Obama Announces (Controversial) EPA Pick

by Eric Umansky
ProPublica, Dec. 15, 2008, 5:29 p.m.

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President-elect Obama has just announced his “green team.” As expected, Obama’s pick to head the EPA is Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Our environmental reporter Joaquin Sapien published a story today detailing Jackson’s mixed record in New Jersey:

Jackson’s critics, including a senior scientist who quit her department in frustration, say she has been too close to industry, withheld information from the public and fallen well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program.

The most important thing we are doing is developing a new ranking system to prioritize sites so that we focus our resources on the worst cases, those that present the greatest risk to public health and the environment,” said Jackson in state senate testimony (PDF) in October 2006.

But two years into Jackson’s tenure, the new system for cleaning up New Jersey’s 16,000 abandoned toxic waste sites still hasn’t been deployed.

Check out the whole story.

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