Biden picks top North Carolina environmental official to run EPA
Source: Washington Post
President-elect Joe Biden will choose to nominate Michael S. Regan, who heads the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, as the next Environmental Protection Agency administrator, according to two individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not yet been formally announced. Regan, 44, would be the first Black man to run the EPA.
He would play a central role in realizing Biden’s promises to combat climate change, embrace green energy and address environmental racism. As administrator of the EPA, he would be responsible for crafting fuel-efficiency standards for the nation’s cars and trucks, overseeing emissions from power plants and oil and gas facilities, and cleaning up the country’s most polluted sites. In the past four years, the Trump administration has reversed or weakened more than 130 environmental protections and regulations, according to a Post analysis, with plans to target nearly a dozen more by mid-January.
Those rollbacks include scaling back automobile fuel-efficiency standards and emissions limits for coal-burning plants, as well as lifting Obama-era limits on methane released from new oil and gas wells. Many senior rank-and-file EPA employees clashed with Trump’s political appointees and a number retired rather than continue working at the agency. There are now 14,222 full- and part-time permanent employees at the EPA, according to the agency, nearly 300 fewer than when President Trump took office.
Regan has served as North Carolina’s top environmental official since early 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper (D) named him to his role. During that time, he forged a tough multibillion-dollar settlement over a coal ash cleanup with Duke Energy, established an environmental justice advisory board, and reached across the political divide to work with the state’s Republican legislature.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/17/biden-epa-regan/
Congrats to him. This would be a huge and challenging job considering all the damage that was done over the past 4 years.
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What a breath of fresh air (pun intended) after the Trump demolition squad.
joining the administration. What is the world coming to? 
pick for Biden.
