Free Republic

Last Wednesday, just days before Christmas, Carol Browner, Obama's radical Climate Czar, announced new EPA restrictions for mercury, arsenic, and other toxic substances being outputted into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants. Compliance is required before 2014. Hailed as a victory by environmentalists, it is expected that it could mean the demise of nearly 60 existing coal-fired power plants with upwards of 22 million customers being affected; mostly in the already beaten up and declining cities and states in what is known as the Rust Belt. Some communities could see their power bills rise by as much as 30%. Most...

House Science Committee Republicans are asking President Obama to ensure that records associated with outgoing top White House climate and energy adviser Carol Browner are preserved. “Ms. Browner and her staff are central figures in many decisions and issues of interest to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee,” according to a letter that Chairman Ralph Hall (R-Texas) and three other senior Republicans on the panel sent late Tuesday. The Republicans are asking for all documents – which they say “is to be construed in the broadest sense” – associated with the White House Office of Energy and

Updated 9:48 p.m. Carol Browner, an key adviser to President Obama on energy and environmental issues, plans to leave the White House, an administration official said Monday night. Her departure comes as something of a surprise. Browner had been deeply involved in negotiations over climate legislation, which passed the House but died in the Senate. And she had been a key part of the team helping to deal with and stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years under President Bill Clinton, she had been...

White House: With cap-and-trade seemingly dead and EPA's regulatory authority under attack, the administration's climate czar is abandoning ship. Too bad she's not taking the administration's energy policies with her. Carol Browner, former EPA director now serving as a senior Obama adviser for energy and climate change, a formerly nonexistent position created to avoid Senate confirmation to a real position, has decided to hang it up. Or she's been thrown under the bus, depending on your point of view. As a "czar," she was a prime mover for climate change and the administration's war on carbon. But when cap-and-trade legislation...

The plot thickens: White House aides Monday were mum about what would happen to the Office of Energy and Climate Change except to declare that Browner, a former Senate staffer to Al Gore, believed energy issues would remain front and center for the president. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48098.html#ixzz1C1zPcOwb One wonders now if Obama will even mention climate during the State of the Union Address Tuesday night. With jobs and economy taking front and center and Browner’s announcement right before SOTUA, government climate initiatives may be relegated to the back-burner. We’ll have to wait and see.And it gets stranger, Haunting the Library...

Three Republican senators demanded Friday that the White House explain last-minute editing changes to an Interior Department report on the BP oil spill that falsely implied that a group of independent experts had endorsed a political decision to temporarily halt all deepwater oil drilling. The senators, members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called for hearings into the matter, contending that the White House had manipulated science for political ends, a claim Democrats frequently made about the George W. Bush administration. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a report this week asserting that officials in the office of Carol...

Gulf Coast residents have plenty of reasons to be furious at the Obama administration's ham-handed, job-killing responses to last spring's BP oil spill. A new report by the Interior Department's inspector general further roils the waters. Interior IG Mary L. Kendall reported last week that the staff of White House energy czar Carol M. Browner improperly edited a report on how to improve safety in deep-sea drilling. The effect was to indicate falsely that there was scientific support for President Obama's decision to impose a six-month moratorium on such energy production. The truth was that seven scientists and industry experts...

“Put nothing in writing, ever,” sounds like a command a veteran CIA official may give to an incoming class of new officers. One would not expect such a directive to issue from one of the President’s trusted advisors, especially from a White House that proudly proclaims itself to be the most transparent in history. But according to various media reports, that “cloak and dagger” tactic was Energy and Climate Change Czar Carol Browner’s underlying rule for auto industry executives involved with secret negotiations concerning the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

It’s a measure of Carol Browner’s growing influence in the West Wing that she’s been given the coveted key to the taupe-accented kingdom — President Barack Obama’s personal BlackBerry e-mail address. The administration’s so-called energy czar is just about the only high-ranking official to emerge from the BP oil disaster with an enhanced reputation — making her, some say, the most powerful woman in the White House next to Obama’s longtime friend Valerie Jarrett. Yet even as Browner’s stock rises, her rationale for remaining by Obama’s side is declining. The collapse of the administration’s comprehensive climate change effort — a...

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

Yesterday, the White House director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, assured "Fox and Friends" host Gretchen Carlson that the Obama administration was "making decisions in real time" regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. Browner further appeased Carlson by insisting that Team Obama had been on the leak "since day one" and that any complaints of government beadledom were unfounded. "There is no bureaucracy here," said Browner. The Energy Czarina went on to highlight two names from the "best minds in America" club that we keep hearing about in reference to stopping the British Petroleum (BP) gusher:...

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs might think that Climate-gate is a nonevent, but on Monday Pennsylvania State University announced that it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, the school's Director of the Earth System Science Center. And Tuesday, Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, announced that he would stand aside as director while his university conducted an investigation. Dozens of researchers at other institutions could soon face similar investigations. . . .

Obama administration climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected claims that e-mails stolen from a British university show that climate scientists trumped up global-warming numbers, saying she considers the science settled. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," said Ms. Browner, whom President Obama has tapped as his chief of policy on global warming. The e-mails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and have come to light over the past week. They appear to show scientists...

Obama climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected the e-mails that appear to show some British climate scientists trumped up global warming numbers, saying she considers the science settled. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," said Ms. Browner, who President Obama has tapped as his chief of policy on global warming. The e-mails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of Wast Anglia and have come to light over the last week. They appear to show scientists saying they've...

Browner: U.S. in 'good standing' heading into Copenhagen talksBy Ben Geman - 11/18/09 07:16 PM ET White House climate czar Carol Browner downplayed the idea that the absence of a domestic emissions law would hinder U.S. leverage in Copenhagen and said the U.S. could tout major accomplishments heading into next month’s international climate talks. In wide-ranging remarks at a climate conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, she also said President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao made substantial progress in their Beijing discussions this week. Browner, the senior White House energy and climate adviser, pointed to tens of billions of...

President Barack Obama's top energy adviser said Friday there is no way Congress will be able to pass a bill on climate change this year. "That's not going to happen," said the adviser, Carol Browner. Browner made the statement at a conference organized by The Atlantic magazine, just days after Senate Democrats introduced a major bill on climate change. In a video posted on the magazine's Web site, Browner was asked about the prospects of enacting climate legislation by the time negotiations on a global climate treaty begin in December in Copenhagen. "Obviously, we'd like to be through the process,...

There's more than one way to get cap-and-trade, President Obama's energy czar said today. Carol Browner, the former Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) administrator who now serves in the Obama administration's newly created role of energy czar, floated the possibility today of the EPA implementing cap-and-trade energy policies, during an interview at The Atlantic's First Draft of History symposium in Washington, DC. "We also have the reality of EPA, under current law, moving forward...to start the traditional regulatory clock," Browner said when asked, during an interview with Atlantic Media Political Director Ronald Brownstein, about the difficulties of passing the stalled energy/climate...

Former Vice President Al Gore and current White House climate change czar Carol Browner are warning companies and lawmakers that the courts will step in to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress fails to act. "All of the discussion has been about the president and the Congress," Gore told journalists at a U.N. press conference Tuesday. "We have a third branch of government: the courts."

Czar is perhaps the perfect title for Carol Browner, the person President Obama chose to rule over his climate policy. The woman will run her kingdom like an autocrat, she will take no prisoners and she will hide all the "bodies" For Example: Until early January Carol M. Browner, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change. Then Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo...

Despite denials from her soon-to-be former employers, the Albright Group, former Clinton EPA head and soon-to-be climate change czar Carol Browner served as a de facto lobbyist for Dubai Ports World, owned by the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, which arranged to buy a company operating six major U.S. ports, including New York and New Jersey. Browner told the Obama transition team that she never served as a lobbyist in her time in Washington, and her employer, the Albright Group, owned by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, also said that the firm does not lobby. But in 2006, when...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, said in July that it had found the "smoking gun" that caused the space shuttle Columbia to break apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1: a piece of foam that had peeled off the external fuel tank and struck the shuttle's wing 1 minute and 22 seconds after liftoff. But many experts looking at the tragedy that killed seven astronauts say there is a deeper cause. They say that the metaphorical smoking gun should be painted green. Because of demands that the agency help to front for...

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner's conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner "intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards." Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in...

Czar is the perfect title for Carol Browner, the person President Obama chose to rule over climate policy. The woman runs her kingdom like an autocrat, taking no prisoners and she has a history of demanding secrecy for example.....When working for the Clinton Administration, Browner had her files erased Against a court order, As Michele Malkin reported back in January: According to testimony in a freedom of information lawsuit filed against EPA by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative legal watchdog group, Browner commanded a computer technician on Jan. 19, 2001: “‘I would like my files deleted. I want...

Barack Obama’s energy czar appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to discuss the cap-and-tax bill passed by the House last week on a razor-thin margin. Carol Browner got stumped by Fox’s Steve Doocy while questioning her ability to speak to the subject, which prompted her to declare Doocy “unfair” for blindsiding her. You be the judge — should Doocy have wondered whether Browner had bothered to read the bill she was promoting on national TV, or is that “unfair”?

House Republicans Darrell Issa and James Sensenbrenner are calling for an investigation of whether Obama climate czar Carol Browner’s secrecy in developing Obama’s CAFE standards and EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding was a “deliberate and willful violation” of the Presidential Records Act. According to the letter, ~~~ … Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), revealed to the New York Times that the White House held a series of secret meetings with select special interests as they were crafting the new CAFE standards. Nichols was a key player in these negotiations because of California’s determined efforts to...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil but are expected to cost consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Obama on Tuesday planned to announce the first-ever national emissions limits for vehicles, as well as require an overall or industry average fuel efficiency standard at 35.5 miles per gallon. Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate director, publicly confirmed the new initiative in appearances on morning network news shows, calling it a "truly historic" occasion and saying...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--With hearings on an energy and climate bill scheduled to begin next week, "energy czar" Carol Browner said on Monday that Obama administration favors regulating greenhouse gases through "comprehensive legislation" rather than the Environmental Protection Agency.

Infrastructure: The stimulus plan to turn America's electrical infrastructure into a so-called "smart grid" is a potential target for unfriendly hackers. It's also the fulfillment of a campaign promise rooted in socialism.There is $4.5 billion in the stimulus package to modernize the nation's electricity system. The whole idea is to monitor where and when electricity is used and to direct it to where and when it is needed. It is thought this will help utilities to adjust their rates to immediate supply and demand for power. It would supposedly allow consumers to adjust their consumption to the times when they...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed a national system for reporting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by major emitters Tuesday. The registry, which was originally proposed in a 2007 energy bill and is funded in U.S. President Barack Obama's 2010 Budget outline, would lay the foundation for regulation of CO2 and other gases thought to contribute to global warming. [Snip] Jackson called the registry a "critical step toward helping us better protect our health and environment." Obama's energy and climate czar, Carol Browner, who is widely believed to be directing the president's global warming agenda, has told Dow...

President Obama vowed to set a new direction of ethics and transparency in government and with his selection of Carol Browner as climate control czar. Unfortunately, her steadfast belief in the far-left policies of extreme environmentalism make that vow impossible to achieve. An environmental zealot, Browner has so much baggage she could be an airline. But then, maybe not. For despite Browner's best efforts, some of her baggage simply won't stay lost. President Obama vowed to set a new direction of ethics and transparency in government and with his selection of Carol Browner as climate control czar. Unfortunately, her steadfast...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's climate czar said the Environmental Protection Agency will soon determine that carbon-dioxide emissions represent a danger to the public and propose new rules to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gas from a range of industries. Carol Browner, special adviser to the president on climate change and energy, said in an interview Sunday that the EPA is looking at a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that requires the agency to determine whether carbon dioxide endangers public health or welfare. And the agency "will make an endangerment finding," she said. "The next step is a notice of proposed...

When The New York Times publishes a story, as it did on February 19, regarding the next step in the Obama administration’s intention to destroy the U.S. economy, it’s a very good idea to pay attention. “E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide” was the headline of John M. Broder’s article. “The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.” Those “top Obama administration officials” are unnamed and so too are the “scientists” claiming that...

The EPA to start regulating CO2, cow flatulence, and who knows what else they want to do. Perhaps they could throw the regulating the sun into the mix. This is truly scary , a bunch of BULL and Manny says we need to be doin some hollerin about this one....

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite" - Dwight Eisenhower WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- President Barack Obama's climate czar said Sunday the Environmental Protection Agency will soon issue a rule on the regulation of carbon dioxide, finding that it represents a danger to the public. The White House is pressing Congress to draft and pass legislation that would cut greenhouse gases by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050, threatening to use authority...

We can expect a proliferation of new regulations that will reach into every area of American life and commerce. What do President-elect Barack Obama’s leadership picks tell us about the kinds of energy and environmental policies we can expect in the next four to eight years? On balance, they suggest we are in for a radical shift away from George W. Bush’s pro-market policies and back to the aggressive regulatory approach favored by the Clinton administration. Let’s take a look at Obama’s prospective appointees.Lisa P. Jackson Obama’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be the first African...

Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, has been named by Barack Obama to be his Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. This new and undefined office could give her broad influence over economic policy. That is a frightening prospect, not merely because of her participation in a group with overtly socialist ties, but because of the way hostile foreign powers such as China are manipulating the modern Green movement to serve their own national purposes. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1051A58C-1F0D-4574-AFF6-C283D4D6FE83

The Rule of the Green Czar By Kathy Shaidle FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, January 16, 2009 Carol Browner, Barack Obama’s nominee for energy-environment “czar,” didn’t preside over the pardons of terrorists in the 1990s; she doesn’t owe thousands in back taxes; and she isn’t mired in an ongoing investigation. She is, however, a card-carrying socialist who used public office for political pressure and was accused of presiding over a department that treated intelligent African-Americans as “uppity.” Until recently, Browner, whose official title will be “Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change,” was a “commissioner” of the Socialist International, the...

WASHINGTON -- Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's choice to be his climate czarina, served until last summer as a member of a socialist organization whose mission is to enact progressive government policies, including toward environmental concerns like climate change. Browner's name and biography have been scrubbed from the Web site of Socialist International, the umbrella group for 170 "social democratic, socialist and labor parties" in 55 countries. But a photo of Browner speaking in Greece to the group's Congress on June 30 remained in the site's archives. Browner, formerly the longest serving administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, having served...

Incoming White House energy-environment czar Carol Browner was recently discovered to be a commissioner in Socialist International. While that revelation has been ignored by the mainstream media and blithely dismissed by her supporters, you may soon be paying the cost of Browner’s political beliefs in your electricity bill. So what does all this have to do with your electricity bill? In late-December, Carbon Control News reported that Browner was a “strong backer” of utility “decoupling,” which had emerged as a “key climate policy priority for Obama.” How would decoupling actually function in practice? There are several different schemes for decoupling,...

Carol Browner a Socialist? By Doug Bandow on 1.12.09 @ 6:16PM There's a tendency of conservatives to carelessly toss about the "S" word. Like John McCain, who opposed the Bush tax cuts while spouting left-wing rhetoric, then accusing Barack Obama of being a socialist because the latter proposed to increase taxes on the rich.

Politics: Is anyone surprised that the would-be czarina of federal climate and energy policy has ties to a socialist group? The environmental movement's goal is to afflict the economy, not comfort the ecology.Carol Browner, who'll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn't new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton. The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions...

The Washington Times is reporting that president-elect Obama's climate czar has ties to an international organization that promotes "global governance." According to the report, as recently as last week Carol M. Browner was listed as one of "14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society." The group, one of many under the umbrella group Socialist International, calls for rich countries to shrink their economies in order to combat climate change. Browner's name and biography has since been removed from the Socialist International's web page. Ms. Browner's appointment as Obama's climate czar does not need Senate confirmation....

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change. By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available. Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says...

that he is a political radical, it’s not surprising that he has tried to present a moderate image to the public. The PR campaign has been working to a large extent. But problems are beginning to emerge. Carol Browner might be one of them. Obama chose Browner, a former EPA administrator, to be his energy czar (really, czarina). Browner is all for draconian carbon emission controls aimed at halting global warming. Critics of carbon control say such plans are really about expanding government control over the economy and have little to do with things climatological. In order words, such plans...

I had an OMG experience when I clicked on this. The Obama administration really intends to act in a big way on this climate change bull stuff. Don't miss Obama's video (you'll have to click through to the article.) Obama's caveat about there being only one president seem hollow here.-- AZLiberty We need strong U.S. leadership on climate change, especially as we head into next year's COP-15 talks. President-elect Obama has already spoken more boldly (by far) on climate change than almost any other American elected official:Obama on YouTube There is often, however, a large gap between words and...

December 12, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Down on BrownerRegression we can’t afford. By Michelle Malkin Yet another Clintonite has been wheeled out of the political morgue to serve in the Obama administration. Carol Browner, a neon-green radical who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993-2000, is widely rumored to be the president-elect’s choice for “energy czar.� But an ethical cloud still hangs over Browner’s EPA legacy. It doesn’t take a team of Ivy League lawyers to figure out that this is one more headache the Hope and Change crew doesn’t need. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, let...

The husband of Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's presumed pick for a new White House energy adviser post, has lobbied on energy and environmental issues, with clients including Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Keyspan Energy. Ms. Browner is married to former New York Rep. Tom Downey, who founded the Downey McGrath Group Inc. in 1993. The two wed in June 2007. Ms. Browner, a principal at The Albright Group LLC, a consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton. In the Obama White House, she is expected to...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Nobel laureate Steven Chu as energy secretary and Lisa Jackson to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, according to media reports Wednesday. Obama is also expected to name Carol Browner as energy 'czar,' the reports said. Chu, a Chinese-American, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.

DUBAI DUETS Late Friday, Department of Justice lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel were attempting to determine if former President Bill Clinton had registered as an "Agent of a Foreign Principal." Federal statute requires that anyone -- even a former President -- doing political or public affairs work on behalf of a foreign country, agency or official must register with the Department, and essentially update his status every six months. It was not clear the Clinton had done so. If his status is less clear, here is what we do know: If Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not know...