Noted.

OBAMA'S GREEN TEAM: Barack Obama is bringing science back to Washington. After eight years in which science was ignored or censored by the Bush administration and right-wingers in Congress, Obama's choices of environmental and energy aides promise a very different approach. Steven Chu (tapped as energy secretary), John Holdren (White House science adviser) and Jane Lubchenco (head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) are first-rate intellects who have long records of speaking out on behalf of the public good.

Chu, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997, has called energy "the single most important problem that science has to solve" and grasps basic points that have been absent from the Washington debate in recent years, such as the fact that energy efficiency is the fastest, cheapest way to fight climate change and that burning more coal would be a disaster unless the carbon dioxide can be reliably captured and stored--a very big if.

Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, has been advising Obama for months, which may account for the president-elect's understanding--rare among US politicians--that climate change "is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago." Lubchenco, a professor at Oregon State University who ranks among the most distinguished oceanographers in the world, has led efforts to restore ecological balance in the seas--a "Mutiny for the Bounty," she calls it--which requires reversing climate change.

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