Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/11/2015
PARIS – Regardless of political statements from Republican lawmakers asserting that the U.S. Congress does not support the Obama administration’s efforts to address climate change, the administration has the support of the American people, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said Thursday.
“If you’re worried about rhetoric you hear from the U.S., that the U.S. government may not be committed, it’s a democratic process, and democracy is speaking. The public sector, the private sector are all here to tell you that climate change is real, it’s happening, the U.S. is doing something about it, and we are going to continue to provide international leadership on this effort,” McCarthy said during a side event at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
While the Republican-led Congress has taken steps to send the message it does not stand behind the administration’s actions, most recently by passing Congressional Review Act resolutions disapproving of the EPA’s carbon emissions standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants, the Obama administration has blazed ahead, stating that efforts to overturn the rules will fail.
“If you’re worried about whether it’s going to stand up, ask me, ask EPA, for 45 years we’ve been reducing pollution to the tune of 75 percent of the pollutants have been reduced, while our GDP has tripled,” McCarthy said. “We will make this work. We have written it in a way that it will stand the test of time.”
Also speaking at the event, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, Janet McCabe, went so far as to state that the regulations, which require states to develop action plans to meet federally set emissions reduction guidelines and essentially mandate the use of carbon capture and storage on all new-build coal-fired power plants, will deliver even greater emissions reductions than advertised.
EPA has said the existing-source regulation, the Clean Power Plan, will reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. “That’s just what the regulation says with this rule, as with many others and with others in the past that dealt with more traditional air pollutants, we know that there’s a tradition, there’s a practice of things moving faster in terms of reductions than even the regulation requires or contemplates, especially when those regulations are built on the innovations that are happening anyway,” McCabe said.
Rick Duke, deputy director for climate policy at the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, also highlighted the opinions of American citizens over the opinions of Congress. “What we’ve seen is that in recent years, poll after poll after poll is showing that broader swaths of America, both private sector and everyday citizens, want to see us deal with this challenge,” he said. “It is really no overstatement to say that the world all around us here this week is clear about the imperative to act on climate change, and increasingly every American is aware of the need to act on climate change, and so we think we’ve got the wind at our back adn proven tools at our disposal to get the job done."
