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Environmental Questions Take Back Seat at Hearing for E.P.A. Nominee
WASHINGTON
— Most of the biggest challenges facing the Environmental Protection Agency —
climate change, major new regulations on power plant emissions, biofuels
production and enforcement of clean air and water laws — were virtually absent
from Thursday’s confirmation hearing for President Obama’s nominee to head the
agency, Gina McCarthy.
Instead,
Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee repeatedly
returned to relatively arcane disputes over e-mail accounts used by top
officials at the agency, whether the department had made public all the
research data used in writing past regulations and whether it had pursued a
litigation strategy that bypassed state environmental officials.
Ms.
McCarthy, 58, is currently director of the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation
and has had limited responsibilities in the areas singled out by Republicans on
the committee. Unlike Mr. Obama’s recently departed E.P.A. administrator, Lisa
P. Jackson, and several other predecessors, Ms. McCarthy did not have a second
agency e-mail account under an alias or use a private e-mail account to help
weed out the hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mails that pour in each
year.
Republicans
have been pursuing the use of secondary e-mail accounts and aliases at the
agency since last year, calling it an effort by officials to evade federal open
records laws. The E.P.A.’s inspector general has opened an inquiry into the
matter.
(Ms.
Jackson used “Richard Windsor” for her alias on a second e-mail account, after
a New Jersey township where she lived and her family dog. Christie Whitman, the
E.P.A. administrator under President George W. Bush, used “ToWhit.” And Marcus
Peacock, a former deputy administrator, used “Tofu.”)
Although
Ms. McCarthy did not have a second agency e-mail account or an alias, Senator
David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, the panel’s senior Republican,
nonetheless demanded whether she had ever used a personal e-mail account to
conduct agency business. She said she occasionally e-mailed agency documents to
her personal account so she could have access to them at her family home in
Boston. But she insisted she had stored nothing official in that account and
that all documents had been returned to agency files and were discoverable
under the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act.
Mr.
Vitter followed up. “Have you ever used E.P.A. instant messaging accounts?”
Ms.
McCarthy replied, “One good thing about being 58 is I don’t even know how to
use them.”
Senator
Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, tried to turn the hearing into a
seminar on global warming but few of his colleagues on either side of the aisle
were willing to engage.
“Really,
this is not a debate about Gina McCarthy,” Mr. Sanders said in his opening
remarks. “It is a debate about global warming and whether or not we’re going to
listen to leading scientists who are telling us that global warming is the most
serious planetary crisis that we and the global community face and whether
we’re going to face that crisis in a serious manner.”
He
noted that a Republican colleague on the panel, Senator James Inhofe of
Oklahoma, had declared that global warming was “one of the major hoaxes ever
perpetrated on the American people by Al Gore, the United Nations and the
Hollywood elite.”
At
that point, violating Senate protocol, Mr. Inhofe piped up to say, “I’d add to
that list MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore and a few others.”
Later,
Ms. McCarthy, a former state environmental regulator under Republican and
Democratic governors in Connecticut and Massachusetts, including Mitt Romney,
said that the science supporting global warming was overwhelming. She said that
the E.P.A. would continue to address climate change under her leadership
through what she described as common-sense regulations.
The
committee has not scheduled a vote on Ms. McCarthy’s nomination.
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