President-elect Joseph R. Biden tapped North Carolina environmental regulator Michael Regan to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and named Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico as his pick for interior secretary, as he moved Thursday to fill out the team tasked with implementing a far-reaching climate agenda.
Mr. Regan, a veteran of the EPA during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, is currently the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
If confirmed, he would be the first Black man to serve as EPA Administrator.
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Introducing his climate team, President-elect Biden said his administration would respond to the existential threat of climate change “by building a modern, climate-resilient infrastructure and a clean energy future” that would put millions of Americans to work. “And we are committed to facing climate change by delivering environmental justice.”
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BOSTON (SHNS) – A coalition of more than 40 groups that includes long-standing environmental organizations, big players in the state’s financial world, tech companies, and more sent a letter Friday to the lawmakers trying to hammer out a climate bill highlighting the importance of including environmental justice provisions in the final product.
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The year is 2014, and the sleepy mining and agricultural towns of Northern Appalachia have transformed into gold-rush towns. But this is a new type of gold – Shale gas.
These towns sit above an underground formation called the Marcellus Shale that could help make America the world’s greatest producer of natural gas – and in 2014 the Marcellus region is booming. The restaurants are buzzing, bars packed, hotels full for the first time since many people can remember. Each generation of this area has seen the boom and the bust of other major industries – timber, coal, steel – and shale gas is the next one. It’s marketed as energy independence, good paying blue collar jobs, the American Dream. In areas where decades of economic decline have created a culture of need, this dream is welcomed with open arms.
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In the first major test of Virginia’s historic environmental justice law, the state’s air board Dec. 3 approved a U.S. Navy proposal to build a power plant near a predominately Black community with higher-than-normal rates of respiratory illnesses.
Environmental and health advocates were dismayed by the State Air Pollution Control Board’s 5–1 decision, saying it shows that the state still hasn’t fully embraced equity and justice at the regulatory level. Board members, meanwhile, pointed out that the Navy plans to install technologies that will ensure the plant produces few emissions.
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Photo credit: Don S. Montgomery, USN (Ret.)
WASHINGTON — When Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the presidential election, his top candidate to lead the nation’s most powerful environmental agency appeared clear: Mary D. Nichols, California’s clean air regulator and arguably the country’s most experienced climate change official, was seen as a lock to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Now Mr. Biden’s team is scrambling to find someone else, according to several people who have spoken with the presidential transition team. The chief reason: This month, a group of more than 70 environmental justice groups wrote to the Biden transition charging that Ms. Nichols has a “bleak track record in addressing environmental racism.”
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Photo credit: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
For environmental justice advocates who have spent decades fighting to protect communities from polluters, the new year cannot come too soon. After four years of the Trump administration shredding the Environmental Protection Agency into “little tidbits,” as President Donald Trump put it during his first campaign, change is in the air.
President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to make the climate crisis and environmental justice guiding principles of his administration from day one, Jan. 20. It’s a huge promise—and a tall order.
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On Dec. 5, 1982, about a month after residents learned of dangerous dioxin levels in Times Beach, the town along the Meramec River was ravaged by a record-breaking flood. The flood damaged or destroyed most homes in the town.
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Photo credit: St Louis Post-Dispatch Staff photographer
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on the most ambitious environmental justice plan ever offered by the nominee of a major political party. His Build Back Better agenda included a commitment to invest 40 percent of his $2 trillion clean energy plan into communities living on the front lines of poverty and pollution.
At the same time, his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, co-authored the Climate Equity Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), outlining ways the next administration can operationalize environmental justice across the agencies. After a summer of historic protests that saw some 15 million to 26 million people take to the streets to take a stand against racial injustice in policing, it’s almost certain that the incoming Biden administration will take bold action to address the intersecting crises of environmental pollution and racial inequality.
But this mandate for anti-racist policy raises a question: How, in the first place, will a Biden administration identify the most polluted and impoverished communities across the country?
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Martha Romero felt that she had to send her daughters to safety.
She had seen air pollution grow worse in recent years as the truck traffic near her San Bernardino neighborhood increased so she made the difficult decision to send her three daughters to live with her mother, whose home is farther from the worst of the fumes and dust from the unending parade of trucks moving to and from nearby warehouses. “Unfortunately, we cannot keep them in an air bubble,” she said.
A coalition of local organizations is leading the fight against the expansion of the San Bernardino International Airport to accommodate Amazon’s burgeoning logistics needs with a complex that will bring more flights, more warehouses and even more truck traffic and pollution to her area. The coalition has an unusual ally: Xavier Becerra, the attorney general for the state of California, and the choice of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Opposing the airport expansion plan is the work of the environmental justice bureau Mr. Becerra created in 2018, the first of its kind. Its focus: the unequal effect pollution and other forms of environmental damage have on health in the most vulnerable communities. While local officials, understandably, want to promote economic development, the bureau created by Mr. Becerra is saying that environmental justice needs to be part of the equation.
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