The nation should be focused on how to do something about global warming, not continuing to bicker about whether the climate is really changing, state Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman said Wednesday during a U.S. Senate committee hearing.
"Sure the climate is changing," Huffman told the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. "What we need to be debating is what we need to do about it."
Later in an interview, Huffman added, "My personal opinion is that denying the truth doesn't change it. "
Huffman made his remarks in response to questions posed to a panel of top state environmental regulators about whether they accepted the conclusion of the vast majority of the world's scientists, who say that burning of fossil fuels like coal is a major cause of global climate change.
The state officials had been called to the hearing by Committee Chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to offer testimony about the relationship between state environmental regulators and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Inhofe is a major critic of the Obama administration's EPA, and a sympathetic ear for state officials like Huffman who believe the federal agency is usurping state authority on a variety of water and air pollution issues.
"Unfortunately, federalism under the current administration has been less than cooperative," Huffman said during his brief introductory statement at the hearing.
Huffman said that EPA and another federal agency, the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement have been "at best ... indifferent to the mounting consequences" of new rules aimed at curbing pollution from strip-mining and coal-fired power plants. He said specific standards for things like how carbon dioxide emissions should be reduced should be managed by the states, with federals setting broad national goals.
"The real problem for me as a regulator is the way they go about implementing these changes," Huffman said.
After the hearing, Huffman backed away from previous statements - included in a letter he sent to Inhofe last month and in written testimony to the committee - that used as an example of his frustration with EPA the federal agency's efforts at addressing environmental justice, or the disproportionate impacts of pollution on minority and low-income communities.
"Probably in hindsight, using [environmental justice] was just maybe a poor choice of an example to use," Huffman said in an interview. "I may have come across as being callous to environmental justice issues. It was not intended to be a criticism of environmental justice or anything like that."
Huffman's statements, written by top DEP assistant Tom Clarke, questioned whether additional efforts were really needed in West Virginia to address any uneven impacts of environmental problems on minority or low-income communities across the state.
"EPA's bureaucratic approach to [environmental justice] may be workable in the economically and racially stratified communities of the urban areas along with the northeast corridor, but has little value in a state like West Virginia which has historically had one of the nation's highest poverty rates and which is comprised nearly entirely of small towns and rural areas," the original statement said.
On climate change, Huffman said that DEP has opposed the Obama administration's rules to reduce carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants because state officials believe the rules are an illegal expansion of EPA's authority.
"EPA prescribes nearly every minute detail of a complex regulatory program," Huffman said in his written testimony. "Even where EPA's rule gives states the opportunity to choose from among different regulatory options, EPA has specified the minute details of these options."
In the interview after the hearing, Huffman said that EPA is trying to "ram-rod" through an approach to dealing with climate change that amounts to "betting the farm" on the scope of the problem and on an approach that Huffman said won't necessarily work. But he also said that he doesn't quibble with the scientific consensus about global warming and that continuing that increasingly polarized debate isn't getting the country anywhere.
"It's reduced to name calling about whether you do or don't believe in climate change," Huffman said. "I think we're not doing anyone a service. The evidence of climate change is real. Now what should we be doing about it?"
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.