Goodbye, Hurricane Carol (1.28.11)

Posted by hpayne on January 28, 2011

Climate czar Carol Browner resigned this week.

But for a mention on The Frank Beckmann Show, the news event was ignored by Michigan’s media. It should not have been. Carol Browner should be a household name in a state where the former Clinton EPA chief has done more destruction to Michigan and its inner cities than any single bureaucrat in America.

Rather than silence, there should have been a parade down Woodward Avenue celebrating the end of Hurricane Carol.

A former commissioner of the Socialist International, Carol Browner was named climate czar as an end-run around the Senate because she was too radical to be confirmed. Like her unappointed administration colleague, former-Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, Browner’s confirmation hearing would have tipped the public to the truly radical nature of the Obama Administration. Still, the fact that her name has not appeared in headlines is testament to how deep the Mainstream Media is in the tank for the leftist green agenda.

Browner first came to national prominence as Bill Clinton’s EPA Chief — and Al Gore’s indispensible aide. Browner was Gore’s ghost-writer on “Earth in the Balance,” the Tennessee senator’s 1992 Apocalyptic call to arms against alleged global warming.

“The internal combustion engine,” Browner and Gore wrote, is “a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we’re ever again likely to encounter.”

Those words launched a green movement that has snowballed into global warming regulations that have cost automakers millions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and set in motion a litigation process that holds the Detroit Three – producers of the ICE – potentially liable for billions in weather damage suits.

As climate czar, Browner was tasked with coordinating Obama’s war on industries — from carbon-emitting cars to coal-fired plants — that are vital to Michigan’s economy.

But Hurricane Carol’s damage was not limited to Fortune 500 companies. Her radical policies as EPA chief — whom underlings once called “She Who Must Be Obeyed” — in the 1990’s drew a target around Detroit’s urban poor, and are still wreaking havoc to this day.

In the late ’90s, Browner championed the effort to apply Title VII of U.S. civil rights law to industrial plant permitting, arguing that locating industrial facilities in black cities “disproportionately impacted” minorities and was therefore “environmental racism.”

I dubbed her policy of redlining cities “green redlining” in a Reason magazine cover story. Browner’s EPA actually drew circles around plants located in minority areas to encourage lawsuits. This provoked outrage among black elected officials. Some of those officials were in Michigan, where Browner’s green allies targeted plants for closure just as they had shut down two Louisiana facilities employing hundreds of minority workers.

“The full force is already being felt at CMS Energy’s Genesee Power Station with an EPA environmental justice investigation that could result in orders ranging from shutting the plant to a broader demand on all nearby industries to lower the area’s pollution,” wrote Detroit News reporter Dave Mastio in 1998. “Metro Detroit could become a hotbed of such disputes with its large minority population and massive smoke-stack industries, which are primarily clustered in poorer communities. The issue has already come up between Arab residents and Ford Motor Co. over a new paint shop in the Dearborn assembly plant.”

Horrified by Hurricane Carol’s threat to his community, Detroit mayor Dennis Archer successfully led a coalition of Midwest Republicans and black mayors to scrap “green redlining.” Addressing the Black Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, then-U.S. Chamber president Thomas Donahue said: “I’m trying to think of a policy that would be more effective in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas — and I can’t do it.”

But Browner was not done bringing pestilence to Detroit’s poor.

In the waning days of her tenure atop the EPA, she banned the pesticide Dursban — the most commonly available household product in the world to address bedbugs, cockroaches, and other nuisances.

Despite widespread protest in the scientific community, Hurricane Carol swept Dursban from the shelves. Predictably, bed bugs are back with a vengeance — hitting lower-income families in cities like Detroit hardest, says Heritage Foundation regulatory expert Diane Katz, because they “can ill afford a weekly house call from the Orkin man.”

Indeed, Detroit is the most bed bug-infested city outside New York and Philly.

When she stepped down this week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner cited “knowledgeable sources (who) say Browner is resigning to avoid testifying under oath to a House oversight committee” led by Michigan Rep. Fred Upton after evidence emerged that “her office got caught doctoring a report to make it appear as if the administration’s drilling moratorium was approved by a panel of scientists.” With Republicans resurgent, it’s likely her primary goal of job-killing cap and trade legislation was dead anyway.

But Browner’s anti-scientific practices had long ago been felt in Michigan — a sort of state laboratory for her destructive policies.

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