Carol M. Browner, President Barack Obama’s energy adviser, plans to leave the White House in coming weeks, White House officials said Monday night.

Browner, who is Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, was EPA administrator for all eight years under President Bill Clinton, and is one of the most experienced Washington hands in the West Wing.

Well, that’s a bombshell.

This is a big reversal from the rumors.  Earlier this month, the NYT‘s John Broder reported the conventional wisdom, “Carol M. Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate policy, is rumored to be moving to a new post, possibly deputy chief of staff.”

That said, the catastrophic failure of the administration to pass a climate bill — heck, the failure to even get a vote in the Senate or one damn speech from the President on the gravest threat to the health and well-being of our children and future generations — must have taken its toll.  And that’s without factoring in months and months of dealing with the BP oil disaster or the prospect of two years of a hostile House of climate zombies.

Here’s more from The Politico on Browner:

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This is a Mediamatters repost by Solange Uwimana. For background on the science, see “The hockey stick lives! Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.”

Conservatives, ever desperate to disprove the science behind global warming, have latched on to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s baseless investigation into climate scientist Michael Mann and his work at the University of Virginia. As the Washington Post reported, Cuccinelli is “demanding that the University of Virginia turn over a broad range of documents” from Mann, a former professor at the university, “to determine whether he defrauded taxpayers as he sought grants for global warming research.”

Democrats in Virginia’s General Assembly responded to Cuccinelli’s investigation by proposing several measures to limit the power of attorneys general to issue civil subpoenas, including to public universities, citing “government intrusion” into academic and private life.

Jim Hoft, who continually amazes with the inanity of his attacks on progressives and the president and his wife, charged that Democrats are moving to “block” the investigation of what he called “manipulated global warming junk science data.” He further alleged of climate change: “We all knew it was a scam.” Fox Nation claimed that Democrats “are panicked over ‘Climategate’ probe,” and right-wing blog Weasel Zippers, who asserted that “Mann was knee-deep in ClimateGate,” wrote of Virginia Democrats: “It’s almost like they’re trying to hide something.”

There at least three basic problems with conservatives’ defense of Cuccinelli’s investigation:

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Chevron, responsible for a multi-billion-dollar environmental disaster in Ecuador, is instead spending millions to shore up political support and to evade the clean up. Senate disclosure forms reveal that oil giant Chevron spent $2.9 million lobbying the federal government last quarter, eclipsing even Exxon ($2.6 million) and BP ($2.2 million). Chevron’s 2010 lobbying totaled $12.89 million, following a tremendous outlay in 2009 of $20.8 million. Chevron also recently launched a major greenwashing campaign, “We Agree,” which claims that it shares the public concern that “oil companies should put their profits to good use” and “oil companies should support the communities they’re a part of.” However, Chevron is also spending millions to defend itself in a 17-year-old lawsuit over the billions of tons of toxic waste its now-subsidiary company Texaco dumped into the Ecuadorian watershed. The case is finally nearing its conclusion in the Ecuadorian court system:

The attorneys representing Amazonian communities in a lawsuit against Chevron have submitted their final argument to a judge in Ecuador, the latest development in a legal saga involving the oil giant that that began nearly two decades ago. The plaintiffs are seeking up to $113 billion in compensation for environmental damages in the Amazon.

Ecuador, smaller than the state of Nevada, is a remarkable hotbed of diversity. The rich life above lies above significant oil reserves — another legacy of millions of years of biological richness. Those reserves have both fueled and threatened the future of the nation and its peoples. The costs of the extraction — including 16 billion gallons of toxic waste water — have been been borne by the indigenous communities of the Amazon watershed, even as the profits were enjoyed elsewhere. The closing argument made by the plaintiffs sums up the toxic record of Chevron in this case:

The evidence makes it clear and unmistakable that Chevron is guilty. Guilty of polluting the rainforests with toxic sludge from lucrative oil drilling operations, guilty of a shoddy and haphazard cleanup operation, guilty of letting toxic waste continue to devastate the rainforest and its inhabitants’ lives, and perhaps worst of all, guilty of trying to cover it all up by destroying documents and making false accusations of fraud before courts in the U.S. and Ecuador. Chevron’s complete disdain for Ecuador, its courts, and its citizens was captured perfectly by a Chevron lobbyist who told Newsweek: “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this – companies that have made big investments around the world.”

So far, Chevron disagrees.

So Joshua Green, senior editor of The Atlantic, writes a column that says of recent news that 2010 was the hottest year on record:

The news highlighted one of Washington’s biggest failures over the last two years: its inability to advance climate legislation,  It was also a grim reminder that things could get worse. Some crucial policy areas have always been neglected and some initiatives stalled. But rarely has a first-order concern like the nation’s climate and energy policy actually regressed — and so dramatically as we’ve seen since the last presidential election.

Economist Brad DeLong writes a piece in response, “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?” pointing out the blame should not be spread around to all of “Washington”:

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Here they are in descending order [I am quoted on #5, Tom Donahue President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce]:

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Earlier this month, ABC ran one of the best climate change stories ever to appear on a major network’s evening news show:  “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming.”

On Friday they aired another very good piece — and now we know the secret of their accurate reporting.  As they explain:

ABC news contacted 10 climate scientists to ask their take, if the extreme winter like the one we’re having is the way of the future.  The consensus:  global warming is playing a role by shifting weather patterns in unpredictable ways.  Many say the forecast for the future calls for record-breaking precipitation and extreme temperatures year-round — and that means winter with more snow.

See also “An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years!”

The dividing line between good climate reporting and bad climate reporting is almost always whether the reporter talked to real climate scientists.  Typically, the more a reporter talks to, the better the story. It is very hard to get the story wrong if you talk to several of the leading climate scientists in any specific subfield.

Here’s the full story:

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Climate change: Dogs of law are off the leash

From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.

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This is a Climate Science Watch repost by Rick Piltz.

“We are facing a well-organized and well-funded campaign attacking our science and our integrity, spreading confusion and disinformation,” says Pieter P. Tans, a leading climate scientist at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Tans talked about the civic responsibility of scientists in his remarks on receiving the 2010 Roger Revelle Medal at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in December 2010.

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A good political eco-cartoon from David Horsey:

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Of all the issues Barack Obama will address during the next two years, none is more important to his legacy than global climate change.  Guest blogger William Becker offers his insight.

Finishing the job in Afghanistan and Iraq, reforming immigration policy and bringing the economy back to health will be high on the President’s priority list, as they should be. He’s expected to pay special attention to economic recovery in his State of the Union speech tomorrow.

However, unmitigated climate change would almost certainly sabotage the achievements on which he has invested so much time and political capital.  Consider these impacts if climate change goes unchecked:

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Here’s  Van Jones on the full costs of our culture of disposability:
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