The presence of a climate justice warrior who zip-tied himself to the White House fence and President Obama’s “climate czar” on the Democrats’ platform drafting committee has the party poised for a progressive shift on energy policy.
Bill McKibben and Carol Browner are the de facto energy and environment representatives on the 15-person panel, which is responsible for establishing the Democratic party’s official positions. Four years ago, the platform embraced an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy: a hackneyed political term used by both parties that proposes development of alternative energy alongside fossil fuels. As the committee convenes for the first time Wednesday, McKibben and Browner will bring worldviews that could take such relatively moderate language sharply to the left.
McKibben, a founder of the grassroots environmental activism website 350.org, has spent decades rallying for progressive environmental causes such as divestment from fossil fuels and a ban on fracking. He has also argued for keeping coal, oil, and gas—what McKibben calls “carbon bombs“—underground, known as the Keep It In The Ground Act, cosponsored by Sanders and labeled “naive” by one Obama official. Still, McKibben has vowed to push for it on the platform committee.
The longtime activist, appointed to the committee by Bernie Sanders as part of an arrangement among party leaders, has rejected the “small-bore, play-it-safe, incremental” approach Hillary Clinton takes to energy policy, instead calling for aggressive measures like a carbon tax.
“Bernie and I and as far as I know virtually every economist—left, right, and center—thinks it’s a good idea. At this point, actually, even Exxon has belatedly endorsed a price on carbon,” McKibben wrote in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Sanders boasted in May that his support of a carbon tax positions him as the only candidate that wants to “deal aggressively with climate change.” He has a kindred spirit in McKibben, who, after the September 11 attacks, suggested that President Bush should have “put a dollar tax on gasoline” and installed solar panels across America rather than encourage Americans to “return to shopping.”
McKibben’s criticism does not apply only to Republicans. He, like Sanders, dinged presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her long silence about the Keystone XL pipeline, after she said in 2010 that she was “inclined to support” it and only declared opposition to the project in September 2015.
“Working with a deep team of oil company advisers, you set up a whole office at the State Department whose job it was to push fracking all over the world,” McKibben wrote. “This was bad policy in the extreme.”
Last year, he condemned Clinton as an advocate of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas (“fracking”), a technique both she and President Obama have supported. As secretary of state, Clinton hailed natural gas as the cleanest fossil fuel and promoted natural gas drilling worldwide. The 2012 Democratic party platform also praised the economic benefits of “cheap, abundant natural gas” while highlighting the necessity of “harnessing our natural gas resources … in a safe and responsible manner.”
“You took the Obama administration’s affection for fracking and ran with it,” McKibben wrote of Clinton’s worldwide fracking campaign. Echoing McKibben’s sense of climate urgency, Sanders criticized the former secretary of state for her call to “regulate” natural gas drilling in May. “I think it is too late for regulating. I think fracking needs to be banned from America,” he said.
Another prickly subject for Clinton—and one that for Sanders and McKibben is black-and-white—is divestment from big oil companies like Exxon. Sanders has repeatedly rebuked Clinton for taking “significant money from the fossil fuel industry,” to which a testy Clinton said she was “so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.”
Such criticism figures to be balanced by Browner, a Clinton appointee to the committee whose roots in government environmental policy date to her staffing Al Gore in the Senate.
Browner is a master of bureaucracy, with years of experience leading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Bill Clinton and serving as Obama’s “climate czar.” As head of Clinton’s EPA, she started a collaborative regulatory effort known as the “common sense initiative,” which sought to bring together activists, labor interests and regulators to develop “a blueprint for how to achieve real environmental protection.”
The long-serving EPA chief tried and failed to push a cap-and-trade measure on carbon emissions through the Senate in 2009. Browner, like other Obama-Clinton officials, has also questioned whether a more aggressive carbon tax is realistic. “I’m not sure, even if all the economists in the world say it’s the best way to do it, that Congress is going to embrace something like that,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in 2013.
But as the relative moderate to McKibben, she, too, has the background to yank the Democrats’ energy platform left. Browner is close to Al Gore, he of Global Warming Apocalypse Doomsday Clock-fame. She became a Gore “acolyte” while serving as his legislative director and later his close ally as EPA head.
In addition to her progressive environmental upbringing, Browner shares another affinity with Sanders—an avowed “democratic socialist”—and his camp. Shortly after her appointment as Obama’s climate czar, Browner’s name and biography were wiped from the website of a Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the environmental branch of Socialist International.
