How the fight for Biden’s EPA selection shows a seismic crack in the Democrats’ climate coalition

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Under President-elect Joe Biden, cabinet elections could not be more different. It has given veteran climate hawks John Kerry and Gina McCarthy new positions with more power.
With Michael Regan, the young North Carolina pollution fighter about to become the first black man to lead the EPA, Brenda Mallory, the first black chair of the Environmental Quality Council, and Deb Haaland, the first native headed by the Department of the Interior, the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council calls them “a team of climate and environmental advocates.”

But a fight over the role of the EPA also exposes a seismic rift within the Democrats ’climate coalition, while showing the new influence those who demand environmental justice have and a new path to follow.

At age 44, Regan would run the agency where he worked as an air quality specialist during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After a stint in the nonprofit Environmental Protection Fund, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper approved him in 2017 to become North Carolina’s top environmental official.

While reaching an agreement with Duke Energy to spend billions on cleaning up the country’s most expensive coal ash, supporters say it lifted morale in an agency destroyed by its predecessor who supported Trump, who often positioned himself. next to the industry above its own scientists.

This is exactly the competition needed now, but Regan’s name didn’t emerge until the last few days after Biden’s transition team encountered fierce setbacks from the climate coalition over Mary Nichols, seen by many as the favorite of the consensus.

As a veteran head of the California Air Resources Board, she was the architect and builder of Golden State’s carbon capitalization and marketing program and had governors. Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gavin Newsom and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer among his supporters and advocates.

But in recent weeks, more than 70 prominent environmental groups have sent a letter to Biden to protest Nichols’ “bleak history in the fight against environmental racism,” asking whether capitalization and trade systems are ultimately doing more harm. so good.
A layer of flat pollution over Los Angeles, California, on October 17, 2017. Although air quality has improved in recent decades, smoke levels remain among the worst in nations.
“It is allowing pollutants to wash their activities green and perpetuate a disproportionate impact on environmental justice communities while worsening climate change and harming the ecosystems of the process,” Chad Hanson, co-founder and project director, told CNN John Muir.
California limits the amount of gases that capture heat that can be emitted each year, forcing companies to reduce their emissions or buy carbon credits known as “offsets.” Although Nichols has long argued that the plan would eventually slow man-made global warming for the benefit of all, the limit and trade do not explain the type of toxic air and water pollution. which affects color “fence line communities,” 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 limit and trade began as a market-based bipartisan solution, Nichols “believed we were only ideological and really despised any community concerns. of environmental justice “. Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Center On Race, Poverty and the Environment.

“It hasn’t changed. And given the racial criteria the country faces, having an EPA administrator with a very poor track record would have been terrible,” Farrell told CNN.

As his actions began to fall, Nichols held a Zoom seminar with the Veloz electric car advocacy group, presented as a retrospective of his career.

“I was part of a group of children who really thought of ourselves as activists on the front lines of being for peace and justice,” he said after the moderators highlighted their presence in the rights march. civilians in Washington in 1963.

The EPA revoked California authority to set vehicle rules
After announcing Newsom’s latest executive order to phase out the sale of new passenger gas vehicles in 2035, Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance. “I think the only reason it’s excusable to leave (California) is if you’re going to some higher position, which is to lead the EPA in Washington. So I’ve been advocating this idea with everyone I know. It makes it clear that you’re the best, ”he said.

But Biden went with Regan, an emerging with few enemies to confirm the stop in Washington and the experience of growing up with asthma amid the pollution of eastern North Carolina.

“We’re excited (by Biden’s options),” Farrell said, “and we’re grateful that our concerns were taken seriously.”

The struggle for this one candidacy is just a testament to how difficult it is to please everyone while legislating a problem that affects everything from food, shelter and transportation to foreign policy, public health, and the American legacy of dumping of pollution in the poorest corners of the nation. And every day, new sciences underscore the urgency of the problem, even though they often undermine popular solutions and promise to be “carbon neutral.”

“Science has gone beyond limit and trade,” Chad Hanson said. “The conversation should not be about carbon neutrality or shifting emissions from one place to another. It should be about directly reducing emissions and capturing much more carbon while protecting many more. forests “.

He points to a provision in California’s boundary and trade rules that would allow timber companies to cut down old-growth forests, a vital carbon sink, whenever they plant new trees. But a seedling plantation will not sequester carbon for decades.

“We have to pull the carbon down while we stop putting it on,” Hanson said. “And the policies that Mary Nichols has been promoting undermine both.”

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