BIDEN SELECTS BUTTIGIEG FOR TRANSPORTATION POST

Granholm, McCarthy eyed for key roles on climate-energy team

WASHINGTON

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Pete Buttigieg to be secretary of transportation, Biden’s transition team announced Tuesday, selecting a former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former opponent who would bring a younger voice to the Cabinet and add to its diversity as its first openly gay member.

Buttigieg, 38, a Rhodes scholar and Afghanistan veteran, emerged during the Democratic primaries to wage a fierce battle for the party’s presidential nomination before bowing out and endorsing Biden. The two men bonded during the general election campaign, and the president-elect made it clear that he wanted to find a place for Buttigieg in his administration.

Buttigieg as transportation secretary would be a key player in advancing Biden’s ambitious agenda on both rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and on cli

mate change, one of the most important priorities for the new administration.

In the coming days, Biden intends to name prominent leaders in the climate and clean-energy world to two other senior positions: Gina McCarthy, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will be his senior adviser on climate change, and Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan, will lead the Department of Energy.

The Transportation Department under Biden is expected to play a newly climate-centric role, particularly because of the agency’s authority to regulate vehicle emissions, the leading source of climate-warming pollution in the United States, to encourage electric vehicles and to provide funding for mass transit.

“Transportation should really be considered as a green agency,” said Carol Browner, who served as President Barack Obama’s senior climate change adviser.

During his presidential campaign, Buttigieg pledged to restore Obamaera vehicle emissions standards and called for making the United States carbon neutral by 2050.

Climate change is also expected to play a newly critical role in planning infrastructure like roads, bridges, dams and levies, as the agency takes into account new climate science showing how heat and flooding could damage such structures — and building and planning accordingly.

Buttigieg frequently traced his awareness of the climate emergency to his experience managing two separate “500-year f loods” of the St. Joseph River when he served as mayor of South Bend.

John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress, who was an adviser to Obama on climate change, said that while Buttigieg may not have a deep background in climate issues, “the guy can drill down on almost anything.”

“He will, I think, grasp the challenge of moving the transportation sector toward a net-zero emissions profile by 2050,” Podesta added.

If confirmed, Buttigieg would be not only the first openly LGBTQ person to hold a Cabinet-level position in the Biden administration, but the first in any Cabinet, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group that last month pressed Biden to appoint LGBTQ people to his Cabinet.

“His voice as a champion for the LGBTQ community in the Cabinet room will help President-elect Biden build back our nation better, stronger and more equal than before,” said Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign.

Buttigieg began the presidential campaign as a political unknown, the mayor of a postindustrial city and college town of about 100,000 people who combined his skill communicating on television and populist liberal ideas like eliminating the Electoral College and expanding the Supreme Court to build the largest bigdonor fundraising apparatus in the field.

But as his political standing rose, Buttigieg adapted from a position on the political left to become a moderate in the Biden mold. He focused less on court expansion and campaigned against the single-payer health care plan put forward by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the most liberal of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Still undecided is the president-elect’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. That person will be central to Biden’s agenda of fighting climate change and reinstating environmental regulations rolled back by the Trump administration.

“A new era of climate accountability is upon us,” former Vice President Al Gore said in a statement. “The U.S. is back on task.”

Gore described McCarthy as “uniquely suited” for the position of senior adviser and said her appointment, along with John Kerry’s role as global climate envoy, “affirms that Joe Biden is serious about America leading by example and driving deep reductions in pollution and climate emissions.”

McCarthy, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, was the architect of landmark rules to cut planet-warming pollution. In her new role, she would be in charge of coordinating domestic climate change policies across the federal government.

Granholm, as head of the Energy Department, will oversee the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as well as 17 national laboratories and a wide range of energy research and development initiatives, including a major loan office that backed the launch of Tesla.

Granholm, a longtime champion of renewable energy development, is widely credited during her two terms as Michigan governor with steering her state through a recession and working with the Obama administration on a 2009 bailout of the automobile industry that included clean energy investments and incentives for carmakers to invest in technologies like battery storage.