WASHINGTON — White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy has told confidants she is frustrated by the slow pace of climate progress and plans to resign in the coming months, according to several people she spoke to.
Ms McCarthy, 67, who has served since the beginning of the Biden administration, was widely expected to remain in her position for about a year, friends and colleagues said Thursday.
President Biden has asked her to stay on, according to a well-known Ms. McCarthy’s plans. Others who have spoken to her in recent days said Ms McCarthy had denied them she would be leaving any time soon and told her associates she had no definite date in mind. She is expected to be succeeded by her deputy, Ali Zaidi.
Ms McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment on her plans, which were first reported by Reuters. Vedant Patel, a White House spokesman, called the reports “false.”
The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda
President Biden is pushing for tougher regulations but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.
“We have no staff announcements to make,” Mr Patel said in a statement. “Gina and her entire team remain laser-focused on making President Biden’s clean energy agenda a reality.”
Mr. Biden tapped Ms. McCarthy, who served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama to lead his ambitious climate agenda, calling for the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to be roughly halved by the end of this decade.
But his plans have stalled in Congress because of united opposition from Republicans and from West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin III, who represents a crucial vote in the evenly divided Senate.
Separately, Mr Biden’s plans to use the executive branch to enact tough new regulations on the pollution of greenhouses from power plants and cars would be severely curtailed by an upcoming decision from the conservative-minded Supreme Court.
In addition, 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, begged oil and gas companies to drill more and temporarily relaxed environmental regulations to allow the sale of gasoline mixed with ethanol during the summer months, when it’s normally banned because it can cause smog.
Those steps came when a landmark United Nations report was released in which top scientists from around the world warned that time is running out for countries to move away from fossil fuels or face a future of climate catastrophe.
One person described Ms McCarthy as “in a beleaguered mode” and said she was concerned about the political and legal challenges facing the government’s climate plans. Others said she had complained about the difficulties of traveling and being away from her husband.
But publicly, Ms. McCarthy has insisted that she remains optimistic about the chances of climate legislation being passed this year. At a recent event in Washington, she said she was “not naive” about the challenges, but added, “I think we will have a bill passed this fall.”
While working in the Obama administration, Ms. McCarthy was one of the key architects of the president’s landmark and far-reaching climate change policy.
After the election of Donald J. Trump, Ms. McCarthy became head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has sued the Trump administration more than 100 times for antagonizing much of Obama’s environmental legacy.
Under Mr Biden, Mrs. McCarthy charged with leading a “whole government” approach in which nearly every federal agency issued new rules designed to tackle climate change. She had also hoped to lead Congress to pass new climate laws that could not be reversed by a future president, guaranteeing a steady decline in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Zolan Kanno Youngs reporting contributed.