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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And thanks.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency are being chased out and departments drastically reduced or eliminated. Efforts at the EPA to slow climate change and reduce pollution are constantly being decreased. The head of the EPA who is behind this change of direction is Lee Zeldin.
Chapter 2: What changes has Lee Zeldin implemented at the EPA?
President Trump has described him as our secret weapon.
Zeldin isn't known for the kind of personal drama and big personality that some other members of the Trump administration are, but he's been very successful in carrying out the dramatic changes in Trump's agenda to undo restrictions on companies that are polluters and on the chemicals in the air and water that harm our health and the environment.
My guest, Elizabeth Colbert, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article in The Current Issue is titled, Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin? She's also the author of the bestseller, The Sixth Extinction. Our interview was recorded yesterday. Elizabeth Colbert, welcome back to Fresh Air.
You start your piece in The New Yorker about Zeldin by saying that last summer, more than 150 staff members of the EPA sent a letter to Zeldin about their concerns about his leadership. What were their concerns?
Well, they listed five areas of concerns. And the first one was that he was terribly partisan, that he would use his public appearances and public communications effectively. to attack the other party, sometimes by name. He kept referring to these funds that had been appropriated really under the previous administration as a scam.
So they were very disturbed by that level of partisanship, the notion that the EPA is supposed to be basically calling the shots objectively and that this seemed to be undermining that.
It was clear that they were going to dismantle what was called the Office of Research and Development, which was the EPA scientific arm, which is 1,500 people who spent their lives trying to figure out what environmental threats we are facing and also sort of scanning the horizon. What environmental threats are we going to face?
They were dismayed about his tendency to side with industry on a lot of key issues. They were very upset about his treatment of the workforce. I mean, if you go back to Russ Vogt and Project 2025 and these tapes that came out of Russ Vogt saying we're going to put... employees of the federal government in trauma. We want to put them in trauma. He explicitly mentions the EPA.
And I think many employees felt that they had successfully been put in trauma, that that was not an appropriate way to run an agency.
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Chapter 3: What concerns did EPA scientists express about Zeldin's leadership?
to regulate dangerous air pollutants, specifically dangerous air pollutants coming out of the tailpipes of cars. And the EPA had just basically been trying to sidestep this. And the court said, you've got to decide either the CO2, the greenhouse gases coming out of cars are dangerous or not. And if they are dangerous, you've got to regulate them.
So, that case basically set in motion this process of, quote-unquote, deciding whether CO2 is dangerous, which was really not much of a decision. Eventually, in the first year of the Obama administration, we got this finding, yes, carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. is a threat to public health, is a danger.
And then there was sort of a separate endangerment finding regarding emissions from power plants, CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. And those findings form the basis of everything the EPA has done since to try to rein in carbon emissions. And it's been... You know, an almost 20-year battle now as we've gone through different administrations.
But even under Trump won, even under Trump's first sort of scandal-scarred EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt... The endangerment finding has always been accepted as settled. But what distinguishes Zeldin's EPA is the willingness or eagerness to take on the endangerment finding. Let's try to take this through the courts and see what happens again, because now we have a new Supreme Court.
Maybe this time we can get a different decision.
He went against the previous EPA heads and decided to try to wipe out this endangerment finding.
Right. Right now, the endangerment finding, they have published the sort of official revocation or rescission of that finding. So therefore, we do not find that CO2 is a danger under the Clean Air Act. We don't have to regulate it. And This is already in litigation.
But I think what's so crucial about this is that not only is it eliminating the regulations that Biden had put into place, but if it gets to the Supreme Court, if they get a decision that reverses Massachusetts v. EPA, then it will be basically impossible for any future administration to use the Clean Air Act. to try to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
So they're really trying to handicap the agency.
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Chapter 4: How has Zeldin's partisanship affected the EPA's mission?
What's the significance? How big is the endangerment finding? Well, repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America. So it's kind of a big deal.
So that was Lee Zeldin speaking last July on the podcast Ruthless. I found it interesting that he said this has been referred to as a dagger in the heart of the climate change religion. So the first thing I want to ask you about is referring to climate change activism as a religion as opposed to actions to protect the health of people, animals, and the earth itself.
Well, one of the interesting things about Lee Zeldin is he You know, he represented this district in eastern Long Island that's very vulnerable to climate change. Sea level rise and flooding are big problems. And when he was a member of Congress, he actually joined in 2016 the Climate Solutions Caucus, which is this bipartisan group, you know, ostensibly working to
further climate change solutions. So he was not a climate change denier in a sort of full blown Trumpian sense. And now he has come to the EPA and speaks of driving a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion. Now, what does he mean by that? Well, It's never actually spelled out what the climate change religion is as opposed to climate change science.
But I think that one of the big issues of our time, I have to say, is that we now have a government, you know, we turn to our government to protect us against big threats. Well, I can assure you that climate change is a big threat. And now we have a its existence even at the upper levels of the government.
And when you talk about the sort of counter-reality of the Trump administration, this seems to me to be exhibit A. We are hurtling into a future, a very, very hot and dangerous future, some of the impacts of which we are already seeing. We're seeing, for example, I'll just use one example, tremendous drought in the West this year that is partly, certainly due to climate change.
And we are looking at what scientists are calling a sort of super El Nino, which is this weather pattern that can cause all sorts of extreme weather around the world. So we are looking at a pretty dangerous summer, even. We don't have to go very far into the future. And we're certainly looking at a very dangerous future. And we're just sticking our heads in the sand.
And if that doesn't concern Americans, it should.
So another thing that he's saying in the answer that we just heard from the podcast is that basically people who are activists for climate change, they're willing to bankrupt the country and choose instead like the most pessimistic worst case scenario. I've heard him talk about that this is like the most pessimistic worst case scenario.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the Office of Research and Development at the EPA?
So there is a very, very concerted effort to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's gotten a lot of tax breaks under this administration, new tax breaks, even more tax breaks, while we sort of dismantle the nascent economy. clean energy industry that might be a competitor. Now, why is this going on? Is this some ideological crusade?
Is this some – certainly some people are getting very wealthy off of it. But I think that as a society, once again, you would think that there would be more pushback against this because clearly fossil fuels are not the fuels of the future. And we are sort of letting a lot of clean energy –
Technologies, basically, they were already being dominated by countries like China, and we're just basically letting that happen without putting up any fight. And I think that very soon, not in the distant future, but in the pretty near future, we're really going to regret that.
I want to ask you about the MAHA moms, the Make America Healthy Again moms. And they were considered to be Trump allies in part because many of the MAHA moms are anti-vax. And Trump and some members of his administration, most notably RFK Jr., have been or remain anti-vaxxers.
However, they have gotten pretty upset about some of Lee Zeldin's actions at the Environmental Protection Agency because he is not regulating some chemicals that are known to harm children. So tell us more about what's making the Maha Moms upset.
Yeah, so the Maha Moms, who are a somewhat heterogeneous group, And different people have different priorities.
But many, many influential, you know, maha moms, which is itself a sort of not a very technical term, are worried about, you know, what their kids are eating, you know, what they're eating, what their kids are eating, what impact is that having, what's in our food supply, what's in our water.
You know, and for some reason, which I have to confess, I'm not sure I ever fully understood, but I guess had to do with his association with Bobby Kennedy, who at various points in his career has been very vocal about these issues.
They thought that, you know, the Trump administration was going to, you know, finally level with the American people about, you know, these dangerous chemicals in the food supply and do something about it.
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