President Obama’s picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are already provoking howls of outrage from the right wing and the energy industry shills who feed them talking points; they’re especially worked up about Gina McCarthy.

Gina McCarthy

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday named two people to his cabinet who will be charged with making good on his threat to use the powers of the executive branch to tackle climate change and energy policy if Congress does not act quickly.

Mr. Obama nominated Gina McCarthy, a tough-talking native of Boston and an experienced clean air regulator, to take charge at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist and strong advocate of natural gas and nuclear power as cleaner alternatives to coal, to run the Department of Energy.

The appointments, which require Senate confirmation, send an unmistakable signal that the president intends to mount a multifaceted campaign in his second term to tackle climate change by using all the executive branch tools at his disposal.

The energy industry mouthpieces at the Heartland Institute immediately pushed this paid announcement out on PR Newswire:

“Gina McCarthy has a long history of demonizing affordable energy and doing everything possible to shut it down. She also has a long history of making up fictitious facts to support her anti-energy ideology. McCarthy’s number-one priority at EPA will be enacting unprecedented restrictions on energy production and use that will further drive up energy prices. If Americans like dramatically rising gasoline prices and rapidly rising electricity prices, they are going to love Gina McCarthy.”

James M. Taylor
Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute

[…]

“During litigation on the EPA’s claim that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health, the attorney for the EPA, introduced as the technical expert, falsely asserted to the Court that the climate models used are valid. The models have never been validated and are failing miserably. The Earth stopped warming over a decade ago, contradicting the models. The models are also contradicted by the characteristics of late twentieth-century warming.

“Under Ms. McCarthy we can expect further deterioration of American science as the EPA ignores scientific facts that do not support its political agenda.”

Kenneth Haapala
Executive Vice President
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

That’s what the pseudo-science wing says; now let’s go to Pat Robertson for the religious right view. Proving himself a master of the art of wingnut projectionism, old Pat went on a rant about Gina McCarthy today, denouncing environmentalists as “crazies” and “religious fanatics,” who are “unreasonable” and “doctrinaire.”

Sounds to me like Ms. McCarthy is a perfect choice for the position.