Biden Taps NC Environment Secretary Michael Regan to Lead EPA into Age of Environmental Justice

RALEIGH – While all the talk of North Carolina pols joining the presumed Biden administration has been centered around Dr. Mandy Cohen of NCDHHS, on account of her role in the Pandemic Panic, the first member of the Cooper administration to land a spot on the Big Guy’s team is involved in another sort of manufactured panic — the climate crisis.

Michael Regan, Governor Roy Cooper’s Secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, is has been selected to serve as Biden’s EPA administrator. The pick checks an identity politics box, of course, which every news report will mention right out of the gate (Regan is black), but it’s the allusions to Regan’s fierce environmental justice that should worry Americans about his appointment.

Cooper’s reaction:

“I am proud that President-elect Biden has recognized the talent we have here to select Michael Regan, North Carolina born and educated, to be EPA administrator. Michael has served as DEQ secretary with distinction, helping advance my climate change executive order and promoting creative solutions to some of our toughest challenges. He has important work ahead of him helping battle climate change on a national level, and I wish him and his family the best on this next step.”

A climate change warrior should be expected for a environmental bureaucrat from the Left, but it’s 2020, so there’s another level of Woke to be achieved, and Regan has the resume to fulfill that part of the agenda too.

As WRAL dutifully notes, Regan “made a name pursuing cleanups of industrial toxins and helping low-income and minority communities hit hardest by pollution.”

It’s the racial justice component that we’ve become so accustomed to in 2020 that Regan will bring to the EPA. After years of dramatic reform focused on less burdensome, more efficacious environmental regulations that release the federal government’s grip on businesses and individuals, a Regan EPA will reverse course to reassert the environmental justice agenda on a nationwide scale.

From the Biden perspective, this is a good pick. Regan already has nearly four years of experience working to undo the business-friendly reforms of a previous administration. He happened to capture high profile settlements for highly politicized pollution events, yes, but has spearheaded aggressive carbon-neutral by 2050 plans and he founded the North Carolina Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board.

So woke. So bad for the economy.

To be sure, Regan is by most accounts a affable and effective, liked on both sides of the aisle, and will likely be confirmed should he sit before the Senate.

Biden reportedly wants Regan to prioritize going carbon neutral on a national scale. You’ll remember Biden’s promise on the debate stage to eliminate the fossil fuel industry — to ‘transition away from it’ — and that means you need a regulator to affect the all the regulations to snuff out fossil fuels and force us into renewable boondoggles.

And all in the name of justice, to boot. In that same debate, Joe Biden received a curiously crafted question on pollution’s disproportionate effects on minorities (because everything is racist). Biden waxed poetic about the racial injustice caused by the environmental injustice, and now he’s appointed an administrator to tilt his sword at both.

While the press is adamant that Regan is not partisan, they also report that the previous frontrunner for Biden EPA chief was rejected from consideration after facing increasing objections from progressive groups that she had not done enough to address “the disproportionate harm low-income and minority communities face from living next to oil and gas installations, factories and freeways.”

Presumably, then, Regan has gained the confidence of the Woke that he will implement a properly woke environmental justice agenda.

And the change of gears will be a jolt for sure. The last four years have been what the environmental alarmists at WRAL as “four years that have seen the Trump administration weaken or eliminate key public health and environmental protections,” which is how you know they were four successful years of freeing individuals and businesses of the authoritarian shackles that are fervent environmental regulations.

That progress is now squarely in the sights of an environmental justice league, and a Cooper cabinet member is their chosen captain. Great.