With her most of her friends on the left otherwise occupied, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on Wednesday faced off with Republican members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee during a long and at some points heated hearing on the use of “sound science” at the EPA. “The Environmental Protection Agency has become an agency in pursuit of a purely political agenda rather than an agency that protects the environment,” charged committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) during his opening statement.
McCarthy faced to the standard argument from committee Republicans: that EPA regulations will harm the economy without producing meaningful environmental benefits. One of the many topics breached was the administration’s climate action agenda, at the center of which is the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. The CPP, the implementation of which is currently on hold under a Supreme Court order, would require stated to develop action plans to meet federally set emissions reduction goals.
Smith, as he has many times, described the rule as a “power grab” that will lead to “all pain and no gain.”
The CPP played a central role in the international climate negotiations in December, which resulted in the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the first universal climate change deal of its type. That too is “all pain and no gain” according to Smith, who quoted a study by 27 climate scientists that found that if all of the 177 parties that have signed the agreement meet their commitments, the resulting reduction in global warming would be only one-sixth of a degree in the next 85 years.
Asked if she disagreed with the scientists’ conclusion, McCarthy shot back, “I disagree with the way you’re characterizing it, Mr. Chairman, with all due respect it is a tremendous step in the right direction.”
The commitments in the Paris Agreement do in fact fall short of the goal of limiting global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius – that fact has long been acknowledged by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the parties to the accord. For this reason, the deal includes a “ratcheting” mechanism that would require parties to revisit their commitments every five years and increase their ambition.
“There is not a single country that signed that expecting that the 2020 goals would get us where we need to be. It is a step in that direction, and it should provide us an opportunity to get the necessary reductions,” McCarthy said.
Smith pushed McCarthy several times, interrupting her on occasion, to state if she agreed or disagreed with the conclusion of the scientists, finally exclaiming; “It’s clear you don’t disagree with their conclusion, you may think it’s a beginning, but you can’t disagree with their conclusion.” To which McCarthy replied, “I don’t even know … the context of their conclusion.”
McCarthy is no stranger to the committee’s hearing room, as was pointed out by the two Democratic members who made it to the hearing Wednesday. The others, Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) explained, were on the House floor, participating in a sit-in in an attempt to force a gun-control vote in the wake of the deadly shooting at the Pulse nightclub last week in Orlando, Fla.
Johnson herself left after giving an opening statement and asking her round of questions, during which time she scolded the majority for their treatment of the EPA. According to Johnson, in the current Congress alone, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee has sent 28 oversight requests to the EPA and has launched 12 EPA-related investigations. The agency has delivered more than 15,000 documents consisting of 139,000 pages to the panel, she said.
“We are imposing an incredible burden on the hard-working men and women of the EPA and spending a lot of taxpayers’ dollars in the process. … The sum total result of all this committee’s oversight can be measured more in press releases than in any concrete findings that could justify the time and resources EPA has had to expend in trying to satisfy the majority’s demands,” Johnson said, going on to accuse the majority of “trying to score political points through efforts to undercut EPA’s important work.”
