Who Will Run Obama's E.P.A.?

dying oceans, dwindling fresh water supplies, and climate change. They will also inherit a culture hobbled for the last eight years by political interference.

It's absolutely critical, then, that Barack Obama choose a new EPA chief wisely.

Leading candidates for the position, reports Bloomberg News, include former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection head Kathleen McGinty; California Air Resources Board leader Mary Nichols; Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection leader Ian Bowles; Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius; New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson; and environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Only Kennedy strikes me as weak. His environmental track record is excellent, but he's clung to the vaccines-causing-autism hypothesis long after large-scale epidemiological studies have discredited it as anything but a statistically insignificant cause. America doesn't need more political officials who skew science to fit personal beliefs. And perhaps more importantly, heading the EPA, with its thousands of employees and $7.2 billion budget, will be a far more difficult managerial task than negotiating environmental lawsuits.

Of the other candidates, McGinty, Bowles and Sebelius have excellent track records on clean energy, and Jackson has a strong record on conservation and pollution control.

But my own selection would likely be Nichols: she served in the EPA under Clinton, and California has led the battle to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as pollution. That gives her a head start on what is arguably the most pressing environmental issue we now face.