Obama presents energy-climate team

WASHINGTON -- As President-elect Barack Obama announced on Monday his choices for top officials to tackle global warming, the challenges they face were highlighted by the lack of progress at climate talks that ended last week.

Representatives of nearly 200 nations met in Poland to work on a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that limited emissions of global-warming gases. Little headway was made, and talks ended Saturday.

On Monday, Obama vowed to try to change that.

"America will lead not just at the negotiating table — we will lead, as we always have, through innovation and discovery," he said at a news conference in which he announced picks for energy and environmental posts.

The nominees are:

• Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, for Energy secretary.

• Lisa Jackson, who headed New Jersey's environmental agency, for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief.

• Nancy Sutley, Los Angeles' deputy mayor for environment, to be chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

• Carol Browner, President Clinton's EPA chief, to coordinate climate and energy issues across the government.

"What the world does in the coming decade will have enormous consequences that will last for centuries," said Chu, who runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Expectations are high, both in the U.S. and around the world. At the climate talks, participants had studied the speech Obama gave to state officials just after Election Day about the need to act on global warming, said Robert Stavins, a Harvard University economist who attended the meeting.

Many nations want the United States to "play a leadership role" in early 2009, Stavins said. "It's not a lot of time for the new administration to come up to speed." Adding urgency, nearly 200 nations will meet a year from now to write a new global warming treaty. Before those talks, Obama's advisers must work out how ambitious the treaty should be.

The Clinton administration signed the 1997 treaty but did not submit it to the Senate for ratification.