The Institutional Investor Guide to Modern Energy - (Page 12) The Institutional Investor Guide to Modern Energy The Mandate Washington for Modern Energy ergy. He believes in fighting the complexities of global warming and has said that the lack of high-voltage transmission lines is the biggest obstacle to expanding the use of wind power. To head a new office that will coordinate policy on energy and climate change, President Obama selected Carol M. Browner, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under former President Bill Clinton. Already dubbed the energy czar, Browner won battles with other top officials to tighten air pollution limits and cut emissions from cars and trucks. The EPA now will be led President Obama and Energy by Lisa P. Jackson, who served at Secretary Steven Chu the agency’s headquarters for a short time during the 1980s and most recently was New Jersey’s top environmental officer. She was known for generally cooperating with industry and streamlining the permitting processes. Moving Toward Kyoto And in a sign of how the Obama administration will weave environmental issues like climate change into its international agenda, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton expects to engage the Chinese on ways to limit climate-changing industrial emissions. China recently overtook the United States as the world’s top polluter and neither country is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. An international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol’s major feature is the creation of binding targets for greenhouse reductions for 37 industrialized nations and the European Union. The pact was adopted in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997 and the first phase of mandatory emissions reductions runs from 2008 to 2012. President Obama has pledged to reverse the resistance of the former Bush administration to action on climate change, and his representatives were visible during a December 2008 gathering of about 100 environment ministers in Poznan, Poland. That meet- A rmed with a new team of environmentally-aware leaders at the helm of the energy and environment departments, and with plans to double the generating capacity of wind energy over the next three years, the Obama administration is poised to give the flagging wind energy sector a needed boost. Washington observers say it’s not only the change in personalities and experience that bodes well for the environment and renewable energy sectors, as the so-called “green dream team” begins to guide the country’s environmental and energy policies over the next four years. “It’s the style. There’s a change in the political process,” says Keith Martin, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of global law firm Chadbourne & Parke. “This administration has a program. It’s a sea change over what has happened in the past eight years.” The Green Team Emerges To help him curb the damaging impact of climate change, break U.S. dependence on foreign oil and invest billions of dollars in an energy economy that will rely on renewable sources such as wind, President Barack Obama has tapped two veterans of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a Washington outsider respected in the U.S. scientific community for his judgment on public policy issues. Steven Chu will serve as Secretary of Energy and help implement a sprawling energy bill due out sometime this Spring. A physicist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1997, Chu overhauled the energy department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California while focusing on energy efficiency and renewable en12 • Institutional Investor Guide to Modern Energy • March 2009 The Obama administration plans to double the generating capacity of wind energy over the next three years. This Special Report was prepared by the Special Projects Department of Institutional Investor.
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