The Lioness In Spring

Browner's critics once called her a socialist. Now even some of those who once counted themselves as her adversaries in the early '90s, like Jim Rogers of Duke Energy—one of the nation's largest utilities—say they are impressed by her ability to grow and negotiate compromises with industry. "She's tough, but she's a lot more pragmatic than people give her credit for," he says.

Browner is appropriately ironic about her nickname from the Obama campaign: the czarina. ("The only problem is that there were no czarinas without czars in history," she jokes. "It was all courtesy of their husbands.") But she takes her coordinating role seriously. And she denies any suggestion that she is dominating policy. Her mandate, she says, is merely to encourage all "the cabinet departments and agencies to sort of work across the traditional boundaries." Browner says one of her main goals is to orchestrate a single national policy so that different government agencies aren't confusing industries and states by setting different policies. Example: DOT regulates autos, but so does EPA because of the 1990 Clean Air Act. "We don't want car companies saying, 'I have to do this for EPA and this for DOT'."

Her colleagues in the Obama Cabinet seem to have only nice things to say so far. "I give her very, very high marks," says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican, who says he's been to six meetings chaired by Browner already. "She's very inclusive. She has really reached out and cast a very broad net." In other interviews with NEWSWEEK, Energy Secretary Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar also praised Browner for her performance. "I'm very happy," says Chu. "She is really bringing various stakeholders into the same room and making sure these discussions are occurring."

There are, to be sure, some who complain they're not yet part of the discussion. Industry lobbyists remain wary that Obama and Browner are still slighting traditional energy sources such as oil, gas and nuclear, favoring renewables such as solar and wind (the exception is clean coal, a big Obama focus). Renewables, after all, will play only a small part in America's energy future for decades to come. "We have not seen any explicit policies that will accelerate the development of American oil and gas resources here at home," says Karen Harbert of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She hopes the administration won't end up "picking winners and losers … What we want to see is a very open and transparent discussion with the private sector, on whose back the ultimate responsibility will fall for implementing the energy and environmental policies. It's very important that we have a permanent seat at the table."

Others, like Mike Morris, the CEO of American Electric Power in Ohio, say they've still got open mind about where Obama is going. "I would hope we've all grown since the '90s," he says, noting the utility industry too has learned that compliance with previous EPA regimes, like the Clean Air Act, "has not been as expensive as we feared it would be. Our company was one of those leading the just-say-no crowd 10 years ago. I hope Carol Browner and her team understand we're heading in the right direction."

One big test of that, Morris says, will be the outcome of the administration's cap-and-trade proposal for restricting pollutants by auctioning off all emissions nationwide. Under the plan, overpolluting companies whose emissions exceed the limit, or cap, buy "allowances" from companies that don't. But legislators from industrial states that rely heavily on coal power, like Indiana, say they'll be unfairly penalized by having to pay utilities that don't pollute as much in places like California, resulting in a huge jump in costs to their local consumers. Sensing a political storm, Obama recently indicated that he'd accommodate their concerns, possibly by rethinking how to distribute revenues.

Browner herself has been through this kind of controversy before, when the Clinton administration sought to tax BTUs, or heat content, penalizing consumers. It was a disaster that contributed to the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994. As a result, Rogers of Duke Energy says he thinks Browner and Obama—and Dems on Capitol Hill—will find a compromise. "She evolved during her time at EPA," he says. "At the end of the day we were able to reach a settlement with her" on a clean-coal plan that required Duke to spend $1.8 billion retrofitting its plants. (Rogers adds that that deal sat frozen for the past eight years because of "ideologues" in the Bush administration who didn't want to push EPA initiatives.) By several accounts, Browner has jumped into the middle of the cap-and-trade debate. "She's the central player in the administration," says Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, who heads a key subcommittee.