(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Lee Zeldin's EPA is not our friend [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-08
The headline of the story on AP read:
"The EPA wants to repeal a landmark environmental finding, jeopardizing climate regulations."
Zeldin wants the administration to rethink a scientific finding that is the basis for for the US to take action against climate change.
We shouldn't be surprised. The whole Trump Administration is populated by climate change deniers.
Berkeley law school has an annotated PDF of Project 2025's plan to deal with eliminating the word climate change from government websites and stop any concrete actions that would mitigate climate change, because it doesn't exist to them, and it gets in the way of big business.
What Zeldin wants to do here is change everything we know about greenhouse gases. The 2009 finding under the Clean Air Act is about motor vehicles, power plants and anything else that generates air pollution. It shouldn't be a surprise because it's right there in Project 2025.
On Wednesday, Zeldin was trying to figure out where the $20 billion in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund set up in April of 2024 was, and who had it. He sent a letter to a recipients of the grants that were listed in the fund. Asking exactly what the nonprofits were going to do with the money.
The money is sitting in 129 accounts at Citibank, which has frozen the funds. Currently, there is $16.9 billion in those accounts.
Zeldin told Fox News that the program was set up to avoid government oversight. "If you ask me where all this is money is going, I actually don't know."
There is a trigger clause in the contracts to the eight recipients that if the Trump Administration tries to claw it back, the recipients get it automatically. As a result, Zeldin has asked the EPA's Inspector General to investigate the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
In a letter to the nonprofits, EPA acting deputy director W.C. McIntosh asked for a complete accounting of grant money, what employees were under the program, and everything the money was earmarked for. They have until March 28th to respond or risk violating the grant agreement.
The same day, Climate United, one of the grant recipients who received $6.9 billion, wrote to the EPA demanding that they reinstate their access to funding, describing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as "Congressionally appropriated" with "strong EPA oversight and direct impact on Americans and small businesses."
Climate United will not be able to make payroll or disperse money to contractors if funds are not released.
"These projects will lower energy bills for communities, boost American manufacturing, and increase energy independence while addressing a growing need for electricity generation. Unless EPA or Citibank takes action to unfreeze funds, local projects across the country will be unable to move forward without legal intervention," said a spokesman for Climate United.
Most of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act that was frozen has now been released by court action. This $20 billion, however, still remains locked with no clarity as to when grantees would receive funds.
On February 24th, all Democratic members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works sent Zeldin a letter asking him to explain the basis for the freeze, and a response by March 3rd.
Ranking member on the Committee, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, says that Zeldin is manipulating facts in order to terminate an already obligated, Congressionally appropriated program that would lower energy costs, spur economic development and reduce pollution. As usual, the freezing of funds is due to imaginary waste, fraud and abuse. The real reason is they don't want any money spent that has anything to do with climate change.
March 3rd has come and gone and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is not happy with Lee Zeldin. He and the other Democratic members of the committee issued a statement on March 6th:
"By ignoring decades of precedent and the plain text of the Congressional Review Act, the Trump EPA is attempting to sell out our nation's health and environmental protections to the same polluting industries that bankrolled much of Trump's campaign.... President Trump and Administrator Zeldin's weaponization of the EPA in service of the polluters the agency is tasked with policing, directly attacks our ability to breathe clean air, and reduce the planet warming carbon pollution that is that is fueling extreme weather."
You don't want to get on Senator Sheldon Whitehouses bad side. One of these days he's going to get what he wants with an enforceable ethics standard for the United States Supreme Court. Just not with this president or this Congress.
As per usual, it's intelligent Democrats that are fighting for our rights. In a sense, this time it's about our right to live. Because without clean air and water, it's not possible. Climate change documents have already been removed from the USDA website. It's probably occurring at every agency at the same time as they're removing everything regarding DEI.
Then a new story showed up. The EPA has an app called AirNow. It gives you air quality info for wherever you live. On the website link above, you can just key in your zip code to get it. It also would display air quality in foreign countries from data supplied by our embassies and consulates.That spigot of information just got turned off by the Trump administration, specifically the State Department.
The stop in sharing data was "due to funding constraints that have caused the department to turn off the underlying network."
I'm not sure if I should just call this a bald-faced lie or not. If the equipment is already in place, and it works automatically, you're only talking about electricity.
The state department said that the monitoring could continue if funding was restored, but it looks like just another nail in the coffin for climate change information and research.
Bhargav Krishna, an air pollution expert in New Delhi, said:
"They were part of a handful of sensors in many developing countries and served as a reference for understanding what air quality was like. They were also seen to be a well-calibrated and unbiased source of data to cross-check local data if there were concerns about quality."
In Africa, a dozen countries depend almost entirely on the US monitoring systems for their air quality data.
The World Health Organizations' data will also be affected. Trump won't care about that because he's pulling us out of that organization anyway. The AP story says that the monitoring stations are expensive and complex to maintain, so I guess it's more than just electricity, and there is a cost to it being operated by the US. But it can't be that much.
It even has propaganda value. The US Embassy in Beijing famously contradicted Chinese government reports and led them to work to improve air quality. That alone would seem to be a significant value.
In still another EPA story, it wants to rewrite a rule providing safeguards to prevent accidents at chemical factories.This would affect 12,000 chemical plants across the country. of course, the rule that was going to be put into effect was generated under the Biden Administration.
It's pretty simple, if you're dealing with hazardous chemicals, you need to have safeguards in place to prevent mishaps. Somebody needs to remind Lee Zeldin about the Bhopal accident in India, where Union Carbide killed 10,000 people and more in a poisonous gas accident. You also need to look at train wrecks like the one in Palestine, Ohio, to see how dangerous chemicals can be.
Facilities also need to know how to deal with natural disasters like earthquakes, or tsunamis, or tornadoes and hurricanes.
The rule also required chemical plants to be more transparent about the chemicals they store and use, to local communities and first responders, and to offer greater employee protections.
The trade group American Chemistry Council said that the original rule had "illegal new requirements" that failed to make facilities safer. The trade group also said that an online tool that allowed communities to look up what was stored and used at chemical plants should be shut down because it disclosed sensitive security information. Arguing that anyone with an internet connection could find out. Pretty easy to set up a password protected site so it would be limited to local government officials and those on a need to know basis. Very bad excuse for not being transparent. But that's what companies think they can get away with now under the Trump Administration.
According to the most recent EPA data, some 177 million Americans could be affected by chemical disasters under worst case scenarios.
The EPA has issued new internal guidance that expenditures of $50,000 or more have to be approved by the Department of Government Efficiency, starting with the EPA DOGE team member. You remember how they have a team member now in every single government agency? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse once again jumped into the fray, saying that it would create bureaucratic delays to even routine contracts and grant awards.
Lee Zeldin is obviously not our friend. It would have been better if he had stayed in the US House of Representatives than in this position at the EPA.
Crippling certain agencies that have to do so much with our health, should never be happening. That means the USDA, the FDA, and the EPA. With the EPA, it's literally committing environmental suicide, but that's what is happening because of the Trump administration's belief that climate change is a hoax. The other problem is that EPA rules get in the way of businesses being able to do business the way they want to, not the way they should. And we know for Trump, anything that gets in the way of business has to be removed. Regulations, restraints, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Beneficial Ownership Information filings, and more, are ways to keep companies operating legally and safe.
None of that matters to Donald Trump or Lee Zeldin.
________________________________
Right after I posted this there's a New York Times article that Climate United is suing both the EPA and Citibank.
"We're not trying to make a political statement here. This is about math for homeowners, for truck drivers, for public schools --- we know that accessing clean energy saves them money they can use on far more important things," said to Beth Bafford, CEO of Climate United.
Zeldin originally gave as the reason for the freezing of funds was tied to a Project Veritas video, a group that creates videos surreptitiously of targets, where an EPA employee described the grant of the funds to the recipients as throwing gold bars off the Titanic.
There's more detail at the Times.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/8/2308705/-Lee-Zeldin-s-EPA-is-not-our-friend?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
