Obama's choice for energy sec has the resume -- and the look

President Obama’s pick for his new energy secretary should garner support from Republicans, as Ernest Moniz supports fracking and nuclear energy.

But he’s also got the look: His appearance, particularly his hair, looks awfully similar  to one of the Founding Fathers. Perhaps the tea party folks will conclude that Moniz would fit in nicely in any paintings of John Adams.

According to The Washington Post, Moniz, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lends Obama's Cabinet scientific heft and brings prior Washington experience. At MIT, he has directed the school's Energy Initiative, where he oversaw reports on almost every aspect of energy. And he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Moniz, who served as associate director of the White House office of science and technology policy and as undersecretary of energy under President Bill Clinton, is also devoted to the "all-of-the-above" strategy for energy that Obama has embraced. In a voluminous written and spoken record, Moniz has come out in favor of nuclear power, research into carbon capture and storage for coal, renewable energy and shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, the Post reported.

But the energy secretary-to-be faces opposition from the left. Many environmentalists and some prominent renewable energy experts have tried to block the nomination of Moniz because of an MIT report supporting fracking — as hydraulic fracturing is commonly known — and because major oil and gas companies, including BP, Shell, ENI and Saudi Aramco, provided as much as $25 million each to the MIT Energy Initiative. Other research money came from a foundation bankrolled by shale gas giant Chesapeake Energy.