Obama Adviser During Recession Is Given New Challenge: Climate Change

“It’s not the harrowing urgency of the economy falling off the cliff,” Brian Deese, 37, said of his new job during a recent interview in his West Wing office, just steps down the hall from Mr. Obama’s.  “But it’s the urgency of, ‘We have a limited amount of time left to change the trajectory on a really urgent crisis.’ ”

Last week Mr. Deese unveiled the heart of Mr. Obama’s agenda:  a blueprint for cutting greenhouse gas pollution in the United States up to 28 percent over the next decade.  The proposal, which is centered on Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to drastically reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s cars and coal-fired power plants, is the White House’s formal submission to the United Nations ahead of a global warming summit meeting in Paris in December.
...
“With no business experience at all, he plunged into the auto thing with us and really figured it out,” said Steven Rattner, the financial adviser who led Mr. Obama’s auto bailout team.  “He added an unbelievable amount of value with the way he thinks things through.  I could totally trust his judgment.”

Instead of making the case for fighting global warming in the language of an environmental activist, Mr. Deese argues from the perspective of an economist, just as he did during the darkest days of the recession.

He loves to cite his favorite new statistic: a recent report by the International Energy Agency that found that last year, global gross domestic product grew 3 percent, while carbon dioxide emissions flatlined. Historically, economic growth has paralleled the growth in fossil fuel emissions.

“The data show it’s possible to grow the economy without growing pollution,” Mr. Deese said with visible excitement.
...
Raised in Belmont, Mass., a Boston suburb, Mr. Deese grew up hiking, sailing and fishing in a home where the environment was important.  (His mother is an engineer who works in renewable energy, and his father is a political science professor at Boston College.)  He graduated in 2000 from Middlebury College in Vermont, went to Washington to work in international aid and was soon hired as a policy analyst by Mr. Sperling, who was then at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization.

Read more at Obama Adviser During Recession Is Given New Challenge: Climate Change