Green Thing's End of Year Top 10 list

Tis the season to make Top Ten lists, from the sublime (Medecins Sans Frontieres’ top ten most underreported humanitarian stories) to the ridiculous (Top 10 Bushisms) and everything in-between – technically the ‘subdiculous’ category.

We didn’t want to miss out on all the fun. So here’s our top 10: Obama’s Dream Green Team:

1) Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and hardcore booster of clean energy innovation, will lead the Energy Department. To give some perspective, the past qualifications of the man he replaces, Sam Bodman, include being CEO of a chemical company with a dodgy environmental record and senior executive in the financial services industry.

2) Harvard physicist John P. Holdren, another hardcore climate dude, will be science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

3) Lisa Jackson will be head of the Environmental Protection Agency - she was an EPA enforcement officer for 16 years before becoming head of New Jersey's chief environmental agency.

4) Hilda L. Solis, an environmental activist in the California State Legislature and campaigner for green jobs, will lead the Labor Department.

5) Carol M. Browner, who was Clinton’s EPA chief, will be the energy and environmental policy "tsar” coordinating high level policy.

6) Highly rated environmental scientist and marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco, an expert in ocean acidification and passionate global warming activist, will head up the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

7) Nancy Sutley, former Clinton EPA official and currently LA’s Deputy Mayor for Energy and Environment who has championed major energy-saving and other environmental initiatives, will run the White House Council on Environmental Quality

8) The slightly more controversial ten-gallon hat-wearing Democratic senator and attorney from Colorado Ken Salazar has been nominated as Secretary of the Interior. An expert in water law and land conservation, Salazar will influence policy on resource extraction like oil and gas drilling on public land.

9) And of course the man himself – Barack Hussein Obama II. As with any large organization, change only happens if it’s championed by the person at the top and Obama has made it clear he’s serious about fighting climate change.

10) Finally, since we needed to make it ten, let’s hear it for the US electorate who restored our faith in democracy, common sense and, let’s face it, America by voting the guy in to begin with.

I’m trying to think of a nice concluding phrase about winds of change filling the sails of ships sailing to Copenhagen or something but it’s completely beyond me.

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