Regina “Gina” McCarthy, President Obama’s chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, has essentially called pollution a force of racism in the US, saying that pollution is “holding back millions of African-Americans.”
McCarthy made even more strange comments at an April 24 appearance at Clark Atlanta University sponsored by the Hip Hop Caucus, a non-profit group that claims to “mobilize, educate, and engage young people… in elections, policymaking and service projects.”
The EPA chief, who was appointed by Obama in July of last year, claimed that black students are the “most vulnerable to climate change” and they should become “champion climate justice advocates.”
Turning pollution into an excuse to throw the race card, McCarthy claimed that stopping pollution is all about “equity” and that minorities have been “overburdened by pollution and environmental health hazards for far too long.”
The environmental official went on to claim that Obama was going to institute “environmental justice” for minorities.
“You can’t ensure environmental justice, and we can’t deliver on this president’s promise of opportunity for all without giving people clean air and clean water and clean land to live on,” she said.
In another message given to the activist group and posted to its website, the EPA head made the outlandish claim that pollution is “holding back” African-Americans.
“Pollution is holding back millions of African-Americans fighting for middle class security,” McCarthy said. “Environmental justice is social justice.”
“We have a moral obligation to act now,” she added.
Recently McCarthy was forced to respond to a growing scandal when it was revealed that the EPA used children as test subjects to measure the effects of pollution on humans.
A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that in the mid-2000s the EPA gave the University of Southern California funds to expose children to diesel exhaust to study its effects.
On April 28, McCarthy explained away the use of children to test dangerous pollution as a way to help scientists “better understand biological responses to different levels of air pollutants.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.