December 11th 2008
Dubai’s Lobbyist As Climate Czar?
Y
eah, I know that Carol Browner, former EPA headmistress for Clinton, greenie-in-chief for Florida, noted over-regulator and fawning Gore acolyte is known more for her anti-industry views on the environment, but a fact is a fact: Obama’s top pick for the new position as Chief Climate Hysteric is also a nasty, nasty lobbyist.
Browner is in business with former Clinton sec of state Madilyn Albright as, in the NYT’s coy words, “an international consultant.” Heaven forbid that the paper should call a lobbyist a lobbyist, unless of course it’s a GOP lobbyist.
Top among Carol & Maddie’s clients was Dubai Ports, and top among their priorities was getting US ports in Arab ownership – following Clinton’s sale of much of the Port of Long Beach to the Chinese. Isn’t it just a teeny bit scurrilous that a woman who has been working for Dubai, which produces, you know, oil, is now going to be the chief proponent of penalizing the heck out of oil? And not only that, but isn’t it even worse that she was working to get Dubai into U.S. port ownership so they could manage smelly, polluted, traffic generating, oil-burning businesses there? And now it’s kosher all of a sudden for her to turn her back on all that and start promoting laws, regulations and “incentives” (read: fines) that penalize the use of oil?
Browner ultimately failed in her Dubai mission, but she’s had many successful missions in her primary task: slamming unneeded regulation on American business. If Obama does indeed appoint her, she will immediately get to work hammering out the US position on the new UN global warming protocols – and don’t expect that position to care particularly about the health of business.
Yes, folks, that’s a change we can believe in.
By the way, I don’t say environmental regulations are “unneeded” because I’m for wrecking our environment. I say it because since the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts were passed in the 1970s our environment has gotten better and better, so people like Browner are not regulating primarily to improve things, but rather because they see manufacturing, power generation and transportation as bad things.
Their quest to scrub our air and water of contaminates down to the parts per trillion results in great and unsupportable burdens on business. It’s immutable: As more improvements are made, the benefits of incremental new improvements become smaller and their costs become higher.
Browner doesn’t care about such niceties, and her eminent appointment, along with another big-time business over-regulator, New Jersey EPA head Lisa Jackson, tells us that Obama has no intention of dialing back regulation in order to help the economy. Instead, he’s signaled his intention to undo the corrections Bush made as he removed some of the more egregious acts of over-regulation imposed by Clinton.
Economy, watch out!
