Gina McCarthy, EPA Director, Doesn't Have a Clue

Gina McCarthy is head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Unfortunately, in this administration intellectual acumen has been bred out of its minions like noses out of pugs. 

            There certainly is nothing in her college transcript to make you stand up and yell “there’s the rocket scientist in the room.”  Her bachelor’s is in social anthropology and her master’s is in environmental health engineering planning and policy.  These are the kind of soft science degrees you get by watching The China Syndrome instead of studying adiabatic charts. 

             With a transcript that weak she never came close to a competitive job in industry.  Instead she worked as a bureaucrat for 25 years.  Now, you can survive as a bureaucrat by suffocating any part of your brain that uses creative thinking.  But to work your way up you must also follow the boss so closely (keeping low, so as not to attract too much attention) that every time he stops quickly your nose finds itself resting comfortably in his posterior.  Little Gina must have that move down to a “T.”  Just look where she ended up.

            McCarthy now finds herself with a title she wants, but a job far beyond her mental pay grade.  This showed itself only too vividly this last week when she found herself trying to answer questions before the House of Representatives. 

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher:  “What percentage of the atmosphere is CO2?”

Ms. McCarthy:  “I don’t have that calculation for you, sir.  I don’t make those guesses, sir.”

She continued to dance around the question until an aid looked it up on his I-phone and passed her a note, an action so obvious that it was remarked upon with derision by the Committee.  Since the EPA is now busy trying to impose stringent restrictions on how much carbon dioxide industry can produce it would not be unrealistic to have the head of the EPA know a little high school level atmospheric science.  

Our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen (78.08% by volume of dry air) and oxygen (20.95%).  That leaves 0.97% to contain everything else.  If $100 represents our atmosphere, and $99.03 are nitrogen and oxygen, how much of the remaining 97 pennies represents carbon dioxide?  CO2 isn’t even equal to one of those pennies.  Carbon dioxide is 0.035% of the whole thing: about a third of a tenth of one percent.  Not that we should ignore it or its importance.

Ms. McCarthy is very concerned that CO2 is up to 400 parts per million (up from its standard 350 ppm) in the atmosphere.  She is quick to point out that it is now higher than it has been in the last 3 million years.  Right.  But I’ll bet she doesn’t know what was going on 3 million years ago. 

About 2.8 Ma (Megaannus—no, not someone in this administration—it means a million years) our planet entered our last Ice Age and it is now recovering from that Cenozoic era Quaternary Ice Age.  Ice Ages affect our climate by locking up huge amounts of water in ice.  We have been recovering from that last ice age over the last 3 million years, and the effects of that recovery will naturally speed up as we approach its acme. 

I would like to think that Gina is an unfortunate aberration, but she is not.  Trying to keep track of the incompetents Obama has put in positions of authority is like playing whack-a-mole, there is always one more fool poking their head out of the hole. 

Irritate a bureaucrat and think for yourself, and keep the faith.