Obama Climate Change Agenda: Advisers To Testify In House ‘Failure By Design’ Hearing

Advisers to President Barack Obama will appear before a House panel next week to talk about the president’s climate change agenda. Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency's air and radiation office, and White House science adviser John Holdren, will testify Wednesday before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Both Holdren and McCabe are Obama’s leading advisers on climate change and are key players in carrying out the administration’s climate change agenda, which includes stricter fuel economy standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 270 million metric tons. The president has centered much of his second term agenda on addressing issues of global warming and pollution.

“We also have to realize, as hundreds of scientists declared last month, that climate change is no longer a distant threat but ‘has moved firmly into the present,’” Obama said in June during a commencement speech at the University of California, Irvine, in Anaheim. “The overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change, including some who once disputed the data, have put the debate to rest.”

Republicans have long opposed the president’s climate change agenda, dubbing the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan,” which sets tighter emissions limits for existing power plants, the “war on coal.” The opposition to the plan is evident in the title of the upcoming committee hearing – “The Administration’s Climate Plan: Failure by Design.”