Biden drops favorite for EPA chief over environmental justice record

WASHINGTON — When Joe Biden won the presidential election, his top candidate to lead the nation’s most powerful environmental agency appeared clear: Mary 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 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 Nichols has a “bleak track record in addressing environmental racism.”

Possible last-minute candidates, those people said, include Michael Regan, a senior North Carolina environmental official, and Richard Revesz, a New York University law professor, neither of whom had been in serious contention for the job until late last week.

The Biden team is also considering asking Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency in the Obama administration, to return.

The environmental justice groups cited Nichols’ role in pushing California’s cap-andtrade program, which is designed to broadly reduce pollution of planet-warming greenhouse gases — but disproportionately does so at the expense, the groups said, of communities of color by exposing them to more pollutants like smog and soot.

The groups charged that Nichols had repeatedly disregarded or dismissed the concerns of those communities about the effects of the climate policies she enacted.

The letter appears to have resonated: One of Biden’s key campaign pledges was a promise to address environmental justice, highlighting the need to protect poor and minority communities that are exposed to more pollution than rich communities.

While Biden had expected that Nichols would be criticized by Republicans for her history of pushing tough regulations on industries, he was caught off guard by the intense objections to Nichols from liberals.

The influence of those groups, and Biden’s reactions to their push, appears to be another signal of the increasing tensions between the left and moderate factions of the Democratic Party. Biden has already been subject to criticism from the left for some of his Cabinet picks, even as he explicitly attempts to build a Cabinet of racial and gender diversity.

Nichols, 75, was first appointed to run California’s clean air program in 1979 by Gov. Jerry Brown. In the decades since, she has been at the helm of that program as California has been at the vanguard of environmental policy, passing ambitious, first-inthe-nation measures on pollution control and conservation that have often served as models for national and even international environmental law.

In an interview last week, when she was still seen as a top contender for the EPA job, Nichols pushed back forcefully at the contention that she has been insensitive to environmental justice issues.

“California is at the forefront of actions anywhere in the nation and the world to direct attention and funding to underfunded communities,” she said.