Speculation: Obama's Green Team and their Bios

President-Elect Barack Obama has been moving swiftly to fill his cabinet so the transition into a new administration will be as smooth as possible, given the challenges currently facing the U.S. There has been rampant speculation about who Obama will appoint to each office and so far most rumors have proven accurate.

Today, NBC News is reporting the names of three possible appointees for Obama's environmental policy team.

1) Steven Chu - Energy Secretary: A 1997 Nobel Prize laureate for his work isolating and trapping an atom, Steven Chu has always lived at the threshold of progress. Chu is a St. Louis native who is currently a professor at the University of California at Berkley. He directs the Berkley National Laboratory and has held positions in physics and research departments at Stanford and Bell Laboratories.

2) Lisa Jackson - EPA Administrator: Lisa Jackson is a chemical engineer by trade. She worked for the EPA for 16 years previously and has recently served as Director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. In the short time she served as Director at the DEP, Jackson put in place mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, reformed New Jersey's contaminated site clean-up process and established a scientific advisory board to review agency decisions. Lisa Jackson would be the first African-American EPA Administrator.

3) Carol Browner - Energy "Czar": A Floridian (like this blog's editor) Carol Browner has served as head of both the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation and EPA. An intereting side-note for environmentalists, Browner was the Legislative Director for former Vice-President Al Gore when he was in the Senate. Currently, Browner is the Principal of the Albright Group and an attorney.