Capito doesn’t buy President’s climate change plan

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia 2nd District Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito said President Obama’s promise of $8 billion in loans to study fossil fuel development is just “a throw-in.”

Obama laid out his climate change policy in a major speech Tuesday. He talked about cutting carbon emissions from power plants and doing so through the federal EPA—not through Congress. He also promised loan money to study things like clean coal technology.

Capito said she’s not buying it.

“I don’t think any kind of so-called ‘investments’ will ever occur,” Capito said Wednesday. “I think this is more about answering his environmental lobbyists desire to move away from fossil fuel.”

Capito has called the president’s plan “job killing.”

“He is shutting our coal production down,” she said, “He’s shutting (West Virginia small businesses’) ability to compete because we use over 95 percent of our energy generation is from coal.”

Obama said he plans to use regulations and executive orders to pursue climate change, which Capito called an overreach by the executive.

“We have a system of checks and balances in the democracy and he is, I think, totally defying this,” Capito said.

 Capito encouraged her peers in Congress to take away some power of the EPA and require economic impact to be part of the formula when considering the cost of climate change.

“The House has passed many of those bills before, (but) the Senate has not been cooperative,” she said. “We’re going to continue to press the Senate to do that.”