Turning the opponents turf into home field advantage in the struggle on climate change

Do not think for a minute that in selecting Harvard for the first major speech of her tenure, Gina McCarthy - new Environmental Protection Agency administrator - made a whimsical decision.  After suffering through one of the longest, and in the end pointless, confirmation processes on record, Administrator McCarthy signaled one of the important tenets of her vision for the agency:

Addressing environmental concerns is good for business, and more specifically for American business.

In her speech today, as reported by Mark Drajem in Bloomberg, Ms. McCarthy makes the statement most practical members of the environmental movement have chanted for years:

"[Investing in solutions to climate change] will, in turn, fuel the complementary goals of turning America into a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing."

She goes on to say,

"Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs? Please, at least for today," she said during remarks at Harvard Law School. "We need to cut carbon pollution to grow jobs. We need to cut carbon pollution to strengthen the economy. Let's talk about it positively. Let's approach this as an opportunity of a lifetime. There are too many lifetimes at stake."

Add to this that companies cannot outsource jobs associated with addressing climate change, that the funding to address climate change only requires us to shift expenditures from a less national and jobs-dense sector of the environment (energy and utilities) to more American and jobs-rich sectors (construction and manufacturing), and that addressing climate change improves health and quality of life, and you have the most logical win-win-win in American history.

The only losers are energy companies who do not have the sense to adapt.  However, in the debate over the past decade, that group has had the most money, and therefore the loudest voice and the most political muscle - as President Obama and Ms. McCarthy found out.  By framing the argument as a question of what is best for American business, best for the national economy, and best for quality of life in America, the new leader of the EPA showed she knew where this battle will be fought....

And gave me hope that she knows how to win it.