This article was published in partnership with InsideClimate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment, and NBC News.
For the last two years of the Obama administration, Jacob Carter built data models at the Environmental Protection Agency that showed how extreme weather events amplified by climate change threatened hundreds of the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps, known as Superfund sites.
President Barack Obama had made combating climate change the EPA’s No. 1 priority, and Carter was a true believer, working on plans the agency’s regional administrators could use to safeguard those sites.
