President Donald Trump has promised to both end scores of federal environmental regulations and ensure America has the “cleanest air and water on the planet.” The person he tapped to resolve this contradiction, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lee Zeldin, is now hard at work to make good on half of that promise. It’s impossible to see though how granting businesses a new license to pollute and harm vulnerable Americans does anything but ignore the second promise. Instead, it will speed up the clock on the planet — let alone — the country, becoming unlivable.
These deeply misguided actions could only come from an agency that abhors its own very existence.
On Tuesday, Zeldin announced in an internal memo that the agency would be shuttering its offices devoted to environmental justice. On Wednesday, the EPA began the process to terminate more than 30 regulations meant to reduce the speed of climate change and keep communities free from pollution. That same day, the agency said it is formally reconsidering what’s known as the Endangerment Finding, the underpinning of many of the strongest regulations meant to reduce carbon emissions.
These deeply misguided actions could only come from an agency that abhors its own very existence. If carried out, they would accelerate the crisis of climate change and the immiseration of millions of people. And Zeldin’s justifications for these actions border on horrific in their deceptive misdirection and grim optimism.
The Endangerment Finding, released in 2009, stems from a landmark Supreme Court ruling that held greenhouse gases fit the Clean Air Act’s definition of air pollutants, and ordered the EPA to determine whether those gases, in the words of the CAA, “endanger public health or welfare.” The Endangerment Finding, unsurprisingly, determined exactly that. Ever since, the EPA has been legally required under the CAA to act to limit greenhouse gases.
The finding has long been a target of climate deniers, but neither of Trump’s EPA chiefs in his first term attempted to rescind it. It shows how much more extreme this administration is that Zeldin and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought seemed gleeful in their statement announcing the formal reconsideration of the finding. In the same breath as he railing against the finding, Zeldin promised to “follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads.” But the suggestion that a review of “the science” — which has only grown more certain in the last 16 years — would lead to any alternate finding shows that there is little doubt about how this reconsideration ends.
Zeldin similarly deployed his dystopian doublespeak to explain the shuttering of the environmental justice offices, which he framed as a blow against reverse racism. “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people,” he said in a statement to The New York Times. “Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.” In a video announcing the deregulatory actions his agency is taking, Zeldin likewise said the Trump administration is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” in order to “unleash American energy.”
Contrary to what Zeldin claims, environmental justice programs are in no way about “forced discrimination.” The programs he’s ending targeted pollution that has affected marginalized people disproportionately, like those who live near the busy highways that were often built right through minority communities. Efforts to ensure that the people who can’t afford to move away from their home next to a power plant have fewer harmful chemicals raining down onto them are only “discriminating” if we’re defining discrimination as “when money is spent on brown people instead of white people.”
The plan is to rely on businesses to decide when they’re doing too much damage to the environment and agree with whatever decision they reach
Zeldin’s rationales are the same twisted logic being propounded across the Trump administration, such as when the Education Department claims that the Civil Rights Act prevents schools providing scholarships to address racial disparities. When applied to the environmental regulations that are now under attack, it means that the EPA is now trying to make it easier for coal-fired power plants to again pump more waste into water sources and mercury into the air.
In a pre-emptive rebuttal to critics, Zeldin wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday that the EPA remains committed “safeguarding health and the environment.” The difference from past administrations, he argued, is that it will do so “through partnership rather than prescriptive bureaucracy, through collaboration rather than regulation.” In other words, the plan is to rely on businesses to decide when they’re doing too much damage to the environment and agree with whatever decision they reach.
The level of cooperation that Zeldin’s strategy calls for relies on unprecedented altruism on the part of business and either extreme naivete or gross negligence on the part of government. It implies that major corporations can be inherently trusted to act in the interest of the greater good rather than their profits. But such an argument totally ignores decades of environmental history, impact studies and case law. If Zeldin is not ignorant, he must then simply be neglectful, opening the floodgates to poison America’s communities with little care for what happens next.
