Nichols, who is stepping down as chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board this month, has crafted some of the most outspoken climate policies in the country. She has further been a chief opponent of the Trump administration’s environmental regulatory rollbacks, battling to preserve California’s powers to establish its own tailpipe greenhouse gas standards.
But environmental organizations and activists fighting to clean up the most polluted regions in the state say Nichols has repeatedly ignored their information and preferred climate policies that enable fossil fuel facilities such as oil refineries to continue emitting. Her actions are invalidating, they say, particularly given President-elect Joe Biden’s commitment to address pollution in minority and lower-income areas of the country.
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“Her inability to work well with environmental justice groups and leaders in California indicates that she is not the right person to oversee and implement climate and environmental programs for the country,” reads a letter being sent to the Biden transition team this week.
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Writers of the letter, directed by the California Environmental Justice Alliance and Friends of the Earth, are still gathering signatures, but they require at least 50 groups and activists to sign.
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In the letter, the environmental activists describe “contentious” communications with Nichols and her team at the CARB. Nichols has “repeatedly disregarded” advice from environmental groups and organizers working in the areas most hit by pollution, including from groups such as the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee set up to offer counsel on the state’s climate plans, the letter says.
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The letter even says Nichols seldom talked to local environmental activists in a “condescending tone” when dropping their suggestions.
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“We want to see an EPA that values the partnership of environmental justice communities. So, pick the best candidate who can do that, who can start from [the] jump to have good relationships with environmental justice communities,” said Mari Rose Taruc, an environmental activist in California who signed the letter. Taruc has worked on the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee.
“Because if you start with somebody who doesn’t have good relationships already or doesn’t have an open stance to working with the most impacted communities, it’s just going to be an uphill battle from there,” she added.
Environmental organizers in California claim they’ve already been struggling with that conflict with Nichols for years. This year, as the country has seen demonstrations on racial injustice, the California Air Resources Board and Nichols have come under scrutiny.
Over the summer, Nichols was aggressively criticized by several black state lawmakers for a tweet comparing police violence against people of color to air pollution.
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