Has new EPA chief Gina McCarthy had her head buried in the sand for the last five years?

Remember in 2008 when President Obama while discussing his plan to cap carbon emissions from fossil fuels plants, said, “Under my plan…electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”? Or when Vice President Biden while ranting to an environmental activist on the campaign trail said, completely in context, “No coal plants in America!” … Or how about when the President’s science adviser Daniel P. Schrag said, “the one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants…a war on coal is exactly what’s needed”?

There’s irrefutable evidence that the Obama Administration is waging a very calculated, very public war on the entire fossil fuels industry — especially coal.

Yet yesterday, Ms. McCarthy told the New York Times today that, “We don’t have a war on coal. We’re doing our business, which is to reduce pollution. We’re following the law.”

The Hill correctly shot back that “the EPA in recent years has churned out rules that impose new requirements on coal-fired power plants, and there’s more to come, including planned carbon emissions standards.” In other words, the so-called “War on Coal” was going on long before McCarthy rose to the top of the EPA. And according the the New York Times, McCarthy’s history suggests she will be taking the war to a new level.

The Times laid out a list of environmental policies pushed by McCarthy in recent years, many of which were so radical that even the Obama Administration wouldn’t adopt them. Among them were tougher greenhouse gas standards for cars, a tighter ozone limit that even the Obama White House flat out rejected, new regulations on smokestack pollution that crosses state lines, which was blocked in federal court, and more.

So, no, McCarthy’s head was not buried in the sand the last several years. She was so busy being even more radical than the Obama Administration that she hardly even noticed what they were doing.

But don’t think for one second that the Administration is going to ask her to tone it down.

“The president told Ms. McCarthy that his environmental and presidential legacy would be incomplete without a serious effort to address climate change,” The Times wrote yesterday. “I’m so glad he said that, because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted this job,” McCarthy said in response.

Once McCarthy knew she was being given the EPA’s 17,000 person army and the support of the Administration to wage full scale war on fossil fuels, Obama appointed her in what the Times referred to as an “act of defiance to Congressional and industry opponents of meaningful action on climate change.”

In other words, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends!”