Wendy Koch

USA TODAY

Taking a new tack on climate change, the Obama administration touted Thursday the "opportunity" — rather than the cost — that climate action presents for the U.S. economy.

"Climate action is not just a defensive play, it advances the ball. We can turn our challenge into an opportunity to modernize our power sector, and build a low-carbon economy that'll fuel growth for decades to come," Environmental Protection Agency Gina McCarthy told Resources for the Future, a non-profit research group.

McCarthy said the EPA's fuel-efficiency standards for car and trucks, for example, are cutting pollution, "saving families money at the pump, and fueling a resurgent auto industry that's added more than 250,000 jobs since 2009." She said the U.S. surge in wind anD solar energy has also added tens of thousands of jobs.

Her remarks come in the same week that President Obama, speaking before the United Nations Climate Summit in New York, asked all countries to help reduce global warming and pledged U.S. leadership on the issue.

McCarthy, in the first of a series of speeches on the economic opportunity of climate action, said it was such U.S leadership decades ago that helped avert an earlier crisis: the thinning of the ozone layer, which protects the planet from the sun's cancer-causing radiation.

"American science identified the problem. American industry innovated the solution," McCarthy said, referring to the development and usage of non-ozone depleting chemicals in hairspray, refrigerators and air conditioners.

"Because we acted, the ozone layer is healing. Our people are safer. And our economy is stronger," McCarthy said, adding climate change presents the world with a new challenge that requires U.S. leadership. She said the U.S. is about innovation, not stagnation.

"Can you imagine President Kennedy looking up at the moon and saying, 'Nah ... we'll just wait for someone else to do it,'" she asked the group.

The U.S. coal industry, which will likely be hurt by the EPA's June proposal to reduce power plant emissions, criticized McCarthy's remarks.

"Administrator McCarthy must be wishing on a star to compare President Kennedy's space mission, which had real-world benefits, to President Obama's climate plan, that will hurt the U.S. economy, cost Americans jobs, and do virtually nothing to impact climate change in any meaningful way," Laura Sheehan, spokeswoman of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, said in a statement.

She said the Obama administration is engaging in "over-the-top, scare-inducing rhetoric" and is pushing a costly over-reliance on natural gas and renewable power.

Yet, McCarthy said, with climate change "the most expensive thing we could do, is to do nothing." She said its impacts have become obvious: "This past decade was the hottest on record. The streets of Miami flood on sunny days. Ocean acidification threatens Washington state's oyster industry. Across the country, people grapple with floods, fires and severe weather. Today, California is facing historic drought, with projected job losses of more than 17,000."

The bottom line is, she said: "We don't act despite the economy, we act because of it."