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Outgoing EPA chief convinced Obama serious on climate change
The departing chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson, says she cringes whenever she is asked if President Barack Obama is truly serious about confronting climate change.

Of course he is, she tells them. "I don't think you need clues. The president has been really clear ... I'm not sure how much clearer he could be."

And yet even Jackson herself was caught off guard last month, when sitting just steps from Obama during his second-term swearing-in, the president cited the threats posed by climate change so prominently in his inaugural address.

"Surprised? Of course. Because I did not know what he was going to say. But pleased? Absolutely," the EPA administrator told Reuters in a wide-ranging interview before she leaves office later this month.

For Jackson, 50, a former New Jersey state official with no national profile until Obama chose her to lead the EPA during his first term, the lengthy inaugural nod to climate change served as a satisfying coda to a tumultuous tenure marked by clashes with Republican lawmakers and agricultural communities.

Jackson's deepest regret, she said, is that she failed to reach out to rural, often conservative regions of the United States. As a result, she said, opponents were able to generate politically damaging rumors of looming regulatory crackdowns, such as a fictitious EPA plan to treat bovine excretions as dangerous pollutants.

"If I were starting again, I would from day one make a much stronger effort to do personal outreach in rural America," Jackson said. "Had I known that these myths about everything from cow flatulence to spilled milk could be seen as 'The EPA is coming to get you,' I would have spent more time trying to inoculate against that."
Posted by: tipper 2013-02-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=361611