United States: In order to introduce a national office that would award $3 billion in block grants to neglected regions suffering from pollution, President Joe Biden’s top environment official travelled to what is regarded as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement on Saturday.
Michael Regan, the first Black administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, declared he is devoting a new senior level of leadership to the environmental justice campaign they launched forty years ago in Warren County, North Carolina, where a majority of the residents were African American.
Three current EPA programmes will be merged to form the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which will oversee a portion of the $60 billion Democrats allocated for environmental justice initiatives under the Inflation Reduction Act. This office currently employs more than 200 people across ten U.S. regions. In anticipation of Senate approval, the president will propose an assistant administrator as the new office’s director.
Along with this, Regan mentioned in an interview, “In the past, many of our communities have had to compete for very small grants because EPA’s pot of money was extremely small,”
“We are going from tens of thousands of dollars to developing and designing a program that will distribute billions. But we’ll also be sure that this money goes to those who need it the most and those who’ve never had a seat at the table.”
Since his first week in office, when he issued an executive order providing 40% of the total benefits from certain government renewable energy projects to poor areas overwhelmed by pollution, Biden has promoted environmental justice as a key component of his climate strategy.
According to Regan, this new office weaves environmental justice into the EPA’s core mission, equating it to other essential agencies like the EPA’s air and water office and establishing its guiding principles in a way that will last beyond the current administration.
Furthermore, as a dumping location for truckloads of dirt loaded with highly carcinogenic chemical compounds that poisoned the water system, North Carolina chose Warren County, a tiny, predominately Black rural hamlet along the Virginia border, in 1978.
