THE ENERGIZER BUNNIES

Posted at 9:03 a.m. ET

There was much relief on the right when Mr. Obama announced his first set of appointments - sane choices in foreign policy, considering the president-elect's liberal background.

That may start to change.  The new environmental team is already raising questions.  Is this the payoff to the left?  Is Al Gore pulling the strings?  Will "In Climate Change We Trust" replace our national motto? 

The Wall Street Journal takes on the president's new choices, and finds grounds for making gray hair even grayer: 

After the selection of a largely centrist economic team, liberals have been asking when President-elect Obama would give them a seat at the table. Well, now we know, and Americans should strap themselves in. Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters.

The Journal is sanguine about Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, nominated to be energy secretary:

We trust...that an expert of his sophistication understands not only the promise of clean tech but its real practical limits.

It slides downhill after that:

The same can't be said for Carol Browner, the Al Gore protégé who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton years. This time she gets a promotion to "energy czar," a new job that Mr. Obama envisions as akin to National Security Advisor but for climate. "Czar" is an apt title for Ms. Browner, who built a reputation as the most left-leaning of Bill Clinton's advisers.

That certainly says it.

During her EPA salad days, she put out air-pollution standards that even the agency itself said would have no measurable impact on public health, purely as antibusiness punishment. She forced GE to dredge the Hudson River of PCBs that posed no threat to the public. Ms. Browner also rewrote a law called New Source Review so that power plants, refineries and other industries were always breaking the particulate emissions rules.

We are in a serious economic downturn.  Browner appears to be exactly the kind of person we don't need in government right now.  There are rational, non-vindictive environmentalists who could have been appointed.  But moveon.org must be pleased.

The Obama Administration is "sitting on some authority," Ms. Browner warned at the Center for American Progress recently. She says the White House is prepared to use that power "in the event that perhaps there can't be some sort of agreement reached with Congress on how to move legislation." In other words, Ms. Browner will use the threat of brute regulatory force as a political bludgeon if Capitol Hill declines to inflict some carbon tax on voters in the midst of a recession.

Not only will this incur colossal economic costs, but it bypasses normal democratic debate. In that sense it's suggestive of the radicalism of Mr. Obama's climate agenda. When Mr. Obama said during the campaign that he favored "nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy" in the name of global warming, we figured he couldn't mean something so utopian. Maybe he does.

Finally...

At a Congressional hearing last year, Ms. Browner declared that trying to eliminate carbon -- a main input of industrial civilization -- "need not bankrupt us." As a standard for policy, that's not exactly reassuring.

We hope that the president-elect, who is a shrewd political practitioner, will restrain this crowd once his administration is actually in place.  If he doesn't, he can prolong the economic agony.  Further, much of the science behind some darling causes of the environmental movement is now being seriously questioned.  We hope, maybe against hope, that Secretary Chu will examine the latest findings and skepticism, and act accordingly.

We all want a decent environment.  We want it achieved thoughtfully, and with attention to real science, not political science.

December 12, 2008.