Ms B is window dressing

not part of ruling clique

Or maybe Carol Browner is closer to economic truth than the card-carrying economic advisors.  What if apparently cheap but high carbon coal-fired power costs more than clean energy?  What if we add to the apparent price of coal power  the costs of premature deaths, pulmonary and other diseases, damage to forests and buildings and failed fly ash impoundments?  In our calculations, replacing coal with local generation that recycles waste energy provides clean energy that reduces total costs, before counting climate change costs.

Tom Casten

Tom Casten, Chair, Recycled Energy Development LLC

In 2001, in the landmark court case Coleman-Adebayo v. Browner, Carol M. Browner and the agency she administered, the EPA, were found guilty of race, color, and sex-based discrimination as well as tolerating a hostile work environment. The case provided the impetus for the passage (unanimous in both chambers) of the No FEAR Act (Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation) that was signed into law by President George W. Bush. The law was heralded as the first civil rights law of the 21st century. Study of Coleman-Adebayo v. Browner is now mandated study for all new Federal employees within 90 days of their being hired, and every 2 years for all Federal employees. The extent of the racism and retaliation within Ms. Browner's EPA was so pervasive that Congress and the Executive required study of it as the penultimate example of what was WRONG with government. When asked in Congressional hearings whether she accepted the judgement of the jury, Ms. Browner said she did.

The question for Mr. Obama, is: Given her unrepentant position on the deplorable conditions she oversaw at EPA, how is Carol Browner qualified to hold administrative position again?

It's not that real environmentalists don't care about money or working people -- well some may not but they're a minority -- it's that we care less about those issues than the environment.  That's precisely what makes us environmentalists, by definition.

The reason that this is important is that if it were proven to the right people's satisfaction that trashing the environment were better economically than protecting it, you lose your argument.  Much better, and much higher moral ground, to fight for the environment for its own sake, not because it's a better economic choice.