McCarthy to be energy czar and expand on her former EPA policies

 

She’s baaaack.  Gina McCarthy, the former EPA Administrator under the Obama administration who brought methane regulations for the oil and gas industry and introduced the Waters of the US rule is being picked to be President-elect Biden’s ‘climate czar.’

As such, McCarthy will coordinate domestic climate response across federal agencies. After leaving the EPA when President Trump was elected, McCarthy was picked to head the environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This is the likely pick of the person responsible for enforcing new and more stringent regulations on on the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma and across the rest of the U.S.

While farm groups and the oil and gas industry might not remember her with a great deal of fondness, others contend she is a “brilliant pick.” At least that’s the response from Greg Gershuny, executive director of The Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program.

He worked with McCarthy when he was Director of Energy and Environment in the Presidential Personnel Office and at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems analysis in the Obama administration.

When the Trump administration suspended the WOTUS rule, it prompted McCarthy respond by calling it “Trump’s dirty water rule.”
“So much for the ‘crystal clear’ water President Trump promised. You don’t make America great by polluting our drinking water supplies, making our beaches unfit for swimming, and increasing flood risk,” she said at the time.
But McCarthy had her own problems as EPA administrator. Recall that in 2016, she was called before Congress to explain the agency’s use of social media to promote WOTUS. She contended the EPA did nothing wrong even though the Government Accountability Office said the agency illegally engaged in “propaganda.”
As the nation’s climate czar she is expected to expand environmental regulations, even more than she did in the Obama administration when she toughened auto emission standards, laid out the methane regulations on oil and gas and created emissions limits on power plants.
While the Trump administration undid much of what McCarthy did as EPA administrator, observers believe she will not only reverse the current administration’s work but go well beyond her previous efforts.
Biden is also expected to tap former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to head the Energy Department. She served as Michigan’s governor from 2003 to 2011 and was the state’s attorney general from 1999 to 2003.
She also has work experience with Biden as they formulated the Obama administration’s auto industry bailout plan.
Granholm is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.