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NPR’s Steve Inskeep and President Obama (NPR) Regardless of what President-elect Donald Trump’s plans are for immigration, President Barack Obama says there will be “inevitable” changes to the demographics of the United States. “If you stopped all immigration today, just by virtue of birth rates, this is going to be a browner country,” Obama told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in an interview that aired Monday. “And if we’re not thinking right now about how we make sure that next generation is getting a good education and are instilled with a common creed and the values that make America so special and...

Barack Obama promised his administration set a new standard in transparency: I will also hold myself as president to a new standard of openness .... Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency. Obama even issued a memo My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government. He declared his to...

A House committee has launched an investigation into whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency’s own internal watchdog — something that Republican lawmakers said could run afoul of the law.The science committee has asked Ms. Jackson to turn over all information related to an email account under the name of “Richard Windsor,” which is one of the aliases identified by a researcher looking into the EPA.The committee has also asked the White House’s lawyer and EPA’s inspector general to look into the matter and report back by...

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,...