"Now that she can see the Hollywood sign from her front lawn, Mary D. Nichols isn’t about to let President Trump roll back California’s strict auto-emissions standards."
"LOS ANGELES — In 1972, as a young lawyer fresh out of Yale, she filed the first test case under the federal Clean Air Act, suing the Environmental Protection Agency to compel California to impose air-quality standards under the law. More than two decades later, as a senior official at the EPA, she drafted the first national standards regulating fine-particle air pollution.
And now, in her second tour as the powerful chair of the California Air Resources Board, Mary D. Nichols is the tip of the spear in her state’s effort to block the Trump administration’s proposals to freeze federal fuel-economy and auto-emissions standards through 2026, and to rescind California’s long-standing ability to set its own, tougher rules—rules also followed by 12 other states that together account for a third of the American market for new automobiles.
Nichols may not be a household name, but no single individual has been more responsible for the success of the Golden State’s half-century, bipartisan effort to clean up its own skies. Then-Governor Jerry Brown first appointed Nichols to the Air Resources Board in 1975, elevating her to the chairmanship four years later. In 2007, the Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger named her again to the same post. In between, she opened the Los Angeles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council and served as state-resources secretary under Governor Gray Davis. In 2013, Time magazine named her one of its 100 most influential people in the world, and to her admirers and adversaries alike she is acknowledged as “The Queen of Green.”"
Todd S. Purdum reports for the Atlantic October 2, 2018.
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