GINA MCCARTHY IS BACK IN CHARGE
The former EPA head is now Biden’s domestic climate czar, on a mission to harness the federal government’s might to stop climate change
Gina mccarthy logged on to Zoom one day in early February and saw a crowd of Cabinet secretaries and other agency chiefs staring back at her, a Brady Bunch of senior bureaucrats. It was the first meeting of the Biden administration’s National Climate Task Force, a team of nearly two dozen top officials from across the government in charge of jump-starting Biden’s “whole-of-government” climate agenda.
To lead it, Biden turned to McCarthy, a 66-year-old New Englander (with the chewy Boston accent to prove it) who knows a thing or two about how to wield executive power in the fight against climate change. As the head of the EPA under President Obama, she led the creation of the Clean Power Plan, the first national emissions limits for power plants, and a slew of other environmental actions.
Now, McCarthy is one of Biden’s two top lieutenants, along with former Secretary of State John Kerry, leading what climate experts describe as the most ambitious climate-policy agenda of any president in history.
How is Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach different from Obama’s approach?
President Obama pulled together a plan, but that plan had discrete tasks. It did not bring it all together under one task force with one overwhelming theme, which is to use every tool at your disposal in every agency and to start thinking about climate change in every decision you make. President Biden is all about using climate change not to address just the planetary problem, but really to use it as a way to rebuild the economy.
The administration’s goal is for 40 percent of the benefits of climate policies to go to disadvantaged communities. How will the public be able to know that progress is being made on that?
One of the things that President Biden called for was a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. The reason to have that is really twofold. One, this is going to have scorecards. We’re actually going to look at what every single agency is doing or not doing and provide the public with all kinds of information. And part of this task force is really about early engagement. We’re not here to tell environmental-justice communities what they ought to want. We are here to say, “Forty percent of the investments we’re making on clean energy are going to be used to benefit your communities. How can we make sure they’re providing the benefits that you want?”
In regard to Trump’s assault on environmental protections, which of his rollbacks are you most concerned about, and how hard are they going to be to undo?
Some of the ones early out of the gate are going to be methane. There was a rule [under Obama] that required methane to be captured from leaks in the oil-and-gas sector. We’re going to revisit that, reestablishing that rule.
We’ve already told people that 2035 is the time window for cleaning up the power sector. And so we’re having conversations with the utility sector, and that’s going to involve not just standard-setting but also making sure that we look at transmission bottlenecks or other opportunities to make that transition to clean energy, which the utilities are not arguing about. They’re just looking for help to see how they can make that [2035] window work.
And the third is we’re looking at the auto sector. We’re going to start talking to car manufacturers about how quickly we can get to zero [emissions] in the car fleet.
The president’s executive orders try to meet the needs of coal communities. But of course, there’s skepticism. Why should they think and feel differently about the Biden administration’s pledges to reinvent those communities and get people to work?
The opportunity that we have here is to understand that coal is not competitive. It is not winning in the clean-energy future. We know what we have to do to address climate change. So there’s an opportunity that the president’s trying to capture, to say, “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a productive and economically viable community.” And so we’ve identified opportunities for that — for the transition of skills that are useful in coal mining and in coal-based utilities, in the oil-and-gas sector — that we hope will be able to get some resources through legislation and other means.
So it’s not about deciding today that their jobs don’t matter. It’s about recognizing that that transition is happening; it’s going to continue to happen. If you look at the renewable numbers back in 2020, we had a huge increase in both solar and wind. And most of that increase was in states that have Republican senators. This is about recognizing where the future is and how we capture it again. We have to advance manufacturing. We have to be the clean-energy country if we want to compete against China and get those jobs here instead of elsewhere. You’re not going to build that on the technologies of the past.