“President Barack Obama intends to nominate air quality expert Gina McCarthy to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Department of Energy as early as this week, according to a source familiar with the process.”
Why are we not surprised?
A few links to introduce them, in case it’s of interest. Moniz spoke at an AAAS lecture on the need for a low-carbon future to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming. Unless nations stabilize global greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at no more than double their pre-industrial levels, he said, climate models suggest that the temperature rise between 1990 and 2100 will most likely be about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit)….
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1104hitachi.shtml
And check out McCarthy’s 2008 presentation while Connecticut’s EPA commissioner on CT’s climate change plan. Significant changes in the way we generate power, transport ourselves etc. are need in order to achieve the reductions needed to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of GHGs, she said. “Climate change is horrible and we’re all going to die unless we change a light bulb.” Time for action is now, she concluded. “We initiated actions to reduce smoking when the causal link between tobacco and cancer was much less certain than the link between anthropgenic GHG emissions and global warming.”
http://cbey.yale.edu/uploads/McCarthy_022108.pdf