“The place the choices are in EPA’s purview, I can guarantee you that I will probably be main and making these choices, and I will probably be accepting the accountability for these choices,” Regan mentioned on the February listening to when GOP senators echoed the right-wing speaking level.
Regan’s expertise in a conservative-leaning swing state served him nicely all through the affirmation course of, signaling that he would search to depoliticize the company and work in good religion with partisan opponents. In February, 4 Republicans on the Senate Atmosphere and Public Works Committee—Sens. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Roger Wicker of Mississippi—accredited Regan’s nomination, advancing him to the total chamber by a 14-to-6 margin.
McCarthy’s affirmation in 2013 took months however in the end received with a 59-to-40 vote. Pruitt eked out a a lot narrower approval with 52-to-46, whereas Wheeler was confirmed with a 52-to-47 vote after dropping the assist of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
Regan even scored a shock Republican vote Wednesday night time when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who had voted with a lot of his get together towards ending debate on the EPA nomination an hour earlier, switched his place and supplied the sixteenth Republican yea.
A local of Goldsboro, North Carolina, Regan has a file on environmental points that stretches again twenty years.
He labored on the EPA’s air high quality and vitality packages within the Invoice Clinton and George W. Bush administrations earlier than becoming a member of the Environmental Protection Fund, the place he led the politically average advocacy group’s efforts to cut back the consequences of local weather change and air air pollution. In 2017, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper tapped him to guide the Division of Environmental High quality, overseeing a finances of roughly $80 million.
Regan’s tenure as North Carolina’s head environmental regulator was blended. He created the Clear Vitality Plan, mandating the state’s utilities to chop their output of climate-changing gases to 70 p.c under 2005 ranges by 2030 and setting a objective to succeed in net-zero emissions by 2050.
In January 2020, he negotiated the most important coal-ash elimination settlement in US historical past, compelling utility big Duke Vitality to excavate almost 80 million tons of a poisonous residue that always pollutes water sources and soil.
Final August, Regan rejected a key water allow for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial pure fuel undertaking, calling it “an pointless undertaking that poses pointless dangers to the environment.”
However that got here two years after he greenlighted permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a separate fuel undertaking that drew fierce opposition from religion teams, environmentalists and neighborhood activists, notably these in Black communities alongside its proposed route. He additionally accredited a fuel facility within the coronary heart of Lumbee territory, the most important Indigenous tribe east of the Mississippi, with out correctly consulting tribal leaders.
Below his management, the state company “accredited each allow software from the wooden pellet trade in North Carolina regardless of the trade’s huge deforestation issues and did not resolve essential environmental points associated to hog waste disposal,” in response to a weblog publish from the Middle for Financial and Coverage Analysis’s Revolving Door Challenge, a watchdog group.
Advocates within the Tar Heel State described him as hamstrung by the state legislature’s Republican majority, who routinely punished his company with finances cuts. The finances shrank 34 p.c from 2008 to 2018, and it misplaced 376 workers positions, analysis from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Challenge discovered final yr. And for Regan’s first two years in workplace, Republicans held a veto-proof majority within the legislature.
“He’s a great particular person, and I believe he has the center to do proper by communities and do proper by the surroundings on this state,” Naeema Muhammad, the organizing co-director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Community, instructed HuffPost when Regan was nominated in December. “However his arms have been tied up by our legislature.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s strongest oil and fuel foyer, mentioned it seemed “ahead to working with Administrator Regan to construct on the nation’s sturdy environmental progress whereas guaranteeing entry to reasonably priced, dependable and cleaner vitality safely produced right here in the US.”
Below the Biden administration, which has vowed to direct 40 p.c of all local weather efforts towards traditionally deprived communities, Regan will take pleasure in a broad mandate to handle air pollution inequities. It’s a frightening disaster.
Folks dwelling under the poverty line breathe air with 1.35 instances extra particulate matter than the general inhabitants, in response to a landmark EPA research revealed in April 2018. For non-white Individuals, that quantity was 1.28 instances larger. For Black Individuals, particularly, that determine surged to 1.54 instances larger than the general inhabitants.
A report by the NAACP discovered Black Individuals have been uncovered to 38 p.c extra polluted air than their white countrymen, and have been 75 p.c extra more likely to dwell in communities abutting polluting industrial amenities than the typical American.
“I’m hopeful he’ll give environmental justice voices a brand new and stronger platform within the EPA,” Kathleen Relaxation, the manager director of the Union of Involved Scientists, mentioned in an announcement. “The following administrator has a bunch of massive duties forward, and we stay up for working with Mr. Regan to make sure the EPA company lives as much as the problem.”