Andrea Mitchell Questions Climate Czar On Math of Biden Emissions Goals: ‘Numbers Don’t Add Up’
MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell questioned White House climate czar Gina McCarthy on Friday about how the Biden administration can reach its goal of reducing 50 percent of emissions by 2030.
The segment on Andrea Mitchell Reports comes a day after the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority when it comes to power plants.
“You can certainly cannot meet the 50 percent goal by 2030 with this kind of restriction. You would have to go power plant by power plant, would you have to get approval,” said Mitchell. “Don’t you need broader congressional authority? How do you get that in this 50-50 Senate?”
McCarthy responded the administration isn’t “ready to give up on that, the goals the president has set, because we are making more progress on them than we ever expected.”
She elaborated: “Look in 2021, more solar wind and battery technology out there than we have had before. One thing that we are seeing now more than ever is that the private sector is taking the signal here. They are investing heavily in getting this job done, knowing that that’s the future.”
McCarthy continued, “The Supreme Court may want to talk about the old days. We’re really going to keep moving. And we think we can make this happen.”
She acknowledged that “Congress needs to act” and that “they don’t need to act to give us different authorities. They need to act with definition about the authority that congress has to move forward and protect the American public and address the climate change threat the world is facing. We need to lead in that effort. We fully intend to do that.”
Mitchell expressed skepticism.
“It’s just hard to understand how you could do that, just the numbers don’t add up given the size of the challenge,” she said.
“What the Supreme Court did was to limit EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in the way they did in that section of the statute in terms of greenhouse gases,” said McCarthy. “It did not take away the agency’s authority to actually regulate all the other ways in which power plants spew emissions that are also going to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted.”
McCarthy explained that the decision “had no impact on our ability to work with other agencies, like the Department of the Interior, to move forward quickly on offshore wind to make that happen. It did not take away the president’s ability to use creative and novel ways like the Defense Production Act, which he used in our solar sector to jump start that when it was delayed.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
