Trump Plans To Suck Life Out Of Environmental Protection Laws
The results of the nation’s environmental biopsy are in and things are looking really grim.
In his first administration, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief was considered by many to have been the nation’s worst ever. Now as he gets ready for another four, miserable years, trump has tabbed a former lawmaker whose chief qualifications are that he was the loudest voice against the trump impeachments and was unbending in his belief that trump was robbed of the presidency in 2020.
Trump’s plan to name former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., as EPA administrator dovetails perfectly with trump’s plans to knee cap the nation’s pollution laws at a crucial moment in the global effort to fight climate change.
Trump’s environmental plans were made clear by the trump transition team co-chairman, billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Group. In May, Lutnick hosted a fundraiser at his home and raised around $5 million for the trump campaign. In August, Lutnick hosted a benefit for trump and his supporters in a marquee at his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Two weeks later, Trump named Lutnick and Linda McMahon as co-chairs of his 2024 presidential transition team. On October 27, 2024, Lutnick spoke at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.
Lutnick said in an interview on Fox that “real” Americans are “not talking climate change” but are focused on issues impacting their pocketbooks.
“The green agenda is an elitist agenda,” Lutnick said. “Who is the strongest? Where? The Ivy League on the East Coast. Right? They’re the ones that are [pushing] climate change.”
The bleak results of trump’s plan to gut environmental laws were highlighted by Carbon Brief, a UK-based website specializing in the science and policy of climate change.
The report said trump’s plans could lead to an additional 4 billion tons of emissions by 2030, compared with President Joe Biden’s plans. The extra 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900 billion, based on the latest U.S. government valuations. The extra 4 billion tons from a second trump term would negate, twice over, all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years, Carbon Brief reported.
Carbon Brief’s analysis is based on an aggregation of modeling by various U.S. research groups. It highlights the significant impact of the Biden administration’s climate policies, which include the historic Inflation Reduction Act, which trump has pledged to reverse along with several other policies.
And while trump threatens to immolate the nation’s clean air and water laws, thousands of people are now staring down real fires, as the area and much of the nation reels from wildfires spread by unprecedented, extremely bone-dry conditions, which climatologists say is a factor of climate change.
There was barely a drop of rain in New Jersey in October and one could be excused for thinking they were seeing rain clouds when they were really witnessing smoke from the wildfires in Rockaway Township. October was the driest calendar month in New Jersey’s recorded history.
The climate crisis and land-use changes are worsening wildfires around the world. A United Nations report noted that extreme fire events are set to increase by about 50 percent by the end of the century, with the Western U.S., northern Siberia, central India, and eastern Australia already experiencing significantly more blazes compared to just a few decades ago.
During his first term in his office, trump’s administration rolled back more than 100 major environmental rules and regulations, including every major Obama-era climate regulation. He withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate accord, under which 195 nations had committed to work together to reduce planet-warming fossil fuel pollution. Biden got the U.S. back under the accord but trump plans to again withdraw.
Trump’s plans would reverse a trend that has seen U.S. greenhouse gas emissions falling steadily since 2005, because of various factors, including greater efficiency, the growth of renewables and a shift from coal to gas power. Since taking office in early 2021, Biden has pledged under the Paris Agreement to cut U.S. emissions to 50–52 percent below 2005 levels in 2030 and to net-zero in 2050.
The relatively good news is that politics may stump trump’s campaign pledge to repeal the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The act, which trump calls the “Green New Scam,” is providing more than $390 billion to develop electric vehicles, batteries and other clean energy technology such as wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors, carbon capture and E.V.s, as well as the factories to make the technologies.
Since the law passed, companies have announced $154 billion in investments for U.S. factories to make clean energy technologies, spurred on by tax credits. Around 80 percent of the money spent so far has flowed to Republican congressional districts, such as electric-vehicle plants in Georgia and battery factories in South Carolina, and planned facilities in Montana and Utah.
The Biden administration is in a race to enact more environmental improvements before trump takes office. They include rules on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and increasing vehicle fuel standards, power plant greenhouse gas standards and power plant air pollution.
Potentially devastating environmental initiatives are recommended under Project 2025, the blue print for the trump administration which was prepared by the Heritage Foundation and other right wing groups.
Mandy Gunasekara, trump’s EPA chief of staff and a contributor to the Project 2025 agenda, said the challenge in revamping the EPA will be “to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states.”
Gunasekara, the architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal, wrote that the EPA needs to be realigned “away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.”
Gunasekara noted that the Biden administration has waged an “assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables.”
Biden’s approach also has been applied to regulating pesticides and chemicals as the Biden administration “pushes the ‘greening’ of agriculture and manufacturing among other industrial activities,” Gunasekara wrote.
“As a consequence of this approach, we see the return of costly, job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy and grow the bureaucracy but do little to address, much less resolve, complex environmental problems,” Gunasekara wrote.
She wrote that the EPA has returned to “fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change.”
Trump has been nothing if not consistent in his wrongheaded claims mocking and denouncing climate change, claims that are rejected by the entire, legitimate scientific community around the world.
Here are a few of the gems from trump’s “perfect” mind.
“One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax. … It’s a hoax. The whole thing is a total … It’s so crazy.” − April 21, 2022
“In my opinion, you have a thing called weather. You go up and you go down … The climate’s always been changing.” — trump, when asked if climate change was due to human activity, March 2022.
“And I say that the thing that’s an existential threat is not global warming, where the ocean will rise, maybe, and it may go down also, but it may rise 1/8th of an inch in the next 497 years they say, 1/8th.” − June 28, 2024
“Climate change is one of the greatest con jobs ever because global warming didn’t work because … Remember when they sent the boats out to the Arctic, freezing, freezing cold, and the scientists were in the boat, a big ship, and they were worried about the icebergs because they were melting. And they had a little cold wave that lasted for about two days. And it was so vicious and so cold that the ice formed around the ship and started crushing the ship like it was a little … Remember? We had to send helicopters in to get them. The ship was just engulfed in ice. And they’re talking about global warming.” − Dec. 11, 2023
“They used to call it different things. Global warming, remember? That wasn’t working because it was getting a little bit cooler. So they said, ‘What are we going to do? We’ll call it ‘global cooling.’’ No. So, they came up with the words ‘climate change’ because that takes care of everything.” − Sept. 3, 2024
“So they used to have, in the 1920s you know they thought the planet was going to freeze. They had a thing, global cooling. They had a picture, I think it was on Time magazine of the Earth very cool,1920s, it was a global cooling thing, but now they got smart.” − June 28, 2024.
Legitimate researchers have documented the consequences of climate change, including: Arctic sea ice loss; melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland; changes in the ranges of animal species; Changing precipitation patterns; an increase in the frequency of heat waves; shrinking snowpack in the western U.S.; changing plant bloom times; melting glaciers; sea level rise; and an increase in flooding events due to sea level rise.
Trump said he will be a dictator for one day to fulfill his mantra of “drill, baby, drill.” Zeldin is charged with rescuing the oil and gas industry from the climate change “hoax.”
“Lee, with a very strong legal background, has been a true fighter for America First policies. He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” trump said in a statement. “He will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”
Trump said Zeldin has “brilliantly” handled some “extremely difficult and complex situations.” Trump did not elaborate or specify the situations.
“Businesses strive to grow, expand here and have the ability to export what they produce, as opposed to exporting their jobs,” Zeldin said in an interview on Fox. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country has been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.”
During eight years in Congress, Zeldin served on the House Foreign Affairs and House Financial Services committees but did not participate on either of the two major committees involved with the environment, including the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Committee on Natural Resources.
While in Congress, the League of Conservation Voters gave Zeldin a 14 percent lifetime score for his votes against numerous environmental bills. In particular, he voted against closing a loophole in the Clean Water Act that allows companies to discharge unlimited amounts of PFAS or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances into waterways. Zeldin also pushed to revoke the ban on fracking in New York.
Zeldin voted against an amendment to a defense bill that would have created a climate resilience office inside the White House; for legislation that would have withdrawn the United States from the treaty enabling global climate negotiations; and for an amendment that would have blocked the federal government from considering the economic damage of climate change when it makes policies.
He has been circumspect in his opinion about whether he accepts the established science of climate change.
“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”
Zeldin was elected to the New York state Senate in 2010, where he served until 2014, when he was elected to Congress. In Congress, he was one of the strongest trump supporters. In 2017, Zeldin applauded trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, saying it offered the FBI a chance at a “fresh start” to rebuild trust.
In May 2018, Zeldin called for the criminal prosecution of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Zeldin also called for creating a special counsel investigation into the FBI and the Department of Justice regarding their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Zeldin said the investigations were launched with “insufficient intelligence and biased motivations” with surveillance warrants for Trump campaign staffers obtained in “deeply flawed and questionable” ways.
Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton and help trump.
“[T]he Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents,” the special counsel concluded
The special counsel’s office secured an indictment against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their role in the interference. A dozen Russian military officers were also indicted.
The report said that “the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russia offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away.”
“Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities” although investigators “found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”
But, the report said that because trump was a sitting president, “we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct.”
Zeldin also called for an investigation into the FBI’s decision to conclude its investigation into the Hillary Clinton email controversy.
Zeldin spoke more than any other congressman in defending Trump during his first impeachment hearings concerning the Trump–Ukraine scandal, where Trump requested that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy investigate then, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
“It is crystal clear… that any allegation that President Trump was trying to get President Zelensky [sic] to manufacture dirt on the Bidens is just not true,” Zeldin said in October 2019.
After trump lost the 2020 presidential election and made false claims of voter fraud, Zeldin was one of 126 Republican lawmakers to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court contesting the results of the election.
In January 2021, Zeldin was asked for his response to the release of an audio recording of a phone call in which trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election and “find” enough votes for him to win. Zeldin answered with a criticism of the media. Questions about the phone call led to trump’s second, unsuccessful impeachment.
Trump and 18 others were indicted by a grand jury in Georgia in connection with their alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
After trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Zeldin disavowed the violence.
Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, denied the scientific consensus of climate change and resigned while under at least 14 federal investigations.
In naming Pruitt on Dec. 7, 2016, trump said the EPA had an “anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs” and that Pruitt, “the highly respected Attorney General from the state of Oklahoma, will reverse this trend and restore the EPA’s essential mission of keeping our air and our water clean and safe.”
In response to the 2016 nomination, Pruitt said, “I intend to run this agency in a way that fosters both responsible protection of the environment and freedom for American businesses.”
Ten months before trump’s election, Pruitt said that trump would be “more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama.”
In 2010, Pruitt was elected Attorney General of Oklahoma. In that role, he opposed abortion, same-sex marriage, the Affordable Care Act, and environmental regulations and called himself a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” He sued the EPA at least 14 times and was twice elected chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Pruitt received major corporate and employee campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, taking in at least $215,574 between 2010 and 2014 despite running unopposed in 2014.
In April 2022, Pruitt ran for the U.S. Senate to replace Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, who retired. Pruitt lost in the Republican primary, garnering just 5 percent of the vote.