The former vice president is set to nominate North Carolina environmental regulator Michael S. Regan to become the first Black man to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Obama administration veteran Brenda Mallory to serve as the first Black chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
And he is tapping Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) to serve as the first Native American head of the Department of the Interior, which oversees most of the nation’s vast natural resources as well as tribal lands. The pick marks a turning point in the federal government’s often fraught relationship with the original people of North America.
On Twitter late Thursday, Haaland acknowledged the gravity of an Indigenous woman taking the reins of the department. “A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” Haaland wrote. “ … I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
All three nominees will play a central role in realizing Biden’s promises to combat climate change and address environmental racism.
The slate of picks also amount to a concession to progressives in Biden’s party who sought diverse representation as well as an emphasis on a racial dimensions of pollution from the Cabinet.
“I did not expect the wave of emotion that I felt,” tweeted Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which publicly pushed for Haaland’s nomination.
Regan has served as the head of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality since early 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper (D) named him to his current role.
While union leaders have criticized his approach at times, he has shown a capacity to work with community activists and the corporate world. Lisa P. Jackson, who headed the EPA from 2009 to 2013, was the first Black administrator of the agency.
As the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, Mallory will be charged with ensuring communities have a voice in the construction of highways and other potential sources of pollution that often end up getting built in poor and minority areas. This summer, the Trump administration limited public review of projects under the National Environmental Policy Act to speed up permitting process.
“We have individuals coming to these positions who have seen what it’s like on the other side, in terms of communities that have suffered,” environmental justice pioneer Bob Bullard said in an interview Thursday. “They have been fighting for justice. Now they are in a position to make change and make policy. That, to me, has the potential to be transformative.”
And Haaland will take over a department with tremendous impact on Indian Country through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which manages billions held in trust by the U.S. government.
“It’s symbolic, but it just cuts to the core of Indian culture,” University of Colorado at Boulder law professor Charles Wilkinson said. “The Department of Interior has almost unlimited power over tribes. And by the way, that is power to do good or bad.”
Biden’s team will be tasked with unwinding many of the Trump administration’s policies.
Haaland will enter the Interior Department after it removed protections from sacred tribal sites in Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and allowed oil drillers into Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to the caribou that Native Alaskans hunt for food.
In an interview this month, Haaland argued that Trump’s interior secretaries, Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, reorganized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other Interior Department bureaus in a way that has hampered the ability of Native Americans to confer with federal officials. Relocating the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., for example, has made it harder for tribal leaders accustomed to traveling to Washington.
“It doesn’t help them that they move one big facet of the Department of the Interior to another state, because that’s not the way that things have been done,” she said.
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and helped lead the campaign for Haaland to be interior secretary, said a diverse Cabinet will pursue environmental policies that are “inclusive and involving the breadth of who the American people are.”
“That’s important, that nobody be left behind as we go forward,” he added.
Under Biden, the EPA will be responsible for tightening fuel-efficiency standards for the nation’s cars and trucks and emissions from power plants and oil and gas facilities after a series of rollbacks of Obama-era rules over the past four years.
Biden picked Regan for that role over Mary Nichols, who chairs the powerful California Air Resources Board. Nichols appeared to be an early front-runner for the position until a group of environmental justice activists from her state expressed concern about California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. Some of those advocates argued the program pushes sources of pollution into poor neighborhoods.
With the Cabinet secretary picks, Biden tapped two people who did not serve in the federal government when he was vice president.
As the Biden administration tries to set the country on track to net-zero emissions by 2050, an open question is how much power will be centralized at the White House — and in former secretary of state John F. Kerry and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy.
Those two Obama-era officials have been tapped for top-level climate positions in the White House. McCarthy will coordinate the new administration’s domestic climate agenda while Kerry will serve in the newly created role as Biden’s climate envoy to the rest of the world.
Note: This is the final Energy 202 of 2020! We’re off for two weeks to drink eggnog and celebrate the end of this tough year. We will return to your inbox on Monday, Jan. 4. Here’s to peaceful and safe holiday.
Power plays
A massive cyberattack breached the U.S. nuclear agency.
The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks, Politico reports. The hack was part of a broader cyberattack on federal agencies that experts suspect to be a Russian intelligence operation.
“They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE,” Politico writes.
The Department of Energy said that the hack was limited to its business networks and did not impact national security.
The EPA will let Florida take over management of the state’s wetlands.
The Environmental Protection Agency is granting Florida the authority to approve or deny permits for development on wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act, the Miami Herald reports. Environmentalists have long opposed the move, arguing that the state environmental agency has a less thorough permitting process and may be more easily influenced by local developers.
Oversight of wetlands has generally fallen to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said that Florida’s move to assume control could serve as a “road map” for other states. New Jersey and Michigan are the only other two states to oversee their own permitting programs.
The Trump administration finalized another rollback under the Endangered Species Act.
The new rule will require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to weigh the conservation benefits that would come from listing an area as a critical habitat against the economic costs of that might come from such a designation, Bloomberg News reports. The move comes just two days after the agency issued a separate rule limiting the definition of critical habitat to areas that can support an endangered species.
Lindsay O. Graham says the Senate should vote on the Paris agreement.
The Republican senator from South Carolina tweeted that the Senate should go on the record about whether it supports or opposes a return to the Paris climate accord. “As currently drafted, the Accord is a big win for China and India,” Graham said. Biden does not need congressional approval to reenter the agreement.
Graham also said that he was working to secure a Senate vote of opposition or support on reentering the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement for Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for lifted sanctions, which Trump pulled out of in 2018.
Rep. Kathleen Rice beat out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Members of the steering committee in charge of committee assignments voted 46 to 13 to give the seat to Rice, who is more senior and centrist than Ocasio-Cortez, The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reports. The congresswomen, both New York Democrats, had been jockeying behind the scenes for a spot on the powerful committee, which oversees a broad portfolio of issues, including energy and the environment, consumer protection and health care.
Climate solutions
Catherine Coleman Flowers wants to find a new way to deal with waste.
Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Ala., where many communities fall outside the range of municipal sewage systems, resulting in untreated waste and illnesses that are rarely seen in developed nations, our colleague Sarah Kaplan writes. Now an environmental activist and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” awardee, Flowers is working to build a new type of septic system that will clean and recycle waste. This month, she launched the Wastewater Innovation and Environmental Justice Lab at Columbia University, which will serve as a hub for activism and research related to sanitation policy.
The issue of untreated waste in America is bigger than people may realize: “Dwindling investment in infrastructure, chronic neglect of rural and minority communities, and the ravages of climate change mean that an estimated half-million U.S. households lack adequate sanitation. In Black Belt Alabama, on the flooded coasts of Florida, in thawing Alaska towns, waste is no longer something that can be forgotten as soon as it is flushed away,” Kaplan writes.
Extra mileage
San Antonio opened a huge wildlife crossing.
The bridge crosses a six-lane highway to connect two sides of the Phil Hardberger Park, which is home to ringtails, squirrels coyotes, lizards, raccoons and deer.
San Antonio’s parks department touts it as the largest wildlife crossing designed for both humans and animals in the United States, HuffPost reports.
