EPA administrator 'revved up' about regulating energy

People should exult in their work-except when they regulate others for a living, in which case some measure of introspection seems appropriate.

Gina McCarthy obviously likes her job.

"I'm as revved up as I was last year and the year before," the Environmental Protection Agency administrator assured energy executives Feb. 24 at IHS CERAWeek in Houston.

She expressed this enthusiasm after promising to toughen the regulation of methane emitted by oil and gas operations and implement as much of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) as jurisprudence will allow during the final year of the administration she serves.

"We are going to meet both our moral obligations to our kids and our grandkids and our commitments to the global community," she declared.

Disappointments, of course, intrude, such as the Supreme Court's stay of implementation of the CPP, which requires states to submit plans for aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"I wanted to be the one to first approve the first plan that came in this year," McCarthy confessed.

She's a regulator on a mission, who described the COP21 climate summit in Paris last December as "really fun" and who indulges no doubt about the wisdom of rushing away from fossil energy.

In Paris, she said, "There was no climate denier standing up and hooting and hollering." Fun, indeed.

Back home, extension of renewable energy tax credits means, "The clean energy train has left the station, folks," McCarthy said, exuding confidence that "renewables will continue to thrive in the marketplace" and that "people want electric vehicles."

Maybe.

Maybe the CPP will survive judicial review and renewable energy will increase its share of the US energy market beyond the 10% the Energy Information Administration otherwise projects for it in 2040.

Or maybe the CPP, coupled with natural gas costs elevated by unwarranted regulation, will make electricity too expensive to use for transportation.

The EPA administrator wouldn't want anybody "hooting and hollering" that way, though. She's having too much fun.