How fight over Biden’s choice for EPA shows seismic crack in Democrats’ climate coalition

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Under President-elect Joe Biden, cabinet choices could not be more different. He gave veteran climate hawks John Kerry and Gina McCarthy new positions with more power.
With Michael Regan, the young North Carolina pollution fighter on the verge of becoming the first black man to lead the EPA, Brenda Mallory, the first black president of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Deb Haaland, the first Native American to leading the Department of the Interior, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council calls them “Team A of climate and environment champions”.

But a fight for the role of the EPA also exposes a seismic rupture within the Democratic climate coalition while showing the new weight held by those who demand environmental justice and a new way forward.

At 44, Regan would head the agency where he previously worked as an air quality specialist under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After a stint with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, he was selected by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper in 2017 to become North Carolina’s chief environmental officer.

While making a deal with Duke Energy to spend billions on cleaning up the ash from the country’s most expensive coal, supporters say it has boosted the morale of an agency ravaged by its predecessor backing Trump who has often turned sided with industry to the detriment of its own scientists.

That’s exactly the skill set we need now, but Regan’s name has only surfaced in recent days after Biden’s transition team encountered a strong backlash from the climate coalition against Mary Nichols, considered by many to be the favorite of the consensus.

As a veteran chief of the California Air Resources Board, she was the architect and builder of the Golden State’s carbon cap and trade program and counted governments. Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gavin Newsom and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer among his fans and supporters.

But in recent weeks, more than 70 leading environmental groups have sent a letter to Biden protesting Nichols’ “grim record in tackling environmental racism” while questioning whether cap-and-trade systems are working. ultimately more harm than good.
A layer of pollution hangs over Los Angeles, California on October 17, 2017. Even though air quality has improved over the past decades, smog levels remain among the worst in the country.
“This allows polluters to green their operations and perpetuate a disproportionate impact on environmental justice communities while exacerbating climate change and damaging ecosystems in the process,” Chad Hanson, co-founder and director of the John Muir project said at CNN.
California caps the amount of heat-trapping gas that can be emitted there each year, forcing companies to cut emissions or purchase carbon credits called “offsets.” While Nichols has long argued that the plan will ultimately slow man-made global warming for the benefit of all, the cap and trade ignores the type of toxic air pollution and the water that plagues “communities of color”. , making them more vulnerable to everything from asthma to cancer to Covid-19, according to numerous studies.
Environmental justice advocates have been making this argument in California since 2009, but since cap and trade began as a bipartisan, market-based solution, Nichols “thought we were just ideological and really dismissive of any concerns of the environmental justice community, ”said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

“She hasn’t changed. And given the racial calculus the country finds itself in, to have an EPA administrator with a very poor record would have been terrible,” Farrell told CNN.

As his inventory began to decline, Nichols hosted a Zoom seminar with electric car advocacy group Veloz, billed as a retrospective of his career.

“I was part of a group of children who actually saw themselves as frontline activists for peace and justice,” she said after moderators highlighted her presence at the civil rights march in Washington in 1963.

EPA to revoke California's power to set standards for vehicles
After touting Newsom’s latest executive order to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035, Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance. “I think the only reason that’s excusable for you to leave (California) is if you’re going to a higher position, which is to run the EPA in Washington. So I pushed for that idea with everyone. that I know, to make it clear that you are the best, ”he says.

But Biden went with Regan, a newcomer with few enemies to block confirmation in Washington and the experience of growing up with asthma amid the pollution of eastern North Carolina.

“We are encouraged (by Biden’s choices),” Farrell said, “and we appreciate that they took our concerns seriously.”

The fight for this one-time nomination is just a taste of how difficult it is to please everyone while legislating on an issue that affects everything from food, housing and transportation to foreign policy, to public health and the American legacy of dumping pollution in the poorest corners of the nation. And every day, new science underscores the urgency of the problem while often undermining popular solutions and promises to be “carbon neutral.”

“The science is beyond cap and trade,” said Chad Hanson. “The conversation shouldn’t be about carbon neutrality or moving emissions from one place to another. It should be about directly reducing emissions and reducing a lot more carbon by protecting a lot more forests.”

He points to a provision in California’s cap-and-trade rules that would allow logging companies to cut down old growth forests – a vital carbon sink – as long as they plant new trees. But planting saplings won’t sequester carbon for decades.

“We need to reduce carbon as we stop putting it up there,” Hanson said. “And the policies that Mary Nichols encouraged undermine both.”

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