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  • 2017-04-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Obama's EPA Director Say the Clean Power Plan Would Have 'No Effect' on Carbon Emissions? (en)
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  • During a March 2017 appearance on the HBO television show Real Time with Bill Maher, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) was asked to defend the Trump administration's announced rollback of Obama-era environmental regulations, including the Clean Power Plan (CPP), an EPA initiative seeking to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants: Santorum's claim wasn't uttered in a vacuum. Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin) made a similar statement during his run for the presidency in September 2015: Did the Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Obama, Gina McCarthy, ever actually make such statements? Not that we could find. We did encounter instances in which her reluctance to disagree with such remarks under questioning were misrepresented as affirmative statements, however. For example, a July 2014 article posted by the Institute for Energy Research purported to quote McCarthy admitting the proposed plan would have no impact on climate: What we learned upon reviewing the video and transcript of the exchange, however, is that McCarthy's so-called admission would be more accurately described as a refusal to accept Barrasso's narrow framing of the question (via C-SPAN): As we have seen, excerpts from the exchange were subsequently used precisely to put words in McCarthy's mouth. Another version appears to have originated from testimony McCarthy gave before the U.S. House Science Committee in July 2015. This is how she responded when chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) challenged her to defend the CPP against criticisms that it would barely reduce global warming at all: Clearly, McCarthy did not say, nor did she want to be taken as saying, that the Clean Power Plan would have little or no impact. She neither agreed nor disagreed with the specific claim that global temperatures would be reduced by only one one-hundredth of a degree. Instead, she (again) expressed the view that the plan was designed to be a starting point for wider global action, not an immediate, one-off remedy for global warming. Where did the one one-hundredth of a degree figure come from? Smith correctly attributed it to another ex-Obama official, former assistant secretary of energy Charles McConnell (2011-2013), who became a vocal critic of the Clean Power Plan. In 2014, he wrote: McConnell didn't say how these estimates were generated, but they are in the same ballpark as others calculated with a climate modeling tool used by the EPA itself called Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-Induced Climate Change (MAGICC). Immediate reductions in global CO2 emissions and temperatures were not among the benefits touted in a fact sheet on the plan published by the EPA in August 2015. (en)
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