The GOP Environment Committee Attacks EPA's Climate Plan, Global Warming Science

One of the first major battles between the architects of the Obama administration's  ​and the GOP leadership that vehemently opposes said plan played out today, when EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy headed to the Republican-led Senate Environment Committee to defend the scheme and ask for the budget to carry it out.

The key evidence Republicans submitted to prove that climate change isn't a serious threat, and that the EPA's plan to combat it is unconstitutional? Three Wall Street Journal opinion articles.

The EPA is calling for ​a 6 percent budget increase, to $8.6 billion, in part to fund its Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's state-by-state scheme to reduce carbon emissions. Republicans, naturally, are stridently united against both the climate plan and any expansion of the EPA's budget. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell specifically identified the EPA as ​one of his party's primary targets after Republicans took power this year.

McCarthy laid out her agency's case in a thick Boston accent, noting that the additional funds would help individual states meet the carbon reduction requirements, that robust EPA funding is "vital to protecting human health," and that a strong economy and a healthy environment "go hand in hand." Then the GOP laid into her.

As is par for the course for any climate-related proceeding in US Congress, the hearing devolved into a marathon of climate change skepticism and anti-EPA grandstanding, with Republican senators repeating the mantra that "climate is always changing" and warning of the alleged costs of carbon regulations.

"It seems like every hearing we have turns into a global warming hearing," noted committee chairman James Inhofe, who, the week before, ​had tossed a snowball on the Senate floor to disprove the existence of the phenomenon.

"This is a stunning development!" marveled Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, after he had sincerely confounded McCarthy by demanding she tell him whether or not it had warmed more than "the models" predicted, and refusing to specify which ones he meant. (Apparently Mr. Sessions was unaware that there are many models, that they are very different, and that any attempt to seriously answer that question is fundamentally meaningless).

But the most bizarre part of the procession (apart from the junior senator from Alaska demanding McCarthy apologize, ​again, for insulting moose meat during her last visit, and hurting the people of Alaska's apparently fragile sense of culinary pride) was that two separate Senators took it upon themselves to submit, as evidence that America should not be combatting climate change, a succession of Wall Street Journal op-eds. Actual science sited by or submitted by the GOP? None.

Senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, took nearly his entire time to read excerpts from "The Climate Science Is Not Settled," an op-ed by Steven E. Koonin that ran in September 2014. "The climate is always changing and always will," Wicker read, but "human influences… are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole."

Next up, Senator Dan Sullivan, of Alaska (Mr. Moose Meat), lambasted McCarthy for failing to submit a legal analysis of a rule the EPA had not even proposed, "because a lot of people in Alaska don't believe" that there is in fact no rule. He then proceeded to submit another two Wall Street Journal op-eds into the record as evidence that the EPA's plans were unconstitutional.

In any other body in any other nation, this sort of behavior may seem bizarre—our presumed Congressional environmental experts relying on opinion articles as the primary evidence they oppose acting to address an urgent phenomenon that is rather well understood and agreed-upon by scientists—but it is par for the course here in the US, where the chairman of our Senate environment committee is the author of a book about global warming called The Greatest Hoax.

Here, it's business as usual, unremarkable. Our climate debate is playing out in a funhouse mirror, where even the semblance of facts are not required—our lawmakers are openly and admittedly making their policy decisions based upon the opinions published in a conservative newspaper, and they don't care who knows it. It doesn't even seem odd, that practice has been so thoroughly normalized.

An indoor snowball, and a few op-eds—that's about the extent of the GOP's actual, officially stated case against climate change as mounted in Congress thus far this year.