Barack

The United States and Canada teamed up last Thursday as President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the opening of a “Clean Energy Dialogue” aimed at developing energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change.

The United States and Canada teamed up on Thursday as President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the opening of a “Clean Energy Dialogue” aimed at developing energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change.

Even before Barack Obama was elected, the assumption was that whoever was elected president, renewable energy and the green economy would get a huge boost. That still appears likely, but the results — at least short term — are less clear, according to some early assessments.

One of the first tasks facing President-elect Barack Obama’s energy and environmental team, which he unveiled Monday in Chicago, will be to review the issue of whether to reinstate the moratorium on oil and natural gas development in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), Obama said.

Forming what one pro-environmental group called a “green dream team,” President-elect Barack Obama has settled on Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, to be secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) in his administration, and has selected experienced regulators to oversee three other offices dealing with energy, environmental and climate-change issues, Washington sources said. No formal announcement, however, had been issued last week.

President-elect Barack Obama has picked Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, to be secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) in his administration, and has selected experienced regulators to oversee three other offices dealing with energy, environmental and climate-change issues, Washington sources said. No formal announcement had been issued Thursday morning.

President-elect Barack Obama Thursday said that neither he nor his office had any involvement in Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s alleged “pay-to-play” conspiracy to cash in on his authority to appoint a successor to fill Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to pick Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley as chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), Washington sources said Wednesday.

President-elect Barack Obama may put his stamp on energy policy early when he takes office in January by using his executive authority to block new oil and natural gas leases on environmentally sensitive lands in Utah, according to a published report.