Michael Regan, tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is poised to be a key player in President Biden’s efforts to support the minority and low-income people most affected by pollution.
If confirmed, Regan, 44, would be the first black man to hold the top federal environmental post. A relatively unknown figure on the national stage, Regan would join the EPA from North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, where he has been secretary since 2017.
Regan, described as well liked and well respected even by those who worked for Republican administrations, will face senators on the environmental committee for a nomination hearing Wednesday.
Republican senators, reeling from Biden’s sweeping executive actions last week, are likely to demand answers about how Regan would approach greenhouse gas emissions mandates, which they say come at the expense of fossil fuel regions in their states.
“The first goal is to reinvigorate the organization and the staff, make sure that I’m a great partner to the staff, and that they know their voices will be heard,” Regan told the trade publication Agri-Pulse of his priorities in a recent interview. “We’re going to follow the science. We’re going to follow the law. And we’re going to apply that to the president’s ambitious climate agenda.”
In Regan, though, Biden hasn’t chosen a climate firebrand, but a more low-key, behind-the-scenes policymaker who aligns with the president’s priority of addressing the disproportionate effects of pollution on minority and low-income people.
Another leading contender, former California air chief and well-known climate regulator Mary Nichols, was passed over for the EPA role in part because state environmental activists criticized her sharply for ignoring the concerns of minority and low-income people whose health is most affected by pollution.
As North Carolina’s top environmental official, Regan sought to elevate the DEQ’s attention to environmental inequities, according to environmentalists and those who worked with him. Regan created an Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board in 2018 to counsel him on ways to tackle pollution in the areas closest to manufacturing facilities, which tend to be predominantly minority and low-income.
“I thought, ‘You gotta be crazy to do this,’” said Jim Johnson, a professor at the University of North Carolina who chairs that board.
“To have a secretary of the department who says, ‘I’m putting these issues back on the table and putting together a group of diverse constituency of the voices that heretofore had not been acknowledged and taken seriously’ … I thought it took a lot of guts to do it,” Johnson added.
In a climate executive order on Jan. 27, Biden directed the government to work to ensure 40% of the benefits of clean energy, water, and waste cleanup investments flow to the regions most vulnerable to pollution damages.
“Lifting up these communities makes us all stronger as a nation and increases the health of everybody,” Biden said in remarks before signing the order, citing heavy industrial areas hard-hit by pollution such as so-called “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana.
Biden’s order also established two new advisory councils on “environmental justice”: an interagency council, on which Regan would sit if confirmed, and an advisory group of outside experts, for which the EPA will provide administrative support and funding.
“What Michael will be able to do is operationalize” Biden’s priorities “in sensible ways,” said Jeff Holmstead, a partner with Bracewell LLP who served as the EPA’s air chief during the Bush administration.
Regan, who spent nearly a decade at the EPA in the early part of his career, worked for several months as Holmstead’s special assistant. Holmstead said he then helped facilitate Regan’s move back to North Carolina to join the EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, a division of the agency that focuses on air quality assessments, science, and policy.
“It’s easy to make environmental justice a rallying cry as a political statement, but actually figuring out what it means and how it works with all of these regulatory programs that EPA has to deal with — that’s something that he’s thought about and he’s capable of dealing with,” Holmstead added.
Others who worked with Regan said he is always thinking about ways to make environmental programs accessible to minority people. For example, Regan, when working at the Environmental Defense Fund, helped expand the “Climate Corps” the environmental group was launching, said Will McDow, who directs the EDF’s resilient landscapes program and worked with Regan during his time there.
Through the Climate Corps program, the EDF installed business students in summer roles at companies to help them find ways to reduce emissions and save energy costs, according to McDow. Regan, however, “saw an opportunity to take that concept and bring it to minority-serving institutions,” as well as local government agencies, McDow said.
Regan’s tenure at the North Carolina DEQ is not without some critics, however.
While saying Regan is “a nice guy” and not confrontational in nature, Donald van der Vaart, Regan’s predecessor in the DEQ secretary role, said he couldn’t think of any environmental policy where Regan worked across the aisle with Republicans in the state.
Van der Vaart, now a senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation, also raised issues with a major multimillion settlement Regan helped broker with Duke Energy in late 2019, which resulted in the utility committing to the nation’s largest coal ash cleanup. That settlement, van der Vaart said, allowed Duke to pass on costs of the coal ash cleanup to its customers.
“When I was there, they wanted that, and we refused to put that in there,” van der Vaart said, calling the settlement “a joke” and a “giveaway to Duke.”
Environmentalists, though, see a parallel in the issues Regan faced taking over the DEQ from van der Vaart as he will face leading the EPA post-Trump. Similar to the Trump administration, environmentalists accused the Republican McCrory administration of ignoring climate change, rejecting science, and favoring industry.
Those who know him well also say Regan, who grew up in rural North Carolina and has asthma, brings the experience of someone who has lived the hardships he is expected to address in his new role.
Oftentimes, leaders “have not really been exposed to injustices, and so they have to rely on what their advisers tell them [and] what they read,” said Marian Johnson-Thompson, a professor at the University of D.C. and the University of North Carolina who serves as vice chairwoman of the DEQ’s Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board. Johnson-Thompson also served on the board of the EDF, advocating for Regan’s hire there.
“It’s one thing to really experience these issues,” she added of Regan. “It brings up a different kind of response.”
