jersey did seek and receive several million dollars from EPA for clean-air programs, and they did give [NJMTA] $750,000 of that for incentives to purchase [auxiliary power units] and bunk heaters on trucks,” Toth said.
Toth added that under Jackson’s leadership, the regulatory agency had “never come after us.”
At the time of the 2006 grant announcement, Jackson said “diesel pollution is a serious threat to public health affecting children and adults. By taking action to control pollution from trucks and buses, we can reduce the amount of harmful soot in the air that we breathe.”
In a statement, American Trucking Associations spokesman Clayton Boyce said the federation looks “forward to working with Commissioner Jackson as she takes on her new role at a time when the trucking industry is implementing environmental strategies that will progress us toward a more sustainable future and move the nation’s goods in a safe, efficient and environmentally sound manner.”
As for Browner, she’s “the one who set the tough emissions standards for on-road diesel trucks back in 2000,” Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, told Transport Topics.
O’Donnell said that Browner, who headed EPA from 1993-2001, was well-regarded by health and environmental groups when she ran EPA. “She was perceived as a real champion and is someone not willing to run away from a fight,” O’Donnell said.
Sutley, Obama’s choice to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, currently oversees energy and environmental issues in Los Angeles.
“She is an experienced, accomplished and highly regarded expert on environmental policy who has worked on these issues in the nation’s largest city, in the nation’s largest state and on complex national issues at the EPA,” said Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, in a Dec. 11 statement.
During the Clinton administration, Sutley served as a senior EPA adviser on air quality and energy issues.
Chu, the likely energy secretary-designate and an advocate for alternative energy and biofuels to stem global warming, is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. He has been director of the Lawrence Berkley laboratory since 2004.
The lab is part of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“He has been relentless about addressing the technical challenges of renewable energy in a deep way,” said Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of UC/Berkeley. “We will now have an energy policy that can mean the U.S. will have a chance of obtaining energy self-sufficiency through new technology.”
