Title, but Unclear Power, for a New Climate Czar

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/us/politics/12climate.html

Title, but Unclear Power, for a New Climate Czar
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: December 11, 2008

WASHINGTON — Much remains unknown, and perhaps undecided, about Carol M. Browner’s new position as White House coordinator of energy and climate policy.

How much real authority will Ms. Browner wield? Will her office have the same bureaucratic clout — the ability to knock heads together at other agencies — as the National Security Council and the National Economic Council? Will she be able to hold her own against the two powerhouses that will lead those established councils, James L. Jones, a retired Marine general, and Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury secretary? Will she outrank the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council? Will she have office space in the West Wing? How big will her staff be?

But this much is known. Ms. Browner’s thinking on climate change, environmental regulation, energy conservation and new technology are very much in line with those of President-elect Barack Obama and the other members of his environmental team. Ms. Browner, who has close ties to Mr. Obama’s transition chief, John D. Podesta, started laying the groundwork for the handover with him back in August.

Aides said Wednesday that Mr. Obama intended in the next few days to announce the nominations of Ms. Browner, Steven Chu as secretary of energy, Lisa P. Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Nancy Sutley as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. But the scope of Ms. Browner’s job remains under discussion, the aides said.

Her views and government record are well known.

Long an acolyte of Al Gore, she has called climate change “the greatest challenge ever faced” and echoed Mr. Obama’s call for a cap-and-trade system to control carbon dioxide emissions. Before leaving office in 2001, she set out to give the E.P.A. authority to regulate the carbon emissions that cause climate change, a power the Bush administration subsequently refused to use despite a Supreme Court ruling endorsing it. She supports California’s ambitious global warming law, which will force automakers to cut tailpipe emissions deeper and faster than current federal law.

After leaving the Clinton administration, Ms. Browner became a founding partner at the Albright Group, an international consulting firm. It has helped Coca-Cola and Merck with foreign operations, but a spokeswoman for the firm declined to identify other clients.

Ms. Browner’s work with the Albright Group attracted attention in early 2006, during the controversy over a Dubai firm’s takeover of a company that operated several American seaports. In February 2006, Ms. Browner and a lobbyist for the Dubai company met with the staff of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a vocal opponent of the deal.

A spokesman for Mr. Schumer told a reporter at the time that the visitors had been “unpersuasive.” Neither Ms. Browner nor the Albright Group registered to lobby Congress about the deal. The firm’s spokeswoman said Thursday that the meeting “was for informational purposes only” and that “the Albright Group does not lobby.”

Ms. Browner also sits on the board of APX, which specializes in handling cap-and-trade emission credits, as well as several environment groups.

Her most notable accomplishment in the Clinton years came when she pushed through tough air quality rules over intense opposition from industry groups and from some in the administration who viewed them as too costly. But even as she pressed ahead, her favorite slogan was “common sense.” How far she will be able to go in pursuit of vastly more comprehensive and costly energy-conservation goals remains to be seen.

The transition team is still trying to draw the increasingly complex White House organization chart, with a proliferation of top-rank positions with as-yet-undefined roles. On Thursday, Mr. Obama designated former Senator Tom Daschle as not only his secretary of health and human services but also the White House “health czar.” Ms. Browner is informally known within the transition and in the environmental community as the “climate czarina,” a title that conceals as much as it reveals.

She showed her bureaucratic muscle in one of the critical environmental battles of the Clinton era, the drive to write tough rules for permissible levels of ozone and fine particles of air pollution. The rules, drafted at Ms. Browner’s E.P.A., set strict standards that industry groups and scores of members of Congress said would be too costly to meet.

Mr. Gore, then the vice president, was Ms. Browner’s top ally in the administration, but the president’s economic advisers and Office of Management and Budget officials were wary of the supposed economic and political costs of the new regulations.

Ms. Browner stood her ground and eventually persuaded President Bill Clinton to support her. The rules went into effect and survived determined challenges in the courts and in Congress. In navigating that maze, Ms. Browner stepped on many toes, and she remains unpopular with assorted industry groups and conservatives in Congress.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 12, 2008, on page A28 of the New York edition.