Obama chooses moderate to head EPA

December 17, 3:57 PMDC Corporate Ethics ExaminerJim Cunningham

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Lisa Jackson to head EPA

Barack Obama chose Lisa Jackson to head up the Environmental Protection Agency – a person who, according to reports, appears to be something of a moderate, willing to find compromises between industry and environ-mentalists.
 

"Lisa is not one for doing things for political fanfare-making," Mottola said. "If the research suggests this is not the right thing to do, she'll say this is not the right thing to do. You will not see science buried under Lisa Jackson.”

While a majority of environmentalists support the pick, some are not so sure. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), Jackson supports some of the same disastrous policies of the Bush administration. Namely, industry-friendly cap-and-trade programs for carbon dioxide emissions and placing private contractors in charge of toxic cleanups. I was most disappointed to hear of her support for “clean coal”. (As if there were such a thing.)

The issue of toxic waste site clean up is the focus of most criticism.

She identified this as her highest priority, but she never followed through… this failure to perform risk-based ranking for determining cleanup priorities has contributed to the belated discovery of contaminated schools and day care centers.”

Even the current head of the EPA criticized her this summer for not cleaning up waste sites fast enough ”and accused the state’s environmental agency of going easy on polluters and failing to seek necessary support from the EPA” That’s pretty bad coming from Bush’s EPA.

"In our experience, Lisa Jackson is cut out of the same professional cloth as the current administrator, Stephen Johnson ? a pliant technocrat who will follow orders," Ruch added. "If past is prologue, one cannot reasonably expect meaningful change if she is appointed to lead EPA.”

Many of the problems we’ve seen with Bush’s environmental policy have stemmed through the manipulation of data, suppression of science and the silencing of views that contradict their ideology.  A survey taken by 1600 current and past EPA staff scientists showed they’d been pressured to skew their findings, with 40% reporting that the phenomenon has increased during the Bush years.  Lisa Jackson’s critics, including some who had resigned - refusing to work under her - express concerns about transparency and the continuation of such interference, claiming that Jackson ”withheld information from the public” and fell “well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state's beleaguered toxic waste program.”

However, Barack Obama has promised that his administration will ”value science” and environmentalists have widely cheered the formation of Obama’s energy and environmental team. Obama has promised to place American in a leadership position on renewable energy.

"The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he [Obama] said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. "We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

For this, and more, Jackson has her credentials. She is a former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner who worked at the federal agency for 16 years and holds chemical engineering degrees from Tulane University and Princeton University. While in her position at the NJ EPA, she fought to triple wind power for New Jersey and helped halt the building of new coal plants. She helped develop the Northeastern states Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and served as Vice President of its Executive Board. Obama’s transition team, in a press release, reminds us that Jackson has also focused on water issues, including expanding protections for surface waters that serve as sources of drinking water and habitat for endangered species.

She is originally from New Orleans, growing up in the Lower 9th Ward. Lisa Jackson will be the first African American to lead the EPA.



Watch: Obama introduced his Energy/Environment team on Monday.