California air official Mary Nichols, a front-runner to lead the Biden Environmental Protection Agency, is facing liberal criticism that she has ignored the concerns of minority and lower-income people bearing the brunt of toxic air pollution.
Nichols, who is stepping down as chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board this month, has crafted some of the most aggressive climate policies in the country. She has also been a chief opponent of the Trump administration’s environmental regulatory rollbacks, fighting to preserve California’s ability to set its own tailpipe greenhouse gas standards.
But environmental groups and activists working to clean up the most polluted regions in the state say Nichols has repeatedly neglected their input and chosen climate policies that allow fossil fuel facilities such as oil refineries to continue emitting. Her actions are disqualifying, they say, especially given President-elect Joe Biden’s commitment to address pollution in minority and lower-income regions of the country.
“Her inability to work well with environmental justice groups and leaders in California indicates that she is not the right person to oversee and implement climate and environmental programs for the country,” reads a letter being sent to the Biden transition team this week.
Organizers of the letter, led by the California Environmental Justice Alliance and Friends of the Earth, are still collecting signatures, but they expect at least 50 groups and activists to sign.
In the letter, the environmental activists describe “contentious” interactions with Nichols and her staff at the CARB. Nichols has “repeatedly disregarded” recommendations from environmental groups and organizers working in the regions most affected by pollution, including from groups such as the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee set up to offer counsel on the state’s climate plans, the letter says.
The letter even says Nichols sometimes spoke to local environmental activists in a “condescending tone” when dismissing their suggestions.
“We want to see an EPA that values the partnership of environmental justice communities. So, pick the best candidate who can do that, who can start from [the] jump to have good relationships with environmental justice communities,” said Mari Rose Taruc, an environmental organizer in California who signed the letter. Taruc has served on the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee.
“Because if you start with somebody who doesn’t have good relationships already or doesn’t have an open stance to working with the most impacted communities, it’s just going to be an uphill battle from there,” she added.
Environmental organizers in California say they’ve already been fighting that battle with Nichols for years. This year, as the country has seen protests on racial injustice, the California Air Resources Board and Nichols have come under scrutiny.
Over the summer, Nichols was sharply criticized by several black state lawmakers for a tweet comparing police violence against people of color to air pollution.
“‘I can’t breathe’ speaks to police violence, but it also applies to the struggle for clean air. Environmental racism is just one form of racism. It’s all toxic,” Nichols said in a since-deleted tweet in early June.
“How dare you use a dying man’s plea for help as a way to discuss your agenda. Have you no shame,” California Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat, tweeted in response. “How dare you talk about Enviro racism when historically your policies favor your coastal elitist friends. While leaving communities of color out and left to foot the bill.”
Black employees of the California Air Resources Board, in a letter in September, raised concerns about experiencing racism at work and recommended, among other things, that one black person and two other people of color are appointed to fill the seats of board members whose terms are expiring in the next few years.
Taruc said whomever Biden chooses to lead the EPA should already have experience working in regions that are most heavily affected by pollution.
The future EPA administrator should be someone willing to “get their hands dirty in those communities, literally dirty with pollution so they can understand how to best help those communities,” she added.
Taruc didn’t name names, but there are several people floated for the EPA’s top job that could fit that bill. They include Heather McTeer Toney, a black woman who served as an EPA regional administrator during the Obama years, and Mustafa Santiago Ali, who was the EPA’s top environmental justice official until 2017. The Biden team is reportedly considering Ali to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, according to Bloomberg.
Nichols, however, is seen as a favorite for the EPA administrator post, given her experience managing California’s climate programs. She is also an EPA veteran, leading the agency’s air office during the Clinton administration.
“Not everybody has actually run a climate action program, or an air program for that matter. And I like working with large bureaucracies,” Nichols told the Associated Press recently. “If they offered it, I would take it.”
Environmental activists, though, take issue with policies Nichols has supported, especially the cap-and-trade program that they say has allowed local pollution to increase because facilities have been able to avoid emissions cuts by purchasing carbon credits or offsets.
More broadly, some environmentalists say that Nichols’s expertise lies solely in climate and air regulations and doesn’t encompass the full scope of the EPA’s work, which also includes addressing water pollution, restricting toxic chemicals, and cleaning up regions where toxic waste was dumped.
“We saw the same dynamic happen during the Obama years, where they sort of put all of their political eggs into the climate basket and then ignored the rest of the EPA mission and really downplayed it,” said Brett Hartl, chief political strategist for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund.
Hartl and other liberal environmentalists have noted that nearly every person the Biden team has tapped thus far served in the Obama administration in some capacity.
If all the EPA deputies are former Obama officials “and it’s just like the gang is getting back together and the chairs are being rearranged, that’s not exactly encouraging from the perspective of bold, innovative, aggressive, creative new ideas that are what we need right now,” Hartl said.
