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Infrastructure Negotiations and the Fate of National Climate Policy —
Will There Be a Chance to Make a Second Impression?
Gina, Gina, Gina…didn’t your mother ever tell you that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? Certainly, mine told me, and I’d venture most have been offered such pearls — or something like them — at one time or another.
I’m confident my mother heard the phrase in an ad for a brand of men’s suits. The first of many times she told it to me was just before a meeting with my college’s scholarship committee, when she advised I shave my beard, cut my hair, and put on a suit. But I digress.
The Gina of whom I speak is Gina McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy serves in the White House as President Biden’s climate czar; it’ a role for which she is more than qualified, having served in the Obama administration as EPA’s admin-istrator and during the Trump administration as president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
McCarthy gave voice during a Politico interview to what many in the climate community have thought but rarely spoke of publicly — that President Biden would accept gutting a central climate provision of the infrastructure bill as part of a bipartisan deal.
In her own words:
