Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as climate change czar, was listed as a member of a socialist group’s 14-member “Commission for a Sustainable World Society” panel until last week, the Washington Times reports this morning. The group not only calls for “global governance” but scaling-back economies in order to address global warming.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Obama transitition team defends Browner’s role in the socialist organization, noting that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is also a member. Very true. And Prime Minister Brown is a member of the Labour Party — a political organization that grew from trade union and socialist parties of the 19th century. The party is, to this day, a self-admitted proponont of “democratic socialism“.

‘The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.’

That’s from the party’s own website. So noting that Brown is also a member isn’t exactly a defense against the fact that Obama’s climate change czar has ties to socialists.

The organization has even more draconian solutions to global warming than even most of the biggest alarmists can claim to.

Socialist International says such “flexible mechanisms” do not clamp down hard enough on polluters.

The organization often takes a decidedly critical view of the U.S.

At this summer’s meeting, the group issued a statement on economics that blasted the “neo-liberal market ideology and the unilateralist, U.S.-dominated approach in the global economic system,” and attacked the U.S. for dominating international financial institutions.

At its meeting earlier in 2008 in Santiago, Chile, Socialist International endorsed “global governance” as the solution to the world’s problems of peace and climate change…

At a July meeting in St. Petersburg, the commission said developed countries “should think of decreasing current consumption levels” – which would mean shrinking their economies – in order to help the environment.

As for whether or not Team Obama knew about Mrs. Browner’s ties prior to her selection, an aide speaking to the Times on the condition of anonymity confirms that her seat on the commission wasn’t a surprise.

More: Gateway Pundit, The American Spectator, and JammieWearingFool.