President-elect Joe Biden on a daily basis has been announcing high-level appointments to his administration that will take control of the federal executive branch on January 20th. None of the individuals come as a shock, but many are no less objectionable in terms of the radical policy shift they portend for America, particularly on climate policy and energy development.
Mr. Biden is expected to appoint Gina McCarthy to be “Domestic Climate Coordinator,” a new position to be housed in the White House Executive Office of the President. From this perch, she will ensure the multitude of federal agencies regulate and manage their responsibilities around reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Mr. Biden this week announced cabinet appointments that will implement climate policy overseen by Ms. McCarthy. They include Jennifer Granholm for Secretary of Energy, who was Michigan Governor and champion of “renewable” solar and wind energy; and Michael Regan for the Environmental Protection Agency, an African American who is the Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and espouses “environmental justice” for communities of color. The president-elect also is expected to name Congresswoman Deb Haaland of New Mexico for Secretary of the Interior, who is opposed to decades long energy development on federal lands.
This appointment of Ms. McCarthy would follow Biden’s naming of former Secretary of State, John Kerry, as “Special Envoy” for climate change with a seat on the National Security Council. These new elevated positions, which overlay all domestic and foreign policy, clearly show the seriousness of the incoming Biden-Harris administration to shift climate and energy policies in a radical, ominous direction.
Ms. McCarthy is fanatical when it comes to climate change, that is, mankind’s tangential role in global warming. She previously served as an environmental regulator in Massachusetts and headed the Environmental Protection Agency in Barack Obama’s second term. She currently heads the Natural Resources Defense Council. One of the major black marks against her time as EPA chief was her mishandling of the catastrophic water crisis in Flint, Michigan and contaminating the Animus River in Colorado. Yet, she will be more influential than ever in the Biden White House.
The enormous regulatory and financial power wielded by the federal government will be steered to all things climate change under Ms. McCarthy. Among the countless policy restrictions coming soon will affect oil and gas leasing on federal lands and offshore, emissions standards, and new mandates on the financial sector for more Green project investments.
Economic activity necessarily results in carbon emissions, including the products we produce and consume, the means by which we travel, and the heat and air conditioning in our homes and workplaces. Proposed Green New Deal policies to reduce carbon emissions necessarily will harm the economy; specifically many of the 300 million non-wealthy Americans whose jobs will be eliminated and the higher costs everyone will pay more for energy, goods and services across the board.
Ms. McCarthy’s obsession is for reducing carbon emissions, regardless of the resulting economic dislocation. Yet any “success” in doing so provides zero guarantees the Earth’s climate will change in a different direction from its present trajectory, which she tacitly admitted, and which is unpredictable, especially 30 years hence.
As CFACT has frequently documented, actual science shows man-made carbon emissions are a tiny fraction of atmospheric gases, and a variety of other natural phenomena impact the planet’s climate. All of this is well beyond the reach of McCarthy, Kerry and the rest of the Biden-Harris team no matter how many trillions of tax dollars they spend on solar panels, electric cars, and retrofitting office buildings.
Scientific climate realities also are bereft in the pliant news media echo chamber, which parrots without scrutiny. National Public Radio, for example, when reporting on the pending McCarthy appointment, dutifully propagated the falsehood that climate change has resulted in “record wildfires, hurricanes and flooding in recent years.”
During his 36 years in the U.S. Senate, Joe Biden was collegial and considered mainstream in the Democratic Party, in contrast to more liberal senators. Since then, the Party has shifted sharply to the political Left, especially on climate and energy policies, which are the priority of the its mega-donors such as Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and George Soros. Mr. Biden has shifted accordingly, and his appointments are another example of that reality.
The immediate question becomes, what of the Republicans? Will they rubber stamp these Biden cabinet appointments, especially if they retain a majority in the U.S. Senate? That would be the easy route.
The climate and energy appointments by President-elect Biden demand a rigorous debate to check the radicalism that threatens the economy and standard of living of the U.S. With the pandemic expected recede in 2021 due to the vaccine, the climate agenda and energy restrictions that will be imposed by the fledging Biden-Harris team threatens long-term economic prosperity in America.
