Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Summer's around the corner. Heat waves are going to be freaking us out. It's as good a time as any to check in on climate change here at Today Explained from Vox.
Chapter 2: What historical events shaped the Environmental Protection Agency?
So let's start with the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency was signed into existence by a Republican, Richard Nixon. Can you believe? This was way back in 1970 when it was okay for the right to care about the planet. After a massive oil spill off the California coast, there was a ton of movement around environmental stewardship in this country.
We had our first Earth Day, the Clean Air Act passed with only one person in all of Congress voting no, and that same Congress, along with Tricky Dick, created the EPA. 56 years later, in this Anthropocene era of ours, another Republican administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the EPA, all while we civilians contend with the effects of human-caused climate change.
That story is coming up on the show today.
What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is AmMom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, everybody. Sue Bird here.
This week on A Touch More, I'm celebrating the start of the WNBA by breaking down what I saw on opening weekend. And we have NBC's one and only Maria Taylor to talk about her boundary-breaking career in sports journalism, the NBA playoffs, and her thoughts on which teams have the best chance of making the WNBA finals.
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This is a big one if you're into environment.
Elizabeth Colbert is into environment. We asked her on Today Explained because she recently wrote a big old doozy for The New Yorker called Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin? It opened with a story.
several dozen, we're not sure exactly how many at this point, employees of the EPA signed a letter addressed to the administrator, Lee Zeldin, objecting to much of what he was doing, objecting to what they saw as the overly partisan nature of his leadership, objecting to his plans to eliminate the EPA scientific division.
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Chapter 3: How is the current administration impacting the EPA's role?
Lee Zeldin was on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a lot of the closed-door sessions. He questioned a lot of the witnesses very aggressively. He was constantly tweeting things out. I've sat through every interview of this so-called impeachment inquiry, and the president hasn't done anything to possibly impeach him for. Nothing.
He was a big defender of Trump at that time, and Trump clearly took notice.
Thanks, Lee.
I think that is when Lee Zeldin really came to the attention of Trump. And does Lee Zeldin have strong feelings about climate science, the environment? What's his philosophy? Well, as a congressman, he represented the East End of Long Island, which is... a very low-lying part of the world and experiencing a lot of flooding owing to sea level rise.
And he actually joined a group called the Climate Solutions Caucus in 2016, which was a bipartisan group, still is, still exists. Now he refers to climate change, you know, sort of concerns about climate change as a religion and a lot of the programs that the Biden administration had put in place to try to limit climate change as the green new scam.
I mean, I just saw a clip yesterday where Al Gore was talking about global freezing.
I'm having trouble keeping up. I thought it was global warming and now it's global freezing. All of this is believed to be a con job. Have you killed off the Green New Deal? It's done. It's dead.
Okay, so that's maybe what he thinks to some extent. What is he doing? It's been over a year since he was put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. How has he transformed it? Yeah, I mean, on some level, you could say it doesn't really matter what his personal beliefs are.
He certainly carried out the Trump administration's agenda to dismantle anything having to do with trying to curb climate change.
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Chapter 4: What controversies surround Lee Zeldin's leadership at the EPA?
Unfortunately for them, I think we never really entered that kind of crisis since the Green New Deal politics took off because we did have a recession, but it was this covid recession that was a strange, strange kind of economic shutdown and not the kind of crisis that called for this kind of big jobs program. But that label, Green New Deal, became so polarizing.
And, you know, it was a strategy to make it so, obviously. Do you think anything like that kind of messaging is just bunk now? Yeah, I'm really sad because I was a big Green New Deal stan, if I can use that word. I really loved this broad vision and a positive vision because I think a lot of climate politics can be pretty doomerist, right? It did go wrong, though. I think...
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019, she did this media blitz around it, and she released this FAQ document, or her office released this very bizarre FAQ document with the sort of media blitz about the Green New Deal.
And in the document, it has some sort of very kind of stream of consciousness language about how we're not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes. Was that what it was? Okay. And of course, as you would expect, that language got taken up by the Fox News culture war machine. And almost immediately, the Green New Deal became we're going to ban hamburgers, we're going to ban air travel.
Let's keep it real. Maybe we shouldn't be eating hamburgers.
I mean, it's wild. Or driving cars or using appliances or having a middle class. which will destroy the lifeblood of our economy and take away air travel and cow meat and the automobile as we know it.
What started as was supposed to be this kind of broad-based majoritarian politics that could appeal to working class people became yet another kind of polarized culture war issue, unfortunately. Biden clearly realizes he can't use this Green New Deal marketing to get this kind of legislation through Congress.
But he does get this kind of legislation through Congress, weirdly called the Inflation Reduction Act. Yeah. But here we are in 2026, and no one ever talks about anything that he did, even though when they were doing it, they said it was the most consequential environmental legislation in American history. Yeah. How did that happen? Oh, boy.
Come on, man.
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Chapter 5: What are Lee Zeldin's views on climate change?
I don't. Sounds cool.
It's someone that literally parachutes out of planes to fight forest fires in the West. And he has also, because he's a government employee, he is a union member, too. And he is fighting again on this kind of working class type of agenda. The biggest fires that people are dealing with back home in Montana, where I live, is, well, nobody can afford housing.
Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him. I profile an iron worker in Oklahoma. Big tech, big bosses, they're not bigger than us. I'm Trey Martin, an iron worker, a husband, and a dad. A flight attendant in Minnesota. Kayla isn't just a state representative. She has a second job as a flight attendant. And right now, she actually has a third job, too.
She's running for Congress. She's part of this new group of congressional candidates, people with nontraditional, more working-class backgrounds.
Some of their websites literally don't mention climate change at all. And if they do, it's just very brief and links it to energy affordability, jobs, things like this. That's a real shift, right? Because these are exactly the types of candidates that I would say five or six years ago would have been like the central messengers of this kind of Green New Deal type of message of
unions, jobs, you know, people that are blue collar workers that are going to kind of build the energy transition. These would be the kind of workers that would be front and center, but they're not. And I think that's telling. But the one I profile in the piece or mention in the piece briefly is Zoran Mamdani, actually, who ran a very successful campaign.
But his campaign was, there's been reporting showing that he barely talked about climate change at all in his campaign. And that's after he had really been a climate activist in the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on climate change and public power in his assembly campaign in 2020. Did you ever wonder why New York State only gets 5% of its energy from wind and solar?
It's because of one word, capitalism. I'm Zahran Mandani, assembly member for District 36 and a proud eco-socialist. Today, I want to talk to you about utilities and why they suck. The whole affordability message, I think, came out of his campaign and people sort of realizing if you do this kind of laser-focused campaign, that's a way to build a mass coalition and that's a way to win.
I really care about climate change, and it bums me out that it's like everyone's 14th most important issue.
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