Carol Browner Named Obama's Climate Czar
Yesterday Obama named Carol Browner to fill the newly created position of White House coordinator of energy and climate policy. If that sounds a little vague to you, don't feel bad. There's a great deal of uncertainty about just how much power Browner will have.Carol Browner, who served as the head of the EPA during the Clinton Administration, is currently chair of the Audubon Society and a founding member of the Albright Group. She has a long record of supporting change to environmental policies in order to slow climate change. During her tenure during the Clinton administration, she passed tougher air regulation laws despite industry opposition.
As her position is a new one, there is little known about just how big her staff will be or whether she'll even have office space in the West Wing. We'll just have to wait and see how big of a commitment Obama is willing to take on reducing carbon emissions in this country.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-17-2008 @ 3:02PM
coupeditor said...
Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner is the only pertinent part of the story you should have covered.
Look up the No FEAR Act of 2002 and see how it mandates that all Federal employees receive training in No FEAR law, because of the miserable record Ms. Browner left at EPA. The American public needs to know that a woman who publicly defended racism, retaliation, and denial of her employee's civil rights is now the official choice for Energy Czar.
See: Time magazine reported that Carol M. Browner's nomination Monday for the newly-created Energy Czar position, raises embarrassing questions in the Environmental Protection Agency's employee relations history due to Ms. Browner's conviction in Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner on charges of discriminating against employees based on sex and race, as well retaliating against whistleblowers and denying them their civil rights. The announcement was particularly ill-timed, as only 2 weeks ago the successful plaintiff in the case, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, was illegally fired by one of Ms. Browner's holdovers at EPA.
Time quotes Coleman-Adebayo as saying Administrator Browner "...wasn't at all sympathetic to complaints about civil rights abuses. We were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place." — Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a former EPA employee whose complaints of a "racially toxic" environment there led to the signing of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2001. (TIME, February 23, 2001)
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12-19-2008 @ 12:17PM
Carney said...
I wonder if she'll answer questions about the Audobon Society's lucrative oil drilling in its bird sanctuaries, while simultaneously working to ban oil drilling in the tiny, Dulles Airport sized portion of the West Virginia sized mosquito bog called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Also, if she's -really-concerned about CO2 emissions, she could get behind a simple mandate that all new cars have flex fuel capability as a standard feature, like seatbelts. At $100 per car, suddenly every new car sold would be able to burn alcohol fuel, which does not emit CO2 when burned. A lot more effective to address the VEHICLE side of the equation than to push on the FUEL side, with all the subsidies and mandates to somehow increase the proportion of our fuel sales that are biofuels, etc., when only 3% of our cars can burn the stuff right now.
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