Citizen Power

Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s first appointment for Energy Secretary, sent workers back to Ground Zero after 9/11, when it was still steaming with toxins and carcinogens. Those rescue workers and clean-up crews are now getting sick, some of them with permanent lung ailments and cancers, and some have even died. Whitman has the chutzpah to dismiss the new Energy Secretary, to be announced next week, Steven Chu, as someone who won’t be effective and probably won’t do well in his new job. What nerve! George Bush has been a disaster for the environment, and for at least some of those years, Whitman stood by and watched, or was actually complicit in the environmental trashing, such as giving her support to the mis-named Clear Skies Initiative.

Chu is an actual scientist, a physicist, and won a Nobel Prize for Physics. He’s not a politician like Whitman. He’s obviously light-years ahead of Whitman in brains and accomplishments, and he has probably not caused the deaths of anyone, unlike Whitman. Whitman should be investigated for manslaughter, in my opinion. Here’s more on the upcoming appointment from Climateprogress.org

You might think someone who had utterly failed in his or her job might have learned enough humility to avoid criticizing others attempting a similar job. But not Bush’s first EPA administrator, Christie Todd Whitman, who told MSNBC:

As for Steven Chu, Obama’s apparent choice to head up the Energy Department, Whitman expressed concerns over his management experience.

“He’s certainly going to know how to analyze the issues,” she said. “He’s going to know the feasibility as he looks at them from a scientific point of view. But it’s going to be the ‘Can they be implemented?’ part of it that will be a challenge for him.

“It’s a big leap from the academic world to the administrative world.”

Let’s see. Whitman’s effort to get Bush to keep his campaign promise for regulating greenhouse gas emissions was crushed in a humiliating fashion by Dick Cheney (see here) — and Cheney in general ran circles around her on all environmental matters (see here), even though she presumably had lots of administrative experience as New Jersey Governor.

And she has the gall to diss a Nobel Prize winner who isn’t even in the “academic world.” He has been running a national laboratory that is actually part of the DOE family. So he has been in the administrative world for many years now.

Plus he has a friggin’ Nobel Prize, and not for theoretical work, but for experimental physics. Since then, he has been focused on organizing team-based applied research to address the climate problem.

Somehow, I think he’ll be more successful than she was (see “A Nobelist for Energy Secretary who gets both climate and energy efficiency?“).

I think Chu will be great at the job and might actually advance us down the road of solving climate change, instead of increasing it, as Whitman did. At least he’ll be more scientific about his approach to it. At the very least, Chu will be a good science adviser to President Obama, who has told us over and over again that he is ready, wiling and able to fight climate change. He told us after his meeting last week with Al Gore that climate change is real, and the time for delay is over. That was music to the ears of many scientists and environmentalists across the world. You can find more information on Steven Chu’s background here

The Poznan Climate conference is wrapping up this week and I will have more information on it coming up soon. Read more at ClimateProgress.org