New York Attorney General Letitia James’s Office led the development of what the Wall Street Journal editorial board called “Biden’s ‘BackDoor’ Climate Plan,” a clever if likely unlawful way to sneak in the Green New Deal under the auspices of controlling ozone — ditching failed climate messaging on “Polar ice caps and the polar bears [which] have become the climate change ‘mascots,'” because, “Unfortunately, climate change in the abstract is an increasingly – and consistently – unpersuasive argument to make.”
The plan is laid out in months of emails between James’s Office and other OAGs with former EPA career attorneys and officials, and even the current Biden EPA climate chief. It is what a James-led lawsuit filed by those same AGs the day before the inauguration set in motion, as detailed in an amicus brief here.
It’s what they are doing. Understandably, AG James doesn’t like having that pointed out, according to her letter to the WSJ editors that ran last Friday.
Regardless, the albatross of climate doomsaying and Green New Deal moon battery has yielded, for practical purposes, to a new narrative “about our neighbor with respiratory illness,” a rhetorical sleight of hand “highlighting the children’s health dimension to all of our major initiatives,” to capture those “many Americans who otherwise would oppose many of our regulatory actions.”
This is the plan, as laid out on The Most Cynical EPA Memo, Evah™, re-released by GAO on the document’s anniversary last month. EPA and its allies are doing what they said for years, among themselves, they needed to do. And which a paper trail shows that James’s Office prepared for months to do. Exposure of which has only prompted AG James to insist that you shouldn’t believe your lying eyes but instead, remember your neighbor with respiratory illness. Which, the paper trail shows, is not what this clever move is about.
AG James’s LTE simply protests — and proves — too much.