President Obama's Fracking-Friendly Nominees

"Obama picked Ernest Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist, for U.S. Energy secretary and Gina McCarthy, a longtime environmental regulator, to head the Environmental Protection Agency."

Moniz directs MIT’s Energy Initiative, which is supported by energy companies such as BP Plc (BP/), Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and Chevron Corp. (CVX) and works on research into technologies such as biofuels, nuclear fission and building design. He has promoted natural gas as a bridge fuel -- a way to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions until cleaner sources of energy are developed.

“In the very long run, very tight carbon constraints will likely phase out natural gas power generation in favor of zero- carbon or extremely low-carbon energy sources,” Moniz said while releasing an MIT report in 2010 about natural gas. “For the next several decades, however, natural gas will play a crucial role in enabling very substantial reductions in carbon emissions.”

McCarthy, 58, is a Boston native who worked for then- Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as an environmental adviser and later as head of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. She currently leads the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which during Obama’s first term issued broad regulations to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants and automobiles.

She also issued the first-ever greenhouse-gas proposal for new electric power plants, rules that the agency is set to finalize this month. Under that rule, no new coal-fired power plants could be constructed without expensive carbon-capture technology, systems that companies say are not commercially available now. New natural gas plants would qualify under those rules, because gas emits about half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned for electricity.