From academia to advocacy: Gina McCarthy takes on Trump’s EPA

Gina McCarthy, former director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard C-CHANGE) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, was featured in a May 24, 2020 article in the Atlantic focusing on Obama administration officials and their return to advocacy work in the Trump era.

“I had never thought that it was going to be as much of a frontal attack on everything the [Obama] administration did,” said McCarthy of her reaction to Trump administration rollbacks of critical environmental regulations. “I just couldn’t let it go.”

When the Trump administration moved to rewrite the standards for power-plant emissions of mercury—a powerful neurotoxin—McCarthy decided it was time to jump into the world of advocacy. “That’s when I realized what [Trump’s EPA was] doing made no sense from a standard-setting process. It was just to destroy everything that had been done before. It had no explanation otherwise.” In January 2020 she took a leave from her position as director of Harvard C-CHANGE to become CEO of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She remains professor of the practice of public health at Harvard Chan School and chair of the Harvard C-CHANGE board of advisors.

NRDC has sued the Trump administration more than 100 times to block its attempts to gut environmental regulations and has won more than 90% of the cases that have been resolved. “Everything that I thought I was working towards, which is really protecting my family and other families from damage from pollution, particularly—that was all at risk,” she said. “And I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore.”

Read the Atlantic article: Revenge of the Obamacrats