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Why Trump Picked Lee Zeldin to Lead the Environmental Protection Agency [1]

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Date: 2024-11-18 10:00:00+00:00

Environment / StudentNation / Why Trump Picked Lee Zeldin to Lead the Environmental Protection Agency With a Republican majority in Congress and Zeldin promising to “deregulate” the EPA, the new Trump administration will prioritize fossil fuel interests over environmental protection.

Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion with former Republican representative from New York Lee Zeldin.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

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In 2019, then-Representative for New York’s District 1 Lee Zeldin voted against extending the moratorium on offshore drilling on the Florida Gulf Coast. That same year, he voted against another bill that would have protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from new oil and gas leases.

Zeldin’s voting history from over 15 years in Congress—before running an unsuccessful New York gubernatorial campaign in 2022—shows his unwavering allegiance to fossil fuel interests. And given this record, it’s obvious why an avid climate change denier like Donald Trump would pick Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the youth-led climate action organization Sunrise Movement, in a statement posted on X, called Zeldin’s “loyalty to Trump” his main qualification for the job, while emphasizing that his record includes “slashing the EPA’s budget, opposing climate action, and denying climate change.”

“We need a steady, experienced hand at EPA to marshal federal resources to fight climate change and utilize the full power of the law to protect communities from toxic pollution. Lee Zeldin is not that person,” Abigail Dillen, president of the environmental law organization Earthjustice, said in a statement. “His loyalty to Donald Trump indicates he will gladly take a sledgehammer to EPA’s most recent life-saving regulations, putting politics over science and endangering our communities.”

During his first term, Trump famously pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement and overturned more than 100 environmental rules, including opening up 18.6 million acres of the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration and exempting fossil fuels companies from reporting methane emissions.

Trump, who campaigned on environmental slogans like “drill, baby, drill” and promises to roll back President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act—the single largest federal clean-energy investment in history—is poised to overhaul even more environmental regulations in his second term. With a Republican majority in Congress and Zeldin promising to “deregulate” the EPA, Trump’s vision could very well come to fruition.

Announcing the pick, Trump called Zeldin “a true fighter for America First policies,” who would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

The Trump-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court has already diminished the EPA’s regulatory power over the last few years, overturning the Chevron doctrine and pausing the EPA’s “good neighbor” rule, which limited air pollution emitted from industrial sites.

Zeldin is poised to roll back more of the EPA’s regulatory power, using the agency as a vehicle for protecting fossil fuel interests over environmental protection, writing on X: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

Zeldin’s claim that he will “protect access to clean air and water,” however, reads more as an afterthought. Restoring American energy dominance is code for expanding domestic fossil fuel production, but Zeldin’s anti-environment agenda becomes even more clear when we take a closer look at his reverence for artificial intelligence, which is fueled by massive amounts of electricity. In fact, AI was a huge factor in Google’s emissions’ rising by nearly 50 percent in the last five years, despite the company’s net-zero goals.

“Through the EPA we have the ability to pursue energy dominance, to be able to make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world, to bring back American jobs to the auto industry and so much more,” Zeldin told Fox News. During the first 100 days, he said, “we have the opportunity to roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to be able to struggle; they’re forced to cut costs internally; they are moving overseas all together.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/lee-zeldin-environmental-protection-agency-donald-trump/

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