The irony here is this administration is spending more money on climate change research and development than any administration in all the rest of the industrialized world combined.
It's pretty hard to say no when a vice president-elect and a president-elect ask you to be part of the national team.
To put that into some perspective, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had first taken the idea of the Kyoto Protocol up to the Congress, the United States Senate voted it down 95 to nothing.