The Republican Brown is bullish on "fracking," the controversial technique for unlocking vast stores of natural gas, while Warren, a Democrat, has what she calls deep concerns.

Warren favors the Cape Wind offshore wind project, which Brown opposes.

Brown is a nuclear power proponent, but Warren worries it's unsafe and doesn't want any new nuclear power plants built in the U.S.

And Warren says the Keystone XL pipeline project would be a bad investment in a dirty fuel. Brown sees it as a job creator.

To the Warren campaign, Brown's positions show he isn't at all serious about the climate threats posed by burning fossil fuels.

They knock him for votes to continue tax subsidies to oil companies, and point to the money Brown's campaign has received from people connected the oil and gas industry (about $334,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics).

"Scott Brown continues to vote for huge taxpayer subsidies to the big oil companies, even as they rake in billions in profits," Warren said. "That's the wrong direction for our country to go."

Warren, too, benefits from money from groups interested in energy policy. The League of Conservation Voters has spent about $1 million in Massachusetts to defeat Brown, including a $200,000 mail campaign announced last week to highlight Brown's "ties to Big Oil."

....Brown says the country should create incentives to develop cleaner renewables such as solar, wind and hydropower, but he says nuclear energy and domestic fossil fuels must remain an important part of the mix. Meanwhile, the nation should work to decrease overall energy use through better efficiency, he says.

Warren wants to focus more on developing renewable energy in preparation for a shift from the fossil fuels she sees at the root of the problem.

"I believe we need to get serious about climate change, and we can start by ending the subsidies to big oil companies and investing in clean energy," she said. "Right now, we're losing out on these investments to other countries."

...Warren's focus on developing renewable power drives opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport heavy tar-sands crude oil from Canada to Texas' Gulf Coast refineries.

"We should be making investments to grow the clean energy economy, not continuing to support dirty fuel," she said, dismissing claims the project would be a major job creator or drive down gas prices.

Brown counters that the pipeline will, in fact, create thousands of jobs and help suppress gas prices.

He's also enthusiastic about fracking, a technique that's recovered large reserves of natural gas by pumping volumes of water, plus sand and chemicals, deep underground to break shale apart and free the gas. Brown says it can be done safely and help achieve energy independence.

Warren, though, believes fracking poses possible health and environmental risks, particularly to the water supply. Fracking, she says, should be subjected to federal safe drinking water laws.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/10/sen_scott_brown_elizabeth_warr_1.html

She was previously a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law. Warren is an active consumer protection advocate whose work led to the conception and establishment of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has written a number of academic and popular works, and is a frequent subject of media interviews regarding the American economy and personal finance.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama. In the late 2000s, she was recognized by publications such as the National Law Journal and the Time 100 as an increasingly influential public policy figure.

....Warren was an early advocate for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The bureau was established by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama in July 2010. In anticipation of the agency's formal opening, for the first year after the bill's signing, Warren worked on implementation of the bureau as a special assistant to the president. While liberal groups and consumer advocacy groups pushed for Obama to nominate Warren as the agency's permanent director, Warren was strongly opposed by financial institutions and by Republican members of Congress who believed Warren would be an overly zealous regulator.[36][37][38]

...At a Banking Committee hearing in March, Warren questioned Treasury Department officials why criminal charges were not brought against HSBC for its money laundering practices. With her questions being continually dodged and her visibly upset, Warren then compared money laundering to drug possession, saying "if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail... But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."[49]

Warren is in favor of increasing the minimum wage and has argued that if the minimum wage had followed increases in worker productivity in the United States, it would now be at least $22 an hour.[50][51]

In May, Warren sent letters to Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve, questioning their decisions that settling rather than going to court would be more fruitful.[52] Later that month, Warren introduced her first bill, the Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, which would allow students to take out government education loans at the same rate that banks such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase pay to borrow from the federal government. Suggesting that students should get "the same great deal that banks get," Warren proposed that new student borrowers be able to take out a federally subsidized loan at 0.75%, the rate paid by banks, compared with the current 3.4% student loan rate.[53] Endorsing her bill days after its introduction, Independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders stated: "the only thing wrong with this bill is that [she] thought of it and I didn’t" on The Thom Hartmann Program.[54]

During the 2014 election cycle, Warren was a top Democratic fundraiser, supporting candidates in Ohio, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, Michigan, and Kentucky. In the aftermath of the election, Warren was appointed by Majority Leader Harry Reid (the same man who made her Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel) to become the first ever Strategic Advisor of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a position that was created just for her. The move is widely seen as an effort by Reid to lean his party more to the left following major Democratic losses in the recent election. It would also end up boosting further speculation about a possible presidential run on part of Warren in 2016.[55][56][57][58][59]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren

...Additionally, Warren has been a vocal critic of so-called free trade deals, which create major regulatory protection for intellectual property, patents and copyrights, but often remove such protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Clinton, by contrast, was a key backer of NAFTA and voted for free trade pacts with Oman, Chile and Singapore during her Senate tenure. Additionally, Clinton was a key Obama administration player when the administration began pushing the Trans Pacific Partnership - a free trade deal that Warren has publicly criticized.

Clinton was a prominent supporter of the 1996 welfare reform legislation that made it more difficult for poor families to receive government benefits. She stood by that support during her 2008 presidential campaign. With a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showing that law coincided with a rise in extreme childhood poverty, Clinton's position may open her up to criticism from Warren, who has positioned herself as a champion of the poor.

There is also Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War. During her 2012 Senate campaign, Warren was an outspoken critic of the war. As a senator, Warren is a co-sponsor of a new bill to repeal the original authorization for war in Iraq that Clinton supported.

After taking office, Clinton shelved most of his populist promises. He made Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs co-chairman, his economic czar and embraced deficit reduction as the key to wooing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to lower interest rates and fuel growth.

After Republicans took Congress in 1994, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” He championed deregulation, particularly in telecommunications and finance, which culminated in the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act boundaries on banks and the torpedoing of efforts to regulate derivatives.

Clinton did reverse some of President Ronald Reagan’s top-end tax breaks, but he also lowered capital-gains taxes, and his reforms encouraged the explosion of stock options for high-level executives. He embraced House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s welfare repeal and even flirted with carving private accounts out of Social Security.

Clinton’s trade policy was defined by and for multinational corporations and banks. His major trade accords protected the rights of investors but not workers.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/06/03/democrats-must-overcome-clinton-nostalgia/

Walmart now captures $1 of every $4 Americans spend on groceries. It’s on track to claim one-third of food sales within five years. Here’s a look at how Walmart has dramatically altered the food system — triggering massive consolidation, driving down prices to farmers, and leaving more families struggling to afford healthy food.

In his first hundred days in office, which began March 4, 1933, Roosevelt spearheaded major legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders that instituted the New Deal—a variety of programs designed to produce:

- relief (government jobs for the unemployed)

- recovery (economic growth),

--reform (through regulation of Wall Street(created the SEC), banks and transportation).

The economy improved rapidly from 1933 to 1937, but then relapsed into a deep recession. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition that formed in 1937 prevented his packing the Supreme Court. For the rest of his days in office, it blocked all proposals for major liberal legislation (apart from a minimum wage law).

It abolished many of the relief programs when unemployment practically vanished during the war. Most of the regulations on business continued in effect until they ended about 1975–1985, except for the regulation of Wall Street by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which still exists. Along with several smaller programs, major surviving programs include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which was created in 1933, and Social Security, which Congress passed in 1935.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt

Judged from the standards of today, of course, there is much we can criticize about the New Deal/Roosevelt era. It did not bring to an end the tremendous injustices that African Americans had to suffer on a day-to-day basis, and some of its activities, such as the work of the Federal Housing Administration, served to build rather than break down the walls of segregation that separated black from white in Jim Crow America.

Yet as Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented “the first time in their history” that African Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the “expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.” Indeed, it was during the New Deal, that the silent, invisible hand of racism was fully exposed as a national issue; as a problem that at the very least needed to be recognized; as something the county could no longer pretend did not exist.

http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/african-americans-and-new-deal-look-back-history

A different time. Racism is not acceptable to progressives now, but we'll take his support of the working class. We didn't need the racist southern whites to elect Obama, and we don't need them now either.

...Undeniably, the “Age of Roosevelt” and the progressive pursuit of the Four Freedoms can seem a very long time ago. But even now, after so many years of conservative political ascendancy and concerted class war from above – more than 30 years of deregulating corporate activity, reducing the taxes of the rich, assailing labor unions, shuttering industries and neglecting the public infrastructure – the democratic legacy of that generation continues to nourish us. We all live in the long, long shadow of those men and women, of what they did and what they afforded us. And in the intervening decades, the Four Freedoms and what they encompass have actually broadened. Pick any area of American life. The consequences of that generation’s commitment to the promise of those freedoms are evident. Moreover, our most volatile political and cultural contests often fall precisely along the fault lines of those freedoms.

All of which renders it all the more remarkable that we do not honor those men and women for their progressive struggles and achievements. That the right and conservative rich continue, as they always have, to work at delaying, containing and rolling back that generation’s greatest democratic accomplishments is not remarkable. But that liberals and leftists have lost their association with that generation is. How is it that the most celebrated generation in American history is not remembered for its most enduring accomplishment and greatest gift to the nation, the embedding of FDR’s Four Freedoms in the very bedrock of American life?...

http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/we-need-to-remember-the-fight-for-the-four-freedoms/