In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristoff addressed President-elect Obama’s soon-to-be-made choice for Secretary of Agriculture, asking whether or not a “U.S. Department of Food” would better reflect the change our country needs to see realized in our food policy.
Kristoff notes that “a Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.” As such, what we need now “is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed ‘secretary of food.’”
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The Obama Administration’s team to lead the Environmental Protections Agency and Department of Energy appears to be in place. Officials close to the Obama transition team announced that Lisa Jackson, the former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and current Chief of Staff for NJ Governor Jon Corzine, is expected to be named to the EPA’s top position in the coming weeks. Jackson, who spent 13 years at EPA, would be the first African American to serve as EPA Administrator.
Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, is in line to be nominated as Obama’s Energy Secretary. As noted by the New York Times, Dr. Chu will play a central role in directing the research and development of alternative energy sources needed to replace fossil fuels in a era of constrained carbon emissions. A proponent for controlling greenhouse gas emission, Chu’s research has included work on biofuels and solar energy.
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Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort. In the two and half decades since the landmark Bay action agenda was agreed to, Maryland’s watershed clean up initiative has received mixed reviews on its success. As the Washington Post noted, “Despite a quarter-century of work, the bay’s biggest problem — pollution-driven “dead zones,” where fish and crabs can’t breathe — has not significantly improved.” Yet there are important environmental improvement initiatives on the way.
The Post’s editorial page yesterday hailed Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s efforts to protect the Chesapeake by limiting further development along the Maryland shoreline and enacting new measures limiting agriculture runoff from chicken farms, the leading source of harmful nitrogen and phosphorous found in the Bay.
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