Hobart Mercury
Wednesday 17/12/2008 Page: 16
US President-elect Barack Obama has named an environmental and energy team that he said signalled his determination to tackle global warming quickly and develop alternative forms of energy. He vowed to "move beyond our oil addiction and create a new hybrid economy". Obama selected Nobel Prizewinning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner, a confidante of former vice-president Al Gore to lead a White House council on energy and climate.
Chu, a Chinese-American, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and is a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources. He shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997. Obama made it clear he planned to take energy policy in a sharply different direction from President George W.
Bush, promising aggressive moves to tackle global warming and support research into other energy sources such as wind, solar and biofuels. "America must develop new forms of energy and new ways of using it," he said. The dangers of being too heavily dependent on foreign oil "are eclipsed only by the long-terns threat of climate change which. unless we act, will lead to drought and famine abroad, devastating weather patterns and terrible storms on our shores, and disappearance of our coastline at home", he said.
Obama rejected the notion that economic development and environmental protection could not go hand in hand. "We can spark the dynamism of our economy through a long-term investment in renewable energy that will give life to new businesses and industries with good jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced," he said.
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