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Congressman Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, responded to the EPA’s new expensive, job-killing regulation on coal plants.

"President Obama's end run around Congress will result in price increases for Kansas's middle class and the loss of thousands of jobs around the country. Yet just Wednesday, the EPA administrator admitted to me during a hearing that the agency doesn't--and cannot--measure whether any of the regulations it promulgates are effective in combating climate change. Making policy on guesswork and ideology over science and basic common sense will only hurt American families. We will fight this, because America deserves better."

Congressman Pompeo asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy about whether EPA actually measured climate change regulations against the 26 indicators of climate change EPA offers on its website. McCarthy replied that no, EPA does no such thing. The exchange occurs at about 2:20 in the clip below, but the clip starts from the beginning of Congressman Pompeo’s questioning, for context.

TRANSCRIPT:

Pompeo: Is anything you’re doing doing any good, as measured by indicators that you’ve provided? This is about science, cause and effect, is there any causal relationship between the regulations you’ve promulgated and the 26 indicators of climate change you have on your website.

McCarthy: The indicators on the website are Broad global indicators--

Pompeo: --They’re not broad, they’re very specific--

McCarthy: --of impacts associated with climate change they’re not performance requirements or impacts related to any particular act.

Pompeo: I actually like the indicators, they’re quantifiable. Heat related deaths, change in ocean heat, sea level rises, snow cover those are great quantifiable things but now what you’re telling me is ---

McCarthy: They indicate the public health impacts of climate change--

Pompeo: Exactly, but what you’re telling me you can’t link up your actions at EPA to any benefits associated with those quantifiable indicators that the EPA itself has proposed as indicative of climate change.

McCarthy: I think what we’re able to do, and I hope we’ll show this in the package we put out for comment, is what kind of reductions are going to be associated with our rules, what we believe they will have in terms of an economic and a public health benefit. But it again is part of a very large strategy.