EPA chief: Climate fight will help boost economy
President Barack Obama’s top environmental official wasted no time Tuesday taking on opponents of the administration’s plan to crack down on global warming pollution.
In her first speech as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy told an audience at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., that curbing climate-altering pollution will spark business innovation, grow jobs and strengthen the economy.
The message was classic Obama, who has long said the environment and the economy aren’t in conflict and has sold ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gases as a means to jump-start a clean energy economy.
McCarthy signaled Tuesday that she was ready for the fight, saying the agency would continue issuing new rules, regardless of claims by Republicans and industry groups that under Obama the EPA has been the most aggressive and overreaching since it was formed more than 40 years ago.
“Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs?” said McCarthy, referring to one of the favorite talking points of Republicans and industry groups.
“Let’s talk about this as an opportunity of a lifetime, because there are too many lifetimes at stake,” she said of efforts to address global warming.
McCarthy acknowledged the agency had been the most productive in its history. But she said Tuesday that “we are not just about rules and regulations, we are about getting environmental improvement.”
Improvement, she said, could be made “everywhere.”
That optimistic vision runs counter to claims by Republican lawmakers and some industry groups that more rules will kill jobs and fossil fuel industries. The EPA under Obama has already put in place or proposed new rules to reduce carbon pollution from cars and trucks, large smokestacks, and new power plants — regulations that McCarthy helped draft as head of the air pollution office.
Next on its agenda is the nation’s existing fleet of coal-fired power plants, the largest single source of carbon dioxide left. Obama in a June speech gave the agency until June 2014 to draft those regulations.