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You might expect that Gina McCarthy, President Joe Biden’s national climate advisor, would be frustrated this week.
The Supreme Court dealt a significant blow on Thursday to what was once the most promising avenue for tackling climate change, curtailing the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate emissions from the power sector. McCarthy has been at the center of climate policy efforts for the last decade, and as the head of the Obama Administration’s EPA, she crafted the agency rule at issue in the Court’s ruling.
Yet in conversation in the days leading up to the ruling, McCarthy was surprisingly optimistic—not that the ruling would go the Administration’s way, but rather that the White House could chart a path to slash emissions even if it didn’t. “We’ve set very solid goals, we’re making significant progress on the transition to clean energy,” she told TIME on June 28. “And that is not going to live and die by the Supreme Court’s decision.”
To meet the White House’s goals, she said, the Administration needs to get “creative” and find novel ways to galvanize the energy transition. That includes inventive use of regulations at places like EPA, as well as the Administration’s engagement with the private sector, use of its own purchasing power, and use of the Defense Production Act to accelerate the production of domestic clean energy technology, she says. “It can’t just be about using regulations or using Congress to fix this; to actually continue accelerating, we have to be creative,” she said, one of at least ten times she used the word creative in the course of the conversation.
It is certainly true that EPA power plant regulations are far from the only—or even the most important—tool in the climate policy toolkit in 2022….
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Source : time
