How the battle for Biden’s EPA pick shows a seismic crack in the Democrats’ climate coalition

by

Under President-elect Joe Biden, cabinet choices could no longer differ. He has empowered veteran climate hawks John Kerry and Gina McCarthy with new positions.
Featuring Michael Regan, the young North Carolina pollution fighter, poised to become the first black man to lead the EPA, Brenda Mallory, the first black chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Deb Haaland, the first Native American to run the Department of Internal Affairs, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council calls them an “A-team of climate and environmental champions.”

But a battle for the role of the EPA also exposes a seismic rift within the Democrat’s climate coalition while showing the new influence of those demanding environmental justice and a new way forward.

At 44, Regan would run the agency where he once worked as an air quality specialist during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After a stint with the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund, he was approached by Democratic Roy Cooper government in 2017 to become North Carolina’s chief environmental officer.

While he reached a settlement with Duke Energy to spend billions on the most expensive coal ash cleanup in the country, supporters say he boosted morale at an agency gutted by his Trump-supporting predecessor who often sided with the industry above its own scientists.

That’s exactly the skill needed now, but Regan’s name only emerged in the last few days after the Biden transition team received a fierce backlash from the climate coalition over Mary Nichols, seen by many as the consensus favorite.

As a veteran head 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 are among her fans and attorneys.

But in recent weeks, more than 70 prominent environmental groups have sent a letter to Biden protesting Nichols’ “dismal track record in tackling environmental racism,” wondering if cap-and-trade schemes ultimately do more harm than doing well.
On October 17, 2017, a layer of pollution hangs over Los Angeles, California. While air quality has improved in recent decades, smog levels remain among the worst in the nations.
“It enables polluters to green their operations and perpetuate disproportionate impacts on environmental justice communities, while exacerbating climate change and damaging ecosystems,” Chad Hanson, co-founder and director of the John Muir Project, told CNN.
California limits the amount of heat-trapping gases that can be emitted there each year, forcing companies to cut their emissions or buy carbon credits known as “offsets.” While Nichols has long argued that the plan would ultimately slow human-caused global warming to the benefit of everyone, cap-and-trade does not account for the kind of toxic air and water pollution that plagues ‘fencing communities’ of color. , making them more vulnerable to everything from asthma to cancer and 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 two-pronged, market-based solution, Nichols thought “we were just ideological and really dismissive of all the community’s concerns about environmental justice,” said Caroline Farrell. , Executive Director of the Center On Race, Poverty and the Environment.

“She hasn’t changed. And given the racial settlement the country is in, it would have been horrible to have an EPA administrator with a very poor track record,” Farrell told CNN.

As her stock began to decline, Nichols held a Zoom seminar with electric car advocacy group Veloz, heralded as a retrospective of her career.

“I was part of a group of children who considered ourselves activists on the forefront of peace and justice,” she said after moderators highlighted her presence at the 1963 Civil Rights March in Washington.

EPA wants to revoke California's authority to set vehicle standards
After touting Newsom’s latest executive order to phase out sales of new gas-powered passenger cars by 2035, Schwarzenegger came as a surprise. “I think the only excuseable reason for leaving (California) is if you’re moving up to a higher position, which is to run the EPA in Washington. clear you’re the best, ”he said.

But Biden went with Regan, a newcomer with few enemies, to delay 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),” said Farrell, “and we appreciate that they took our concerns seriously.”

The battle for this single nomination is just a taste of how difficult it is to please everyone while framing a problem that affects everything from food, shelter, and transportation to foreign policy, public health, and America’s legacy of dumping pollution. in the poorest corners of the nation. And every day new science underscores the urgency of the problem, often undermining popular solutions and promising to be ‘carbon neutral’.

“Science is a thing of the past,” said Chad Hanson. “The conversation should not be about CO2 neutrality or shifting emissions from one place to another. It should be about direct reduction of emissions and absorbing much more carbon by protecting much more forest.”

He points to a provision in California’s cap-and-trade rules that would allow logging companies to cut old growth forest – a vital carbon sink – as long as they plant new trees. But a sapling plantation will not capture carbon for decades.

“We have to get carbon down if we don’t put it there anymore,” Hanson said. “And the policies that Mary Nichols is promoting undermine both.”

.Source