The editors of the Wall Street Journal then go on to explain just who the "carbon buster" appointments are as well as suggesting some of the dangers these folks will pose to American businesses, consumers and the overall economy. The foremost two (among a whole gang he's assembling) are the global warming zealots Obama has tapped for, respectively, Energy Secretary (Steven Chu) and "energy czar" (the far left bureaucrat bully and Al Gore protégé, Carol Browner)
Browner was head of Bill Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency and was a disaster....The EPA long ago became the government arm of the environment lobby, but Ms. Browner was especially political. During her EPA salad days, she put out air-pollution standards that even the agency itself said would have no measurable impact on public health, purely as antibusiness punishment. She forced GE to dredge the Hudson River of PCBs that posed no threat to the public. Ms. Browner also rewrote a law called New Source Review so that power plants, refineries and other industries were always breaking the particulate emissions rules.
But her most pernicious inspiration was the idea that the EPA could by itself classify carbon as a "dangerous pollutant" under current clean-air laws and thus impose new taxes and restrictions on all types of energy...
The Obama Administration is "sitting on some authority," Ms. Browner warned at the Center for American Progress recently. She says the White House is prepared to use that power "in the event that perhaps there can't be some sort of agreement reached with Congress on how to move legislation." In other words, Ms. Browner will use the threat of brute regulatory force as a political bludgeon if Capitol Hill declines to inflict some carbon tax on voters in the midst of a recession.
Not only will this incur colossal economic costs, but it bypasses normal democratic debate. In that sense it's suggestive of the radicalism of Mr. Obama's climate agenda. When Mr. Obama said during the campaign that he favored "nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy" in the name of global warming, we figured he couldn't mean something so utopian. Maybe he does...
