Lisa Jackson for EPA: a dissenting voice?
December 20, 2008
I haven’t commented yet on Steven Chu, Lisa Jackson and the rest of Obama’s energy & enviro team because I just can’t wrap my arms around what would make my hosannas that much more worthy of your limited eyeball time than anyone else’s. In all honesty, though, I do have some reservations about Ms. Jackson, based on my published study of New Jersey’s program designed to remediate brownfield sites. See vol. 34 of the Fordham Urban Law Journal from 2007 if you are curious. My principal source for some background info for that article, Bill Wolfe of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), strongly opposes her, for reasons some of which are described in my article. Note this as one example: “The state hazardous waste clean-up program under Ms. Jackson was so mismanaged that the Bush EPA had to step in and assume control of several Superfund sites.”
I’m going to go back and look a little more closely than I did at the time at specific persons and offices who bore responsibility for the mess in the NJ brownfields program (the quote above refers to the Superfund program, designed for the more contaminated sites). If anything, I might get some clues about a post-Bush EPA. My gut instinct, based on other appointments (Solis, Chu, Holdren, Lubchenco, etc.), is that the transition team is so focused on reversing eight years of climate change policy that other priorities may have been crowded out. I also think that Carol Browner had a lot to do with this nomination; Jackson worked in her EPA.
PEER argues that even in the area of climate change, New Jersey is not a shining beacon on the hill. As I told my Law of Global Warming class, and as PEER rightly observes, NJ missed out on the first RGGI greenhouse gas auction because it could not get its regulatory act together.
Maybe Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board would have been a better choice. I hope I am proven wrong.
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