HAPPY ANNY, MOST CYNICAL EPA MEMO EVER

Timely milestone for one of the most cynical documents obtained during the Obama administration

With the signs increasing that the Biden EPA plans to use National Ambient Air Quality Standards (“NAAQS”) to impose its climate agenda without the political peril of congressional votes, GAO wishes an infamous Obama-Biden memo a Happy, Very Timely Anniversary.

This particular memo, titled “Strategic Communications Conversation” to which PR advisor Allyn Brooks-LaSure attached a “Non-Paper” (that also was non-provided), was dated on this date in the early months of the Obama-Biden EPA, and broken on January 26, 2015. It turned up in the “Richard Windsor” trove of records obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute from then-Administrator Lisa Jackson’s false-identity email account, an account used promiscuously by current Biden officials Gina McCarthy and Joe Goffman.

It’s quite something to read this memo, written at precisely this point in the Obama-Biden administration, and with new sue-and-settle examples, erm, “reconsidering” Bush regulations piling up (more on that later).

This is particularly important given signs detailed to the DC Circuit here, laid out here, and very nicely summarized in today’s Wall Street Journal here, that EPA is preparing to issue a secondary ozone “NAAQS”, in a brilliantly craven move to even further obscure what it is up to on CO2. (Recall, even Obama’s EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson rejected a climate NAAQS as not “advisable”. One prominent green attorney said “hell will freeze over” before that came to pass. Well, Texas just froze over, at least, and with the help of this very agenda.)

What this memo shows is EPA’s recognizing it had to move its global warming campaign away from the failed model of discredited Big Green pressure groups and their “mascots” the polar bears and polar ice caps, that “climate” has proved “consistently — an unpersuasive argument to make.” In it we see the birth of the breathtakingly disingenuous “shift from making this about the polar caps [to] about our neighbor with respiratory illness…”.

Doubling down on the cynicism, it continued:

Children:…By revitalizing our own Children’s Health Office, leading the global charge on this issue, and highlighting the children’s health dimension to all of our major initiatives – we will also make this issue real for many Americans who otherwise would oppose many of our regulatory actions.

Here we see the conviction, manifested, that if they yell “clean air” and “children” enough about something they, the media and the green groups will ultimately get their way.

Which perfectly segues into today’s blockbuster Wall Street Journal editorial, “Biden’s ‘Backdoor’ Climate Plan,” about how “Democratic AGs, green groups and a top Biden environmental regulator are colluding on a plan to impose the Green New Deal on states through a back regulatory door” — “to hasten a replacement ozone rule that regulates CO2” — “because they know they can’t pass it through the front in Congress.”