Mary D. Nichols

Mary Dolores Nichols is the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, a post she has held since 2007, when she was appointed to the position by Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger. She also held the position between 1979 and 1983. Due to her efforts to combat global warming, she has been dubbed "the Queen of Green".

Nichols was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in April 1945, and raised in Ithaca, New York. She received her bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1966 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1971, and passed the California Bar the next year. In 1972, she was involved in a 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. She was first appointed to the Air Resources Board by Governor Jerry Brown in 1975, and was made its chief four years later.

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 biggest achievements. In addition to her work at the Air Resources Board, she serves as faculty at the UCLA School of Law.

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." 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 current governor Jerry Brown, a close ally of Nichols.

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