Carol Browner, President Obama’s former climate change chief, used to be against nuclear power. Now she is for it.
In a guest column for
Forbes, Browner said nuclear power can meet U.S. energy needs without raising carbon pollution.
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“I used to be anti-nuclear. But, several years ago, I had to re-evaluate my thinking because if you agree with the world’s leading climate scientists that global warming is real and must be addressed immediately, then you cannot simply oppose clean, low-carbon energy sources,” she wrote.
Browner is not exactly a disinterested bystander, however.
She headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, and under Obama was Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. Now she is a member of the Leadership Council of Nuclear Matter, an organization funded by the nuclear energy industry, including Exelon Corp.
Browner said she has “long championed clean air and the need to limit the dangerous pollutants that contribute to climate change. In doing so, I have come to fully appreciate the role that our current nuclear energy facilities play in meeting our energy needs without increasing carbon pollution.”
She and other lobbyists, including former U.S. senators Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, and Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, are supporting a public education campaign on the need to preserve the nation’s nuclear energy plants.
“Electricity generation accounts for nearly 40 percent of our nation’s carbon emissions. Existing nuclear power plants, which produce 19 percent of U.S. electricity, emit virtually no carbon pollution and are among the cleanest sources of electricity available,” Browner wrote.
She said a variety of independent analyses by the National Academies of Science, Electric Power Research Institute, the EPA and U.S. Energy Information Administration, show that reducing carbon emissions requires multiple clean energy technologies, including nuclear energy.
A report released this week at the White House concluded global warming is affecting the U.S. economy and has made extreme weather more likely,
USA Today said.
"Climate change is here and now, and not in some distant time or place," said Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, one of the authors of the 1,100-page National Climate Assessment.
USA Today said hundreds of the nation’s top scientists contributed to the report, and agreed with a recent report by the United Nations that the earth is warming, mostly because of human activity.
Politico said that in June, the EPA is scheduled to issue its “most ambitious” climate regulation yet, a rule aimed at lowering greenhouse gas pollution from the nation’s thousands of existing power plants.
In support of that EPA regulation, Politico said President Obama would be meeting directly on air for interviews with some of the nation’s most prominent television weather forecasters, such as the Today Show’s Al Roker, bypassing the usual national media outlets in Washington.
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