Conversation
Can-Do Environmentalist Carol Browner
As global climate change accelerates, capitalists who once loved to hate her may learn to sing her praises.
By Lorraine Dusky
The pop song words “If I ever needed you…I need you now” came to mind after a recent chat with Carol Browner, the tough-minded, straight-talking former head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton. Why? Because talk of global warming can no longer be simply dismissed as the mere scare tactics of anti-development tree huggers.
Browner, 51, is not presently in a position to direct public policy and shape legislation, but she continues to figuratively beat the ecological drum. In her frequent lectures to college students, business leaders, and environmental groups, she speaks with urgency: “We have been talking about this problem for 20 years—we can’t just keep debating,” Browner says. “We have to act.”
By that she means more than simply having each of us turn out the lights and turn down the heat. While such conservation counts, she warns that it alone will not suffice. “Every individual doing every single thing they could do every day, every month, won’t be enough to deal with the magnitude of the problem of expanding deserts and melting ice caps,” she said when we spoke. “Saving the earth is going to take fundamental changes in corporate behavior. We need tougher requirements for industry and financial incentives to meet them.” And Browner left no doubt about this: “We need a level of political will that is lacking today.”
At EPA Browner earned a reputation as a doer, a consensus builder, someone able to merge public and private interests and move forward. One example of her leadership is the success of the Brownfields program to clean up and redevelop urban sites that had been contaminated and abandoned; it was given the Innovations in American Government award by Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Ford Foundation. Under Browner’s EPA, three times more Superfund cleanups were accomplished in eight years than in the entire prior history of the program.
While President Bush has stripped the EPA of the clout it had during the Clinton years, Browner sees reason for optimism because not everyone is waiting for Washington. She applauds not only the far-reaching pledge California’s legislature made at the end of the summer—to drastically reduce by 2020 the greenhouse gas emissions that are widely blamed for global warming—but also what other states are doing. “Literally every day I read that another government is doing something,” she said. “Rhode Island, Maryland—and now Arizona is joining the effort.”
Cap-and-Trade System
As various environmental and medical communities push for regional emission caps, it’s a given that the standards will not be uniform. “Companies with facilities in different states will come to Congress and say, ‘We need one system,’” Browner said. “Now whether they will call for as tough a requirement as I might, I don’t know. But I believe we are within a few years of a national ‘cap-and-trade’ mechanism of the sort we used for acid rain.”
In a cap-and-trade program, corporations have three choices: They can meet the cap on emissions they are assigned; retool their factories and clean up power plants to come in below the cap, and then sell their spare emission credits to another corporation that releases more gases than its allowance; or buy extra credits from a cleaner corporation in order to cover their excess emissions. A complicated program, to be sure, but one that has worked before. The Chicago Climate Exchange, the world’s first voluntary program of this sort, is already in place. California’s plan is almost certain to include a cap-and-trade mechanism.
The Killer in the Greenhouse
Those nasty greenhouse gases (there are six main ones, but carbon dioxide is what you hear most about) are emitted into the atmosphere by everything from automotive exhaust to power plants. As Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, so aptly demonstrated, once released they trap the sun’s light and heat. While some of that is necessary for the earth to be other than an ice cap, the uptick in the amount in the last several decades has been truly alarming, and almost certainly an accelerator of global warming.
“Never before have we faced a challenge like global warming,” Browner said. “It’s one thing to have the kind of pollution that can be photographed and put on the evening news. But you can’t see or feel climate change as it happens. Most of the most serious consequences are a decade or two away, and by the time ordinary citizens can notice them it will be too late to make a difference.”
While it is industry that needs to step up to the challenge, it’s also the captains
of industry who considered Browner a canker in their collective hide when she pushed for tougher standards for clean air and water. Forbes called her an “environmentalist zealot,” and nay-sayed her “hardball tactics.” Whenever you hear about Carol Browner, the piece went on, “it’s unlikely to be good news for business.”
One could practically hear her roll her eyes through the speakerphone when that was mentioned. “These are the exact same arguments that come up every time we try to deal with an environmental issue,” she commented to Yoga +. “It’s wrong to think we can’t have a healthy economy and a healthy environment—frequently a healthy environment is good for the economy.” She pointed out that the campaign to clean up acid rain, for instance, cost far less than projected. “Time and time again we have found that the benefits of less pollution are generally greater than originally estimated, while the costs are significantly lower,” she said. “Putting a dollar value on benefits can be very subjective, true—but how do you calculate the value of a human life?”
Now, she said, We the People need to convey to our government that we are serious about greenhouse gases. It’s her belief that once confronted with tough laws and regulation, “the business community will find the mechanisms that address the problem in the most cost-effective manner. We need a revolution in our way of thinking.”
Expect Industry to Be Creative
Some of that transformation will be in finding ways to use alternative sources of power, such as wind and solar, and biofuels that pollute less. “Clear direction from government and a specified time frame will drive interest in alternative sources of fuel,” she asserted. “If we stimulate a demand for them, then the problems of, say, getting wind power from the Dakotas to the grid will be solved.”
Browner first came to Washington as a problem solver herself, with experience in Florida state politics and legislative work; one of her first jobs out of law school at the University of Florida in Gainesville had been writing policy dealing with public land acquisition. After honing her can-do skills and briskness at a consumer advocacy group, Citizen Action, Browner worked for then-Senator Lawton Chiles, then moved to Gore’s Senate staff as legislative director. Then it was back home to Florida—where she’d grown up a bike ride away from the Everglades—to head the state environmental commission in by-now Governor Chiles’ administration. Her second stint in DC was to serve in the Clinton cabinet. She currently is a principal in The Albright Group, a Washington DC-based consulting firm with clients confronting issues familiar to her. The firm is named for senior partner and former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.
Walking the Walk
Browner relaxes by walking the mile to her office in Washington, having recently sold her only car—an aging Honda that got great mileage, she notes—and by doing as many yoga classes a week as she can fit in. She is often on the road lecturing and visiting clients around the globe, and on long flights, she has been known to do yoga in the back of the plane as long as no flight attendant tells her she is causing a disturbance. For other would-be mile-high yoga practitioners, she has a tip about the planes with two levels: “On the upper level, they usually leave you alone.”
Browner is articulate and forceful, making one aware that the national political scene probably hasn’t heard the last of her. With a shift in the party occupying the White House, don’t be surprised if her name is once again in play for some big job. The earth will breathe a sigh of relief.
If not actually break into song.
Lorraine Dusky, the author of Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth about Women and Justice in America, writes frequently about social issues.
January/February 2007
Yoga+ magazine