EPA Chief Lee Zeldin Is On a Mission to Let the Polluters Pollute

Lee Zeldin, the new boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, isn’t kidding around. He’s spoilin’ for some despoilin’, and he doesn’t care who knows it. From The New York Times:

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of the E.P.A. In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X, Mr. Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business… From the campaign trail to Day 1 and beyond, President Trump has delivered on his promise to unleash energy dominance and lower the cost of living,” Mr. Zeldin said. “We at E.P.A. will do our part to power the great American comeback.” Nowhere in the video did he refer to protecting the environment or public health, twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.

Because, as we know, there is no public cost to environmentally inflicted disease or industrial pollution.

Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

Give Zeldin credit. He may have decided that his job is to help Republican donors poison the whole damn country, but he has by God learned his lines well.

In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the E.P.A.’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.” Mr. Zeldin called Wednesday’s actions “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” He added, “today the green new scam ends, as the E.P.A. does its part to usher in a golden age of American success.”

It is a well-established fact that the average American corporation doesn’t have the social conscience God gave the Gaboon viper. Now that attitude has a friendly administration. Zeldin’s brief is to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from doing anything substantive to protect the environment. Here is what passes for optimism.

The announcements do not carry the force of law. In almost every case, the E.P.A. would have to undergo a lengthy process of public comment and develop environmental and economic justifications for the change.

First of all, Zeldin and the administration could care less about what is said in the “process” of public comment, and they will pull their environmental and economic justifications for the despoilin’ out of the collected works of Professor Otto Yerass. And nobody will be there to stop them. And, not for nothing, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points out, Zeldin probably lied during his confirmation hearings.

“Today is the day Trump’s Big Oil megadonors paid for,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said. He called the E.P.A. moves a series of attacks on clean air, clean water and affordable energy. “Administrator Zeldin clearly lied when he told us that he would respect the science and listen to the experts,” Mr. Whitehouse said, referring to Mr. Zeldin’s confirmation hearing.

Not that anyone who matters cares. Rivers will die now, choked to death by Fox News talking points.