The WE ACT Conference was amazing [1] and impressive. More than 400 [2] individuals, organizations, scientists, activists, organizers and elected officials that attended to listen and discuss the most pressing climate crisis questions currently facing us. It was a great honor to join WE ACT on their 20th anniversary to talk strategy and tactics as well as science. For a young organizer like myself, it was humbling and encouraging to be seeing, listening and sharing the stage with long distance runners in the movement for environmental justice.

First Black EPA Chief for a New EPA?

undefinedSo many things struck me but one of the most powerful aspects for me was meeting Lisa Jackson, the new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the first Black person to ever to reach this post.

Why? Well, to understand how monumental it is for her to be the new EPA chief, you have to look at history.

Historically, heads of the EPA have been for the most part white men who sometimes have some science background but are often former elected officials or men who have high-level corporate backgrounds. These men have often been praised for how much money they saved industry. In the worst case, they have even been ratted out by their own staff for line editing EPA's scientific report on climate change. Needless to say they have tended to be on industry's side, either passively standing by or, too often, standing in the way of any serious regulation of the major corporate polluters and carbon emitters.

But in theory the EPA can be an immensely powerful and effective agency. It can do everything from imposing higher restrictions on auto emissions to cleaning up brown fields to truly regulating industry's dirty air toxins through existing Clean Air Act Legislation.

"The EPA has to move beyond legislation to regulation"

Lisa Jackson was first in her class at Princeton and has a long environmental record and worked at the EPA for 16 years. What can the EPA be under Lisa Jackson?

The key is in something she said at the WE ACT conference that just floored me, ""The EPA has to move beyond legislation to regulation." Even though her appointment has come with critics [3], Jackson has already begun to raise important questions. She recently promised at a Senate hearing to immediately assess the hundreds of coal ash disposal sites at power plants [4] across the country in the wake of two spills in Alabama and Tennessee. During a recent Associated Press interview, Jackson was recently quoted saying "We are going to be making a fairly significant finding about what these gases mean for public health and the welfare of our country." She wants to kick start the EPA's long overdue conversation on greenhouse gas regulation [5]. The EPA could potentially begin seriously regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the Bush administration refused to do time and time again.

This is huge. Jackson is a solid Black liberal signaling that government cannot just legislate, that is must regulate, that it must enforce. What does this mean? It means that the ball's on our court with the even bigger question, "What is our movement going to do to take advantage of the openings the Obama Administration is creating for us?" What is our program of demands to hold Chief Jackson accountable? Will we move her--what is our next move?