What I Saw as the Country’s First National Climate Adviser

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/opinion/environment/biden-gina-mccarthy-climate.html

New York Times opinion piece by Gina McCarthy, departing national climate adviser and a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Excerpt: This week, as the world’s leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, the United States will deliver a message many thought was not possible: We are going to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and zero them out by 2050. Over the past 20 months as America’s first-ever national climate adviser, I have witnessed a paradigm shift: The private sector no longer sees climate action as a source of job losses, but rather as an opportunity for job creation and economic revitalization. It’s a striking shift after four years of the Trump administration, which threw science out the window and backed out of the Paris climate agreement. In 2020 the future seemed grim. But today, states and companies are running toward a clean energy future. How did what was once considered impossible become not just feasible, but at the core of America’s manufacturing and economic resurgence? In my early days as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, auto dealers were predicting that shifting to cleaner cars meant vehicle costs would skyrocket and sales would drop, while the autoworkers and steelworkers talked about plant closings and layoffs. Even very early on in the Biden administration, when labor was fully engaged and squarely at the table, the old paradigm that cleaner standards meant job loss was hard to break. And unions worried that a big shift to electric vehicles could pose a fundamental threat to their workers. But quickly the conversation shifted to one of long-term capital investments in E.V. technologies, expanding domestic manufacturing, adding more union jobs and building an E.V. market that would reach 50 percent of new U.S. car sales by 2030. Just a short time ago this shift would have been dismissed as a fairy tale. Not anymore.… 

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