Obama is packing the government with Big Green ideologues | Ron Arnold | Columnists | Washington Examiner
Six months ago this info on EDF and Bryson was shared by Ron Arnold.
"…but Obama’s other Big Green nominee awaiting Senate confirmation is worse: John E. Bryson, former head of Edison International, parent company of Southern California Edison.
Bryson has been criticized for all the wrong reasons. He was co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970, and one of its first attorneys to file mountains of lawsuits against industry.
He was just out of Yale Law School, filing suits over pesticides, smog and other fashionable issue-of-the-month cases. He got tired of that after six years, went into California Gov. Jerry Brown’s first administration, and then into public utilities.
Obama’s brief nomination announcement late last month recited Bryson’s electric utility credentials and said the former executive would “add a business outlook to his inner circle.”
But Bryson’s resume neglected to mention that in August 2008, he joined the global private equities firm that pioneered Gordon Gekko-style leveraged buyouts, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, as a senior adviser.
And we missed the press release from two months earlier – coincidence, no doubt – that said, “Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Environmental Defense Fund Announce First-of-Its-Kind ‘Green Portfolio’ Partnership.”
EDF earlier gave cover to KKR in the $45 billion acquisition of TXU, a Texas utility, the largest leveraged buyout in history, in return for promises to cut coal-fired plants out of the picture.
In a Washington Examiner special report in 2010, I exposed EDF’s virtual ownership of the Commerce Department agency, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the long EDF ties of NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco, and EDF’s stranglehold on NOAA’s disastrous “catch shares” regulation of A