During the January 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade wondered whether Carol Browner, who President-elect Barack Obama has designated as assistant to the president for energy and climate change, will “have a hard time getting confirmed” because of her supposed “socialist ties.” In fact, as FoxNews.com itself has noted, Browner's newly created position “does not require Senate confirmation.”

Additionally, Kilmeade claimed that Browner is “taking a job we didn't really know we need filled: global warming czar. Some ... don't even believe we are experiencing that.” As Media Matters for America has noted, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that "[w]arming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that “it is extremely likely [greater than a 95 percent chance] that humans have exerted a substantial warming influence on climate.”

From the January 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: President-elect Barack Obama's pick for global warming czar, Carol Browner -- she's got socialist ties. She led a commission of a socialist group which calls for global governance. Mr. Obama's transition team defended Browner's membership on the committee, but should -- but should we be concerned at all if she tries to become this czar? John Fund from The Wall Street Journal joins us. John, you know her. Is she a socialist?

FUND: No. Look, I think it's very important that we don't get fixed on the labels. I think we should look at, though, the overlap between some socialist ideas, which involve central planning of an economy, and the environmental movement, which is very interested in over-regulating the economy in order to achieve, I think, very dubious and nebulous goals on global warming.

KILMEADE: So should she have a hard time getting confirmed? I mean, she's listed on this website -- she's one of 14 people on this socialist web site -- and she's taking a job we didn't really know we need filled: global warming czar. Some [unintelligible] don't even believe we are experiencing that.

FUND: Well, just remember, the word “socialist” in Europe doesn't quite mean now what it used to mean. Many of the parties that are belonging to that group that she spoke at back in June, the Socialist International, are social democratic parties. They support a free-market economy, albeit with lots of government regulation and lots of welfare-state spending, but they don't believe that industry should be nationalized the way the British Labor Party used to do before Tony Blair.

So, I think that what this should be a springboard for is a discussion about just how much the environmental movement wants to try to wrench our economy into a completely different type of arrangement in a very dubious desire to try to lower the overall temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree over the next hundred years.