Climate change deniers are really about solutions, said Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy on Thursday.
Just as long as the solutions flow to their advantage.
“Climate deniers are not about a lack of data,” McCarthy said during an environmental summit held at George Washington University. “They’re about deniers of whether or not the solutions, once you recognize the problem, are going to be to their advantage or not.”
McCarthy was at the university to address a packed house of students and environmental advocates ahead of Earth Day celebrations on Friday, when the Obama administration will join 150 countries in signing a deal agreed to in December to address the threat of climate change.
She said the EPA is a public health protector, but “if you think climate change isn’t impacting public health, then you have to open your eyes and take a closer look.”
She said the “data is there” and the understanding that it is a public health threat is there.
“So, while EPA struggles to provide good clean air to everybody, safe drinking water, healthy safe places for kids to live and work,” she said, “we also have to recognize that an unstable climate is impacting every single human being on the face of this earth.”
“If we do not do something, you are the very people whose future is being robbed.”
McCarthy brushed off concerns that a Supreme Court stay of the agency’s far-reaching climate regulations, the Clean Power Plan, will impact the strength of the agency to address climate change.
She said the stay adds only a few months to “the court drama” that the agency anticipated would come. “Everything EPA does is litigated. And much of what we litigate goes to the Supreme Court.
“We didn’t lose anything,” she said about the high court’s halt to the climate plan, adding that the stay did not address the merits of arguments addressing the rule. McCarthy said the subtexts to the decision was the court saying, “this is a big deal and we want a piece of it.”
The Clean Power Plan directs states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions a third by 2030, which 30 states and dozens of groups are opposing in federal appeals court, arguing that the plan is an illegal attempt at federal overreach.
McCarthy said they knew all the legal issues being raised before the rule was made law and made changes to address them before finalization.
“I am enormously confident that we will meet the merits test up the chain. And that this will hold,” she said.
