It was announced Monday night that Carol Browner, the White House's coordinator for energy and climate change policy, will soon be leaving her gig, and there are no indications that there will be a successor to the position.
Translation: Any serious effort at combating greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. global warming) is dead for the next two years.
As President Obama continues to try to pivot to the center as the second half of his first term in office officially begins tonight, the jettisoning of Browner, a Florida native, has to be interpreted as good news by all those big business interests the President is interested in currying favor with now. Don't think so? Check out this quote from a Washington Post story published last night:
Scott Segal, an energy expert at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell & Giuliani, welcomed her leaving. "Carol Browner was a passionate contributor to a strong White House commitment to environmental policy," Segal said. "Her departure may be part of a legitimate effort to pay careful attention to addressing some of the real regulatory obstacles in the way of job creation in the United States." Bracewell & Giuliani has been retained by many of the nation's biggest coal mining, utility and oil refining companies.
Republicans have been extremely vocal in preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing new regulations on large generators of greenhouse gases. And Republicans and business leaders have already won the fiercest fight this administration was ever going to propose to regulate such emissions – the much derided Cap-and-trade legislation (bashed as "cap-and-tax" by its opponents), which passed in Nancy Pelosi's House in June of 2009 (by 5 votes), but was never even voted on up or down in the U.S. Senate last year.
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.