Mary D. Nichols

Nichols was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in April 1945,[4] and was raised in Ithaca, New York.[5] She received her bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1966 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1971. She passed the California Bar the next year.[6] In 1972, as a new lawyer at a small public interest firm, she was approached by the City of Riverside, where the highest levels of ozone had been recorded, about suing Los Angeles over its air pollution[7]. Instead she brought this suit against the United States federal government, arguing that under the Clean Air Act, the United States Environmental Protection Agency must force California to develop a stringent plan to deal with air pollution in Los Angeles.[8] She was first appointed to the Air Resources Board by Governor Jerry Brown in 1975, and was made its chief four years later.[9]

After her first stint at CARB, she moved back to private law practice. In 1989, she founded the Los Angeles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council as a senior attorney. During the Clinton Administration, she worked at the United States Environmental Protection Agency as the assistant administrator of air and radiation. While at the USEPA, she ran a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and acid rain, which she considers to be among her greatest achievements.[8] In addition to her work at the Air Resources Board, she serves as faculty at the UCLA School of Law.[10]

In August 2007, Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Nichols to head the California Air Resources Board, despite the fact that she was a Democrat, saying "Mary was quite simply the best person for the job."[9] The primary job was to implement the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 and to build a low-carbon economy. The CARB implemented a market-based cap-and-trade program to reduce the state's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases back to 1990 levels by 2020. In 2010 Schwarzenegger was replaced by governor Jerry Brown, a close ally of Nichols.[8]

Thanks in part to efforts by the CARB, California has successfully decoupled greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth.[11] She was part of California's delegation to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris,[12] where she and other members of the Brown administration shared lessons on decarbonization with the rest of the world.[13][14]