by Luke Morgan

Former EPA Chief and White House Climate Czar Carol Browner says that climate deniers in the House of Representatives are the biggest impediment to getting a price on carbon.

When asked what the most significant obstacle in passing climate change legislation is during an event in Washington on the Clean Air Act yesterday, former EPA Chief Carol Browner pointed to Republicans in the House and their “stunning” denial of the reality of earth’s changing climate.

“I think unfortunately, right now a majority in our House of Representatives appears to not even think the problem is real,” Browner said. “It’s sort of stunning to me because I’ve never seen the breadth of scientific consensus on an environmental issue like there is on this.”

Speaking directly after Browner was Texas GOP Representative Joe Barton. Barton is the chairman emeritus of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and sits on the Environment and the Economy subcommittee.  However, while collecting $1.7 million from Big Oil over the years, he has displayed alarming ignorance on climate reality.

Barton claimed that carbon dioxide is not only irrelevant to the Clean Air Act, but that it’s not dangerous at all because it’s “a necessity for life.” To illustrate his example, he noted that he was exhaling carbon dioxide as he spoke, and actually argued that people should build greenhouses because they create life, so greenhouse gases are good.

“There’s a reason that you build things called greenhouses, and that’s to help things grow,” he said.

Barton also claimed that the atmosphere had, in the past, contained carbon dioxide levels greater than 5,000 parts per million (ppm), implying that we could do so again today.  The current scientific consensus, however, is that 350 ppm is the safe upper limit.

Barton said that he accepted the climate is changing, but he discounted human influence and the rise in extreme weather as “opinions.” Both the anthropogenic causes of climate change and its effects on extreme weather events are extremely well-documented in the scientific community.

Barton’s remarks came during a panel convened by National Journal and the American Lung Association on the legacy and future of the Clean Air Act.  Although he spoke alone, many of the other speakers either pre-empted or responded to his off-base remarks.

Dr. Jerome Paulson of the Children’s National Medical Center pointed out the silliness of Barton’s argument that CO2 is a necessity for life.  Paulson noted, “If we had no sodium, we wouldn’t be alive.  But there does come a point where if people consume too much sodium or if there’s too much sodium in their bodies, then it becomes toxic and people can die.”

The same is true, Paulson said, of CO2 in the atmosphere: it’s necessary, but too much of it is clearly a bad thing.

The event, which can be viewed online, focused mainly on the Clean Air Act and whether it had been successful, and how successful it could be moving forward.  While Barton incorrectly argued that CO2 is not a dangerous pollutant and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the Clean Air Act, Browner – who was also the longest-serving EPA Administrator – pointed out that the agency is required by law to regulate anything it considers to be detrimental to environmental health.

Barton also repeated the Republican talking point that the EPA places an undue burden on businesses.  However, Browner pointed to the EPA’s review of the Clean Air Act, which detailed $2 trillion dollars in economic savings through 2022.  Browner has made similar arguments before to Stephen Colbert.

Barton expressed doubt that Congress would be legislating on the Clean Air Act at all in the current Congress.  Browner, however, noted that current law allows the EPA and the executive branch to make significant progress in combatting CO2 without needing Congress’s stamp of approval, and that the Supreme Court has upheld that right.

Luke Morgan is the executive Intern at the Center for American Progress.

Today, as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the final reduction requirements for mercury and other toxics from power plants, Carol Browner, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, released the following statement:

President Barack Obama adopted public health safeguards today that will drastically reduce dangerous emissions of mercury, arsenic, acid gases, and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants. The new safeguards are preventative medicine—they will annually forestall thousands of premature deaths, hospitalizations, and respiratory ailments.

In less than three years, President Obama has reduced harmful air pollution from two major sources: power plants and vehicles. Cleaning up toxic and cross-state air pollution from dirty power plants will save 45,000 lives every year, or prevent nearly five deaths every hour. And modernizing vehicle fuel economy standards will slash carbon dioxide pollution and reduce oil use by more than 2 million barrels per day.

Both initiatives will put tens of thousands of Americans to work inventing, manufacturing, and installing modern pollution-control technologies.

The support for the new toxics reduction rules by some major utilities demonstrate that the standards are readily achievable and affordable, and pose little threat to our electricity system.

In the following “Ask the Expert” video, Browner answers two questions:

What are the public health benefits of these new mercury standards? Can coal-fired power plants meet the new standards without harm? How do the president’s actions on reducing air pollution compare to recent administrations?

Read more

President Obama has been criticized heavily for not doing enough to stand up to the vicious blitz on climate science. He’s also being attacked aggressively on the right for using his presidential powers to act on environmental issues outside of Congress.

So where does he stand? For those who’ve seen the words “climate change” disappear almost entirely from the President’s lips, he’s been a huge disappointment — even a failure, as Climate Progress editor Joe Romm wrote after the collapse of a comprehensive climate bill. And moving into this week’s climate talks in Durban, the lack of action in the U.S. has substantially reduced the country’s credibility.

But Carol Browner, Obama’s former “Climate Czar” who worked within the Administration to get a climate bill passed, believes the President’s record will be judged on his full range of initiatives, including what he’s been able to do outside of the deeply-dysfunctional Congress.

In an interview on the Climate Progress podcast, Browner shares her perspective on Obama’s environmental record. She points to initiatives like greenhouse gas standards for cars, power plants and oil refineries; clean energy investments from the Recovery Act; and mercury standards from power plants — all being developed during a time of deep hostility to any sort of environmental regulation.

Read more

Last Wednesday, the National Audubon Society awarded former EPA Administrator Carol Browner the organization’s Annual Keesee Conservation Award, recognizing her commitment to protecting the environment.

Browner, who was also director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, has one of the strongest environmental records — working to strengthen the Clean Air Act, pass the Safe Drinking Water and Food Quality Protection Acts, and secure the largest U.S. investment ever in clean energy.

Here’s a video tribute that Audubon put together featuring interviews with Al Gore and Madeleine Albright:

In last night’s interview with former EPA Administrator Carol Browner, Stephen Colbert came out swinging with a line straight out of the Republican playbook:

“The EPA is useless. That is an indisputable fact…We protected the air and the water. We cleaned it up. Now you’re just rubbing it in our faces by continuing to keep it clean.”

Colbert gave Browner, a Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, the chance to defend the EPA, who explained why regulations create more economic opportunity. Ultimately, Colbert came up with his own solution — describing why pollution is a better job creator than cleaning up the environment:

“If there’s more pollution then there’s more work for the doctors who have to cure us of the diseases we get from the things we eat and drink. I can use your logic against you.”

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were furiously taking notes and have already added the talking point to their energy plans.

Watch it:

Colbert also has a very funny intro to the interview, in which he mocks the Republican claims that the EPA is a “job killer.”

“Yes. This job-killing cemetery is murdering jobs and then burying them in itself. Jobs. Everyone knows pollution is a job creator.”

Watch it:

Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At a Center for American Progress Action Fund event yesterday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack sat down with CAP Distinguished Senior Fellow Carol Browner to discuss jobs created from conservation of public lands, supporting rural America, feeding the hungry, and other priorities at the Agriculture Department. He also took a moment to talk about extreme weather events related to climate change, and how it is “hard to explain” that anyone could not realize that the climate is changing:

BROWNER: It’s nice to hear someone use the word “climate change” in this current political debate we have going on about the science.

VILSACK: Can I just say something about that?

BROWNER: [Laughs] This was not in the script.

VILSACK: No it wasn’t but I think it’s important to point out what’s happening here. We have record droughts in the southern part of our country, record droughts. We have record snowfall and snowmelt in the northern part of our country which is now causing significant flooding challenges. The average, and the worst week of tornados we’ve ever experienced in this country is roughly about 150 tornados in a week; in May we had 350 tornados in one week. We had a hurricane and a tropical storm that didn’t just impact the coast areas as it normally does, but was in upstate New York—upstate New York—looking at damage resulting from the storm that basically wiped out whole fields of agricultural crops—whole fields. Folks who had never experienced flooding conditions, that were directly related to a storm that was hundreds of miles away. If people don’t understand that the climate is changing, it’s just hard to explain how anybody could not see that, given this year that we’ve had with natural disasters.

Watch it:

The Center for American Progress and Think Progress have been closely following extreme weather events and “global boiling.” In a report in April of this year, we looked at disasters in 2010 and early 2011 to discuss how extreme weather is the new normal, and what seems extreme now will become commonplace in the future. These events can have extraordinary impacts on Americans’ lives, as the report states:

The extreme weather of 2010 exacted a huge human and economic toll as well. More than 380 people died and 1,700 were injured due to weather events in the United States throughout the year. And the magnitude of these events forced the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to declare 81 disasters last year. For nearly 60 years, the annual average has been 33. In 2010, total damages exceeded a whopping $6.7 billion. As of April 2011, FEMA had dedicated more than $2 billion in financial assistance to those harmed by extreme weather in 2010.

The report also dives into details about how each state fared in terms of weather-related disasters last year. It’s no wonder that Secretary Vilsack spoke about climate change the way that he did — his home state of Iowa saw 2,469 extreme weather events in 2010. And yet, Republican presidential candidates continue to deny the increasing links between extreme weather and climate change, and their impacts on agriculture and rural America. As Rick Perry told a crowd at the Iowa State Fair in August, “we’ll be fine.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who attacked investigations into the years of interference on global warming regulation by the Bush White House, is now calling for probes into Obama’s “Presidential czars” who are taking action. Yesterday, Inhofe, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) sent a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson “requesting specific information about White House Coordinator of Climate and Energy Policy Carol Browner, and how her office has exercised authority over the Environmental Protection Agency.”

This champion of “transparency,” however, attacked an investigation into the White House’s interference with the EPA last year, saying that “regardless of Administration, the President acting through the entire executive branch is fully entitled to express his policy judgments to the EPA Administrator”:

Instead we are here to politicize the internal deliberative process of the Administration under the guise of an update on the science of global warming hearing. While I welcome the opportunity to discuss the latest science on global warming, doing it in this heavily political setting with a predetermined outcome focused on internal deliberations of the Executive is not the right venue for such discussion. It is my view that regardless of Administration, the President acting through the entire executive branch is fully entitled to express his policy judgments to the EPA Administrator, and to expect his subordinate to carry out the judgment of what the law requires and permits. It can be argued that the “unitary Executive concept” promotes more effective rulemaking by bringing a broader perspective to bear on important regulatory decisions. . . .

Therefore, I consider this debate over censorship within the Administration to be a nonissue. All administrations edit testimony and all documents go through interagency review before any final agency action. I cannot support any investigations that could have a chilling effect within the deliberative process of the Administration, and cause future career and political employees from refraining from an open and honest dialogue.

By some strange miracle, Inhofe has had a complete change of heart on the inviolability of the “unitary executive” during the Obama presidency. In yesterday’s letter, Inhofe requests “all correspondence and records” from “all meetings, discussions and conversations between EPA and Carol Browner,” which “includes but is not limited to the following: letters and other written communications, electronic communications, phone records, meeting notes, documents prepared to summarize meetings and agendas, meeting dates, including attendees of listed meetings, and transcripts and notes from stakeholder briefings.”

In June, Inhofe even supported a criminal investigation into whether the EPA was “suppressing science.” Inhofe’s newfound love for transparency in the executive branch stands in utter contradiction to his professed outrage last year: Read more

National Center for Public Policy Research president Amy Ridenour explains to Congress why she laundered $2.5 million for Jack Abramoff.

In a widely reprinted column, the National Center for Public Policy Research’s (NCPPR) David Ridenour attacks White House energy and climate change adviser Carol Browner as a “socialist” and “zealot” with “so much baggage she could be an airline”:

As little respect as she has shown for the law, she has shown even less for science.

Ridenour’s arguments include the bizarre Drudge Report attack that Browner is a socialist, accusing Browner of complicity in an EPA case for which she was fully acquitted, and the repetition of a 1995 claim of “illegal lobbying” by then-Congressman David McIntosh (R-IN), which the New York Times explained then involved “doing things that have long been routine functions of officials in the executive branch, practices that lawyers in Republican and Democratic administrations alike have declared legal.”

In fact, it is the National Center for Public Policy Research that has little respect for the law, and even less for science:

Little Respect For The Law: Laundering $2.5 million for Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff was a member of NCPPR’s Board of Directors; he resigned in October 2004. From 1999 to 2001, NCPPR wrote “repeated articles that aligned with the positions of the lobbyist’s clients.” In October 2002, Abramoff directed the Mississippi Band of Choctaws to give $1 million to NCPPR, and then told Amy Ridenour to distribute the funds to front organizations he controlled. In June 2003, Greenberg Traurig, the firm that employed Abramoff, sent $1.5 million to NCPPR, which Ridenour again distributed to front organizations controlled by Abramoff. Amy Ridenour later testified to Congress that she was an unwitting dupe. [Raw Story, 3/8/06]

Less Respect For Science: NCPPR Is Part Of The Right-Wing Climate-Denier Machine. The National Center for Public Policy Research was founded in 1982 by Amy Ridenour, David’s wife and a compatriot of Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist in the leadership of the College Republicans in 1981. NCPPR is a member organization of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Cooler Heads Coalition and the right-wing State Policy Network. In 25 years of operation, NCPPR has received about $280,000 from Exxon Mobil, in part to fund its “Envirotruth” climate denial website. [ExxonSecrets, SourceWatch]

Less Respect For Science: NCPPR Uses African Poverty to Attack Climate Change Action. Using its Project 21 front group, NCPPR put out a press release supporting CEI’s Third-World vs. Gore campaign on Amy Ridenour’s blog. It attacked “Gore and his celebrity friends” for “living opulent lifestyles” while “many in the Third World – particularly those in Africa – are literally dying due to a lack of adequate power, and the catastrophe that could result from imposing anti-global warming emissions regulations on power generation in these areas.” In fact, Africa is “one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability,” with between 75 and 250 million Africans facing increasing water scarcity by 2020, potential food shortages and a rise in disease. [Project 21, 3/10/2008] [IPCC, 2007]

This hit piece was published in several right-wing publications, including Investor’s Business Daily, Robert Decherd‘s Providence Journal, and Rev. Sung Yun Moon’s Washington Times.