Elizabeth Kolbert

speaker

317 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 29 Apr

Elizabeth Kolbert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How Trump's EPA head has transformed the agency — and sided with polluters · 29 Apr 2026 podcast

And it did everything from helping states and tribes that were confronting issues that lacked the resources to do a lot of their own science.

It did things like set the

cleanup targets for Superfund sites.

It did a lot of research into the dangers of gazillions of chemicals that are out there.

And it was also supposed to be doing this sort of horizon scanning of what are the environmental problems that we haven't sort of taken cognizance of yet, but that are coming our way.

So it was an essential part of the EPA.

And a subset of that is that their analysis often showed

that chemicals, for example, were dangerous in very, very low levels.

And that had big implications for industry that many industries didn't like and fought back against.

And they had something called the integrated risk information system, which was particularly despised by industry.

And now all of that is gone.

And so that's, you could argue, a very clear win for the affected industries.

Well, the short answer is no, it does not exist anymore.

And what happened was rumors began to circulate that they were going to get rid of it.

And there were all sorts of conversations in the agency, people, for example, thinking that if the people who are eligible for retirement retired, maybe they could sort of try to protect the younger people.

So is there an office that replaced the Office of Research and Development when that was basically eliminated by EPA head Lee Zeldin?

Theoretically, yes, there is a new office, a much smaller office that is located within headquarters.

So there's a lot of concern over what's happening to the independence of the science.

And that's true.

EPA is under this Trump administration gold standard science executive order and gold standard science in the Trump administration seems to mean, you know, science that backs up what we want to do.

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