*President-elect Joe Biden will reportedly select Michael Regan to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Regan, 44, is currently the secretary for North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the state’s EPA equivalent. He would be the first Black man and second Black person to hold the role of EPA chief.
Picking Regan suggests Biden wants a longtime veteran at an agency responsible for the bulk of the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.
During 45’s stint, the EPA has rolled back regulations on power plants, industrial emissions from the oil and gas sector, and emissions from vehicles — all of which will need to be reversed in order to put the U.S. on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 as Biden has promised.
“The Biden team was very impressed with his tenure leading North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, how he held polluters accountable, including by reaching the largest coal ash cleanup settlement in US history,” a source familiar with the transition team’s thinking told The Hill.
“And the team was also impressed by how he worked to give communities disproportionately harmed by environmental injustices a larger voice in state environmental and natural resource decisions.”
Here’s Michael Regan making the case against offshore drilling in his current job as the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality Secretary in 2018.
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