Traditionally, the environment and energy slots have not been the highest-profile positions in the President's Cabinet. But that changed when President Obama began assembling his team after the 2008 election. He installed some big names, including Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy; Carol Browner, who ran the EPA under former President Bill Clinton, as the new climate czar; and the tough New Orleans native Lisa Jackson as the first African-American head of the EPA. The change has been remarkable, with Jackson's EPA moving to regulate CO2 as a pollutant and Chu remaking the sleepy Department of Energy into a laboratory for clean technology.