Obama’s Carbon Busters

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After the selection of a largely centrist economic team, liberals have been asking when President-elect Obama would give them a seat at the table. Well, now we know, and Americans should strap themselves in. Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters.

It’s striking that the moderate in this bunch may be Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped as Energy Secretary. Though a political unknown, Mr. Chu is the respected director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the 1997 Nobel physics laureate has spent the last four years chasing a breakthrough in advanced biofuels, solar and other high-tech ventures.

Mr. Chu’s special passion is climate change, and he favors putting a price on greenhouse emissions. The federal energy portfolio, though, is dominated by nuclear issues such as waste disposal and maintaining the U.S. weapons stockpile, with a side of basic research. On the latter, Mr. Chu co-chaired a blue-ribbon panel last year that called for doubling energy research spending.

Congress will see that and raise. But we trust Mr. Chu already knows that the Bush Administration has devoted some $43.3 billion to climate-specific science and R&D since 2001, including the annual $650 million budget of the Berkeley Lab, which is funded through the Energy Department. We trust, too, that an expert of his sophistication understands not only the promise of clean tech but its real practical limits.

The same can’t be said for Carol Browner, the Al Gore protégé who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton years. This time she gets a promotion to “energy czar,” a new job that Mr. Obama envisions as akin to National Security Advisor but for climate. “Czar” is an apt title for Ms. Browner, who built a reputation as the most left-leaning of Bill Clinton’s advisers.

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. Under Ms. Browner’s orders, EPA general counsel Jonathan Cannon prepared a 1998 memorandum concluding that “CO2 emissions are within the scope of the EPA’s authority to regulate,” even though Congress specifically declined to include carbon when it last amended the Clean Air Act in 1990. Now a law professor, Mr. Cannon serves on the Obama transition team.

Cue the lawsuits in 2003, when the adults in the Bush Administration rejected Ms. Browner’s scheme. The lead author of the opposition’s legal briefs was Georgetown professor Lisa Heinzerling, who is also a transition member. One of the most important decisions facing Mr. Obama is what to do with the Supreme Court’s 2007 order that the EPA consider regulating carbon on the Browner theory. The Bush Administration has resisted such regulation, but Mr. Obama’s selection of Ms. Browner betrays his answer.

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.

As for the “team of rivals” hype, the rest of Mr. Obama’s energy list is heavy with Ms. Browner’s acolytes. Lisa Jackson, for 16 years a top EPA enforcement officer, will now run that agency. At the White House Council on Environmental Quality will be Nancy Sutley, who was Ms. Browner’s special assistant at EPA. At a Congressional hearing last year, Ms. Browner declared that trying to eliminate carbon — a main input of industrial civilization — “need not bankrupt us.” As a standard for policy, that’s not exactly reassuring.