Outgoing Obama EPA Chief Gina McCarthy thinks President-elect Donald Trump will not be able to change EPA policy towards CO2, because it will be too difficult to undo her policy initiatives.
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
EPA chief says Trump has limited room to scrap climate rules
McCarthy says any attempt must be scientifically justified under Clean Air Act.
The chief architect of President Barack Obama’s climate change policies has warned the incoming Trump administration that US law and the scientific evidence of global warming will constrain any attempt to overturn her work.
With the outlook for global climate action uncertain after the US election, Gina McCarthy, the top US environmental regulator, told the Financial Times that climate change sceptics led by Donald Trump would have limited room for manoeuvre.
“It’s going to be a very high burden of proof for them,” said Ms McCarthy, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining why US law would ensure that Mr Trump could not easily abolish climate change regulations.
…
To replace Ms McCarthy, Mr Trump has nominated Scott Pruitt, a politician who has repeatedly excoriated the EPA and made it his mission to try to scupper her signature achievements.
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/e4759fea-c491-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f
I can’t help thinking Obama appointees like Gina McCarthy are in total denial about the magnitude of their loss of support. President-elect Donald Trump has an enormous mandate to liberate America from the shackles of bureaucrats like McCarthy. In a few short years, nobody will remember who she was.
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The mission of the EPA is to protect human life and the environment. And how does it go about achieving that noble mission, you may ask? Well, “When Congress writes an environmental law, we implement it by writing regulations.” Too bad for Gina et al because most of the regulations the EPA has written/enforced over the past 8 years have no Congressional laws behind them. So, her point is moot. No law, no regulation. Buh-bye, Gina
“She says” is correct. “She thinks” is probably incorrect.
Go George Go.
Go do some extended community service work for the Navajos Gina. You harmed them with EPA stupidity, and ineptitude.
All he has to do is to have EPA withdraw the endangerment finding.
It may be difficult, because EPA’s Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act is a 52 pages long document, while the Technical Support Document is 210 pages long.
However, it is not impossible, because both documents are bogus. Therefore the first thing to do is to request EPA to produce an executive summary of the Technical Support Document, not longer than a single page (currently it is 7 pages), with all external references to scientific sources attached.
Summary reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and U.S. Global Change Research Program and National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are not legitimate scientific sources, they are political documents.
It is also ridiculous to include 6 different gases in their analysis, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
So they are requested to restrict themselves for now to a single gas, carbon dioxide.
Also, any danger to public health and welfare they may envision, has to be quantified.
The document itself has to be subjected to extensive peer review, before any regulation based on it could be issued.
I’m confident, that following this procedure carbon dioxide in ambient concentrations will be taken off of the list of pollutants.
Reading McCarthy’s comments make my irony alarm sound off with a deafening screech. Her “scientific evidence ” is based on computer models which have been shown to have no predictive skill, hypotheses concerning CO2 which have never been proven and supported by a “consensus” which has no place in a scientific discussion.
This exactly the fetid mindset that has turned the EPA into the “Vatican” of the Church of Global Warming & why Ms McCarthy seems to have endowed her regulations with 10-Commandments status
Very simple solution ……… just cut 89% of the EPA’s budget !
or 97%
……..“It’s going to be a very high burden of proof for them,” said Ms McCarthy, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, outlining why US law would ensure that Mr Trump could not easily abolish climate change regulations……
Ummmm, excuse me, but doesn’t see have that bass ackwards? I though that, in science, the burden of proof was on those who are pushing and supporting a scientific theory.
It should not be hard to shoot down the CO2 regulation if Trump just brings together a panel of scientists that can show everyone the problems with the CO2-climate-change theory. Give Ms. McCarthy a series of questions on the CO2-climate change issue that she probably cannot answer–something like what they did with the Dept. of Energy.
Agreed CD. Exactly what science did Ms. McCarthy employ to establish the climate change regulations over at the EPA?
My thoughts exactly. They’ve been putting the cart before the horse for so long — they now believe it belongs there! As a matter of fact, it was never even a horse, just a stubborn ass.
Not sure what is more breathtaking, her ignorance of climate science or her ignorance of how her own government works?
Gina really must be up all night burning the stupid from both ends!
A dispassionate cost/benefit study of the EPA and the effectiveness of its regulations, showed even thirty years ago, that the EPA policies, cost hundreds of thousands of more lives than they have ever been able to save through their draconian regulations. That alone should justify its abolishment as it exists today. A gentleman called Ralph Keeney did such a cost/benefit for society. Another by name of ‘Tengs’ and his co-authors, did it even more effectively.
Can you link to those studies please?
I’m fairly confident enough documentation can be turned up that the CO2 endangerment finding was based on studies and data that violated EPA and legal constraints on quality, sourcing, and review, and that if this is the case it’s possible the finding can just be voided on that basis.
The correct end-game of course is Congressional action to amend the Clean Air Act to remove CO2 and climate change from the EPA’s remit absent further specific Congressional action on that front.
The finding can be voided on the basis that it does not account for the incontrovertible dangers of LOW CO2 and the failure of the EPA to establish what an optimal range of CO2 partial pressure is. That alone is enough to bounce the finding back to the EPA where it can be killed by Trump himself. It is easy to show that the optimal CO2 is far above today’s low levels, the disagreement among scientist over what an optimal CO2 is will be enough to stagnate any finding forever.
Rational Societies usually rank their societal risks, showing what is most likely to directly kill, injure, or cause the premature deaths of people in their society. Rationally, they then spend money toward the top of that list to relieve the most serious problems which are usually to do with education, energy, jobs and the habits of ignorance and poverty. The EPA has consistently spent its billions, toward the bottom of such a ranking. That, is money flat-out wasted to no good purpose.
The two biggest and interconnected problems that humanity and the environment have faced for the last few hundred years and still today, are IGNORANCE and POVERTY, both of which stand a chance of being beaten by EDUCATION and affordable, assured ENERGY.
Rant over.
So very interesting and so very similar to one of our local politician’s quotations. This local pol was quoted when asked what would happen if her party would lose the (municipal) election.
She replied that it wouldn’t matter because the things her party had executed, (Local Agenda 21, that is) were constructed so as to have deep roots and would be very difficult to remove.
I remember thinking how antidemocratic that is. Your populace votes you out for the things you have been doing, but you purposely (and stealthily) design so as to counteract an unfavorable democratic outcome.
I guess our pol was talkin’ bike lanes and other ‘Greenest City’ crap, but on a whole other political level it’s the same deep left, deep green refrain and strategy.
For the greenies, Democracy is just a code word for “absolute rule.” They think they know it all – just ask them.
When leftists say “power to the people,” they mean dissipate the power of states (Gaue) and most mid-level institutions among so many people that it becomes diffuse, disorganized, and ineffective. At the same time, the State (Reich) acts like a sponge, absorbing all meaningful power. As an example, the Third Reich represented the elimination of political parties as “unification,” when it was the opposite. Carried to its extreme, and it soon was, there was nothing to stand between the individual and the State, no protection, no rights, nothing at all.
I don’t think anyone knows who she is now, either. She’s an archetype of a highly educated person who has zero common sense. Goodbye and good riddance.
The main problem I see with the scientific backing for McCarthy’s position is that institutional science itself is now thoroughly corrupted – as exposed by Hal Lewis. She – or at least someone on her team who understands such things – can simply pick from the virtual infinity of ‘peer reviewed’ papers to support any conclusion whatsoever.
Virtually all of these papers will have been generated using some form of GCM or other models and the conclusions reached on the basis of them is presented as some sort of irrefutable concrete evidence. It doesn’t seem to matter that none of these models has passed any sort of even rudimentary validation and are shown to be wildly in error over and over by the data. The climate industry, including the once prestigious institutions and journals, all accept the models as being more real than reality itself. Everyone with even the most basic of science educations knows that this is pure pseudoscience but nevertheless that is how things have tragically gone.
So when the EPA present screeds of this voodoo science as defense, even though the landing team will know and say that it’s pseudoscience, how would a court find since this is how badly the whole of science has been corrupted?
And on that note – how is it ever going to be possible to drain the academic swamp?
Not to mention the MSM swamp.
cephus0, “So when the EPA present screeds of this voodoo science as defense, even though the landing team will know and say that it’s pseudoscience, how would a court find since this is how badly the whole of science has been corrupted?”
Here is one way, and here’s a second version.
If I manage to publish the paper, the EPA CO2 endangerment finding is out the window.
It should not be difficult as the whole CO2 thing was not based on science. Consensus is not science. Just ask someone to measure the heating by CO2.
“President-elect Donald Trump has an enormous mandate to liberate America from the shackles of bureaucrats like McCarthy”
Mandate? You must be kidding; Trump doesn’t have a mandate for anything, except to leave – gracefully before he’s impeached; all he has is a sharply divided country. In fact HRC won the popular vote by 2,833,220 votes and still counting and we’ll see just how successful he is in 6 months, let alone 4 years.
And on the topic of “Swamp Draining”, he’s filling it up with the worst swamp dwellers imaginable: Mnuchin for Treasury, Tillerson for State, Perry for Energy, Stallone(!!!) for Chair of the NEA, Linda McMahon (!!!) for SMBA!! It’s a veritable circus and a who’s who of idiots and imbeciles just like him. The only respectable member of his cabinet-to-be is Nikki Haley as our Ambassador to the UN (until 1/21/2017, he’s still a private citizen and should remember that before he embarrasses himself and the nation even further with anymore tweets to or about China, drones or anything else). He is a babbling idiot of the worst kind.
Climate change notwithstanding, the whole thing is joke and an international embarrassment!
1. He is inheriting a sharp(ton)ly divided country.
2. The electoral vote system was crafted to prevent domination by the big states/cities. Thankfully.
3. You may rest easier if you accept that the other team has the ball for a while. Oh, acceptance isn’t in your lexicon? pity….
4. Thus far the only election fraud discovered has shown precincts with more votes for Hillary than the precincts have voters, and this is after minimal investigation.
The Democratic Party offered the choice between a totalitarian fan-boy and an unashamed liar and unindicted felon. And in the course of the election, revealed itself to be corrupt through-and-through.
Your team is a bad joke, T. Madigan, and an embarrassment to American society, to the Constitution, and to US politics.
You are entitled to youtnown opinion but not your own facts. Sore loser.
What facts are you referring to? HRC did win the popular vote by almost 3M. He IS a babbling idiot and that is a fact.
The theme that Hillary Rodham Clinton won a popular vote majority is due almost entirely to California. I lived in California for nearly fifty years, and voted for over thirty, and was never once required to show positive ID. Skanky votes from one state, who might be dead, nonexistent, currently living in another state, or non-citizens should not count. That is also not counting the very interesting classic ploy from Detroit, where some 250 precincts showed more votes than voters. (But the New York Times states authoritatively that there was almost no f r a ud)sarc
@T Madigan:
“….What facts are you referring to? HRC did win the popular vote by almost 3M……..”
Get this through your head if that is possible T Madigan: Selectively cherry-picking your facts does not get HRC into the White House.
Adding together the vote totals from the states to get nationwide totals is really (IMHO) a pointless exercise because the popular nationwide vote DOES NOT and NEVER HAS decided who goes to the White House. The Electoral College electors decide who gets there based on which candidate won the most states. This is because our Founding Fathers didn’t want a handful of large states and/or urban areas (California, the Northeast, Chicago, SE Florida, etc.) dictating to the rest of the nation.
The value and significance of the nationwide popular vote totals is exaggerated and overblown for political purposes. It’s sad and pathetic to see so many people in this country who don’t seen to realize and understand that.
You are really going to enjoy the next 8 years. PLease stick around for our entertainment.
Yes, I will; he will make for great satirical fodder, just like the fictions many of you cling to on this blog. And, with a mouth like his, it will be a laugh a minute – I actually don’t think he listens to what comes out of his mouth. 8 years, I think not. He will be lucky if he survives 6 months before he’s impeached.
Goodey, the meltdown is in full swing and we’ve got front row seats to the show.
The only joke fodder here is you.
You must be HURTING so, so bad. !!
Funny to watch a rabid dumbocrat getting so off his face ranting 🙂
Some contributions do not require a sarcasm! But some contestants need a reality check!
Actually, Trump has already begun uniting what Obama sharply divided beginning 8 years ago. People across all spectrums of age, race, income and education came together to vote for Trump and vote out the corrupt, elitist, globalist agenda.
MAGA!
He has had many investments. Some have been successful, and some have not. He has learned to spot a fraudulent business proposal, before investing too deeply in it. The key is to not get in too deep, before you can see how well it is performing, and not trust data given to you, by those with a vested interest in the success of the enterprise. Those are the exact skills that we need to evaluate the success that the “climate change cabal” has had in wisely investing taxpayer funds, and the results the public has received for those investments.
Any reasonable analysis of this political gambit, will result in its rapid de-funding. It is not as complicated as Gina would like us to believe. The climate changes, and so do the political winds. Adjustment is preferable to denial of what is obvious.
HRC actually lost the popular vote if you consider the 4 million cast for the libertarian. How many of those votes would have gone to HRC? I doubt that any would have. So, yeah, she got more votes than Trump, but she did not win the majority..
Good point, Just as relevant is Trump ran against (1) the GOP establishment (2) the Dem establishment (3) the most insider candidate ever (Hillary), and (4) the mainstream media. And Won! This while spending about 1/2 as much money as Hillary. That type of efficiency is badly needed in Washington. While I am not willing to defend all Trump’s positions (hell 6 months after he makes them, often in a reactionary tweet, he is no longer defending many of his old positions). That does not bother me one bit … it just says he is not a professional politician (a class of societal leaches unfit for the office of president) and showing the ability to learn and adjust. I did not vote Trump but am VERY pleased with what I have seen so far.
Yes dearie, Of course Hillary won. NOT !!
Now off you trot back to your padded cell.
I don’t expect Trump to play a Robin Hood. He will be himself, as always, for better or for worse.
Hey Madiman.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/19/us/elections/electoral-college-results.html
Donald Trump is the next POTUS..
SMILE and be very, very HAPPY !!!
http://metrocosm.com/election-2016-map-3d:
“Election maps are telling you big lies about small things
The typical red/blue election map is in some ways deceiving. The one below shows the county-level results for the 2016 election. To look at all the red it would appear Republicans dominated the race. In reality, Democrats received a larger share of the popular vote.
“As with most maps that represent information using color, red/blue election maps are great for communicating categorical data (in this case, which candidate won county X?). But they don’t do a very good job conveying magnitude (how important is county X compared to other counties?).”
Many Democrats seem to be under the mistaken impression that people elect presidents. In fact, states elect presidents. Otherwise the country would be screwed:
?w=590&h=429
If you removed only California’s popular votes from the total, this is the result you would get, as of November 16:
Clinton: 55,889,446
Trump: 57,760,819
Just get rid of California….
Ref: http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/popular-vote-results-2016-clinton-trump-2012-2008-vs-electoral-college-california-uncounted-ballots-new-york-update-totals-final/
Steven Goddard puts it very nicely..
http://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Screen-Shot-2016-12-19-at-8.19.32-PM.png
The popular vote is meaningless, a footnote at most.
Clinton benefited from rampant fr@ud. No one knows how many votes she got from live, legal voters who voted only once, but three million fewer than reported is a reasonable estimate. Not just in CA, but in OR, WA, CO (which vote by mail), NV (the Dinghy Harry machine), MN, IL, NY, NH and VA, for starters. It also occurred in states that Trump managed to win in spite of the dirty tricks, like MI and WI.
Because there are so many rotten precincts in so many states, we need the Electoral College more than ever, in order to lessen the effect of so much corruption.
T. Madigan “he’s filling it up with the worst swamp dwellers imaginable: …, Tillerson for State”
At least most of the other names you mentioned are clearly skeptics.
But, as far as Rex Tillerson, I wouldn’t stoop to calling him a “swamp dweller,” but all the rationalizations and epicycle style explanations for his OWN WORDS, Tillerson is clearly Paris Accord pushing warmist”
oooops, another proggie fail
There is no national popular vote for president. Each state has a popular vote to decide the number of electoral college votes the candidate will receive.
Around 3 million out of a total US population of over 300 million. You act as if it’s a massive margin when it’s actually tiny. Even only counting the 120 million or so that voted, it’s tiny. With only a few historical exceptions, the popular vote has split more or less evenly between the main candidates every election. Roughly half the voters are voting for the loser each time. It makes any claim of “winning” the popular vote dubious at best. The margin of victory is consistently miniscule by comparison to the total voter turnout.
In short, the Mob Vote is a meaningless metric. Those who pretend it means something are no friends of democracy. They are friends of mobocracy. In a mobocracy, the biggest mob wins. And nigh invariably it’s the Left who stir up a mob when they cannot have their way.
Yes, socialist scum like you are an embarrassment. We get it.
Brilliant reply, 2hotel9. Just what I would expect from the likes of a Trump voter.
Ah, you gonna cry now? Squeeze out some crocodile tears for us, we love that.
She’ll be lucky if her and ilk aren’t investigated for collusion with special interest environmental groups, and who knows what other crimes have been committed at the EPA in the last eight year. The next month couldn’t arrive soon enough.
Just defund the EPA and fire all its employees.
Are you a betting man, Gina?
It was always hard to get a barn out. Not only because of the crap, but also because of the cattle that is in it.
Gina is bluffing, and she knows it. Thre are several simple routes to undoing CPP and Wotus.
1. Easiest is for Trump,to carefully vet his SCOTUS nomination, as SCOTUS has already stayed both until the cases reach it, on grounds they are both likely unconstitutional. Opinion concerning CPP by none other than Larry Tribe, foremost US con law scolar, at Harvard Law. 2. With control of both chambers, Congress can clarify the definitions in CAA and CWA with simple legislative amendments. The former to make clear congressional intent on air pollution did not include CO2. Such a bill has already been introduced in the House. The latter to make clear federal authority does not stretch beyond navigable waters, appropriately redefining navigable. 3. More problematic, longer lead time is redo SCC, a required input under CAA and other existing laws about regulations. 4. Most problematic is to redo the endangerment finding pursuant to Mass. v. EPA, because that will get tired up in endless litigation by greens.
Oklahoma AG Pruit was a leader on (1) and knows about (2).
According to current law, “navigable waters” include a tiny ravine with enough flow to float a toy boat.
Which is why I said suitably redefine navigable. Not intermitent. Not toy boat flow. Maybe not even permanently canoe-able, although that gets close to where I would draw the line for true pollution control purposes. All that oyher water stuff gets left to the states.
My farm has a ~ one surface acre dammed stock pond in a natural watershed coming off the neighbors back fields. 8 foot designed max depth when full. When it rains heavily, or during spring melt, it overflows out a carefully designed concrete and corrigated steel culvert system into Penn Hollow Creek in front of the farmhouse, itself intermittent until about 2 miles down valley. Penn Hollow Creek from there is toy boatable not canoe-able (it mostly a meter wide and six inches deep in summer. It flows into Otter Creek, which sort of is canoe-ableif you don’t mind portaging around snags and a beaver dam. It is about 5 meters wide and a meter deep except at the beaver dam, and used to support real fish otters before they were trapped out in the 1880’s. About three miles further on down, Otter Creek empties into the Wisconsin River at a state sponsored fishing boat launching ramp for the River (one of several at a local state park and at state maintained slough access points, all about 40 miles upstream from the Mississippi. Trailerable outboards for walleye, bass, catfish, waterfowl hunting. That state launching ramp is where, IMO, Wisconsin River navigability stops as does EPA regulation of waterways, and Wisconsin takes over. Wotus would have EPA regulating my Wisconsin permitted, dam design approved, stocked fish licensed farm pond. NUTS.
Headline has a misspelled word.
No, just not the US spelling.
These are the same prophets that were dead sure that Hillary would win in a landslide.
Clearly McCathy is of the mind that the science is settled, which is why she believes that changing the laws will be hard to do. She is going to be in for a big shock once she realizes how politicized the science has become under her watch and how easy it will be to get to the balanced science.
Let’s see:
Power of an appointed EPA administrator vs power of an elected president.
I think I know which side I’m voting on…