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

But I think that this sort of betting would be that, yes, it will make its way all the way to the Supreme Court.

It's a very important case.

Yes.

And they have also in sort of separate actions rolled back or rescinded the latest sets of regulations that were designed under the Biden administration to reduce CO2 emissions from cars, which were very explicitly aimed at sort of speeding the transition to electric vehicles.

And they have rescinded the Biden administration's power plant rules, which were also

pretty clearly aimed at eliminating coal-fired power plants, which are, you know, big source of CO2 per unit of energy.

You get a lot of CO2 for less energy if you're burning coal.

So the idea was, and most coal plants in the country have already closed, but the idea is we were going to close basically the rest of them.

And that is, you know, sort of

An astonishing part of what's going on at the EPA now is to be a cheerleader for coal, which is not only the most greenhouse gas-intensive fuel out there, but it's a very dirty fuel.

It's putting mercury and arsenic into the air, and it's creating coal ash, which is a very dangerous substance, which is sitting around next to all these old coal-fired power plants, which has in recent years caused several very bad accidents.

Yeah, I think we have to conclude that's a very deliberate strategy.

I was talking to William K. Riley, who ran the EPA under George H.W.

Bush.

And he is, you know, no fan of current leadership.

And he said to me, you know, they had a very shrewd strategy, you know, move fast and break things.

And by the time the courts catch up, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

You know, you can't reassemble everything.

All the people, he was talking specifically about all the people who have left the agency, the experts that have left the agency are not getting them back.

And they realize that.

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