WASHINGTON — When Congress rushed to pass a $2 billion extension of the enormously popular “Cash for Clunkers” program earlier this month, there were few cheerleaders more quick than President Obama to extol the environmental virtues of the program.
“This gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution and our dependence on foreign oil, and strengthens the American auto industry,” he said last month, urging Congress to approve the additional funds.
Yet The New York Times captured a wholly different sentiment coming out of the White House yesterday, quoting an anonymous senior aide doubting that the environmental benefits are worth mentioning at all.
“What we ended up with,” said one senior Obama administration official, who would not speak on the record because he was being critical of his own administration’s environmental bona fides, “is a program in which you trade in old clunkers for new clunkers.”
It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
Read more at Michigan Messenger’s sister site in the nation’s capital, The Washington Independent.