WASHINGTON – White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy has told confidants she is disappointed by the slow pace of climate progress and intends to step down in the coming months, according to several people she has spoken to.
Ms McCarthy, 67, who has served since the start of the Biden administration, was widely expected to remain in her position for nearly a year, friends and aides said on Thursday.
According to a person familiar with Ms McCarthy’s plans, President Biden told her to stop. Others who spoke with her in recent days said Ms McCarthy denied she was leaving soon and told colleagues she didn’t have a specific date in mind. He is expected to be succeeded by his deputy, Ali Zaidi.
Ms McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment on her plans, which were first reported by Reuters. White House spokesman Vedanta Patel called the reports “untrue”.
Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
President Biden is pushing for stronger regulations, but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.
“We have no personnel announcement to make,” Mr Patel said in a statement. “Gina and her entire team are focused on delivering on President Biden’s clean energy agenda.”
Mr Biden tapped McCarthy, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, to drive his ambitious climate agenda, which aims to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half by the end of the decade. invokes.
But their plans have been stalled in Congress because of unified opposition from Republicans as well as Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat from West Virginia who represents a significant swing vote in an equally divided Senate.
Separately, Mr Biden’s plans to use executive authority to enact tough new rules on greenhouse pollution from power plants and automobiles could be sharply limited by an upcoming decision by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Furthermore, the war in Ukraine has pushed up gasoline prices, prompting Mr Biden to take steps that are anathema to climate activists. He released a record amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, urged oil and gas companies to do more drilling and temporarily loosened environmental regulations to allow gasoline mixed with ethanol to be sold during the summer months. done, when it is generally banned because it can cause smog
Those moves came as a landmark UN report in which top scientists around the world warned that the time was running out for countries to move away from fossil fuels or face a future of climate catastrophe.
One person described Ms McCarthy as in “upset mode” and said she was concerned by the political and legal challenges facing the administration’s climate plans. Others said she was saddened by the difficulties of traveling and being away from her husband.
Publicly, however, Ms McCarthy has insisted she remains optimistic about the prospects for the climate law to be passed this year. At a recent event in Washington, she said she was “not naive” about the challenges, but added, “I think we’ll have a bill that goes through this fall.”
When she served in the Obama administration, Ms. McCarthy was the chief architect of the president’s historic and far-reaching climate change policies.
Donald J. Following Trump’s election, McCarthy became the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the Trump administration more than 100 times because Mr. Trump denounced too much of Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy.
Under Mr Biden, McCarthy was accused of leading a “whole-government” approach in which nearly every federal agency created new rules designed to address climate change. He also hoped to guide Congress toward passing new climate laws that could not be rolled back by a future president, ensuring a steady decline in the country’s greenhouse emissions.
Contributed to reporting.
