Trump’s Pick for EPA is a Zealot
Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.
“Unqualified,” declared Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, about Lee Zeldin being nominated by President-elect Trump to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The nomination, Jealous said, “lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs and future out to corporate polluters. Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin—or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.”
In issuing the statement, the Sierra Club noted that it “is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization with millions of members.”
What Zeldin heading the EPA is centrally about was summed up well in the first two paragraphs of the underplayed Page 14 article in the New York Times about the November 10th nomination. Trump, it said, “announced…he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.”
“Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to ‘kill’ and ‘cancel’ EPA rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.”
There were also some hoorays for the nomination. “Congrats to Representative Zeldin on his nomination to be the 17th EPA administrator,” said Andrew Wheeler, an EPA administrator under Trump in his first term as president. Prior to that he was a lobbyist for major coal, chemical and uranium companies. Walker further said on Elon Musk’s X in a quote also cited by the National Review: “I know he will do a great job tackling the regulatory overreach while protecting our air and water.”
Meanwhile, Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment based in Farmingdale, Long Island told Long Island’s daily newspaper, Newsday: “The good news is: he lives here. He understands that climate change is real. He understands the value of protecting coastal waters, estuaries, the marine environment and drinking water…We’re hoping, and we need Lee Zeldin to bring perspective and strength to the Trump administration to do the right thing here and protect us.”
“Trump Picks New EPA Head Guaranteed to Destroy the Environment,” was the headline in The New Republic magazine. The subhead on its article: “This will be a disaster.”
“Meet the ‘great deregulator’ Trump chose to lead EPA,” was the headline of the E&E website of Politico. “A Trump ally with a limited environmental record will have the task of undoing President Joe Biden’s climate legacy.” Its article quoted prominent climate change denier Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team eight years ago, saying: “I think he [Zeldin] has all the ability and political savvy to be a great deregulator. I think he’s capable of mastering the technical side of it, but he also will be a great advocate in public for what they’re trying to do.”
The headline of the New York Metropolitan Area news website Hell Gate said: “Lee
Zeldin Appointed to Oversee Climate Collapse.” The subhead: “Trump choosing a Long Island lackey as EPA administrator.”
As to the record on the environment of Zeldin, he has a 14% score from the League of Conservation Voters on its National Environmental Scorecard. In the years during which he was a member of the House of Representatives—2015 to 2023—initiatives he voted against, notes the organization, included “cracking down on Big Oil price gouging, against clean water and clean air protections, against methane pollution safeguards.” The organization’s senior vice president for government affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, said after Trump announced Zeldin’s nomination: “Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during his first term and again during his 2024 campaign. During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14%.”
Zeldin has through the years been a very, very close ally of Trump.
In 2021, he was among Republican members of the House who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election that Trump insisted he won. And it has included his being a leader in defending Trump during Trump’s first impeachment hearings.
Zeldin didn’t seek re-election to the House so as to run for governor against Democrat Kathy Hochul, a contest he lost. In the House he represented the eastern two-thirds of Suffolk County on Long Island. He was raised and still lives in the suburban Long Island community of Shirley. He is an attorney.
On global warming or climate change, The New York Times article on his nomination said that in a 2014 interview with the editorial board of Newsday, Zeldin “expressed doubts about the severity of the problem” saying: “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”
Trump has repeatedly called global warming or climate change a “hoax.”
The headline on Inside Climate News was: “Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA Pick, Brings a Moderate Face to a Radical Game Plan.” Its article said “Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservative.” The piece concluded by stating “the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election,” and a quote from Sam Bernhardt, political director of the environmental group Food & Water Action: “He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do.”
The New York Times piece on the Zeldin nomination related that Trump “rolled back over 100 environmental policies and regulations” during his first term. “President Biden restored many of them an strengthened several.” Now, “Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are discussing moving the EPA headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington.”
Trump in his first term pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on a global reduction in carbon emissions. Biden, on his first day in office as president, had the nation rejoin it. In the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would again have the U.S. leave the Paris Agreement.
Politico reported: “The world is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time—only this time, he could move faster and with less restraint. Trump’s vow to pull out would once again leave the United States as one of the only countries not to be a party to the 2015 pact, in which nearly 200 governments have made…pledges to reduce their planet-warming pollution. His victory in last week’s election threatens to overshadow the COP29 climate summit…where the U.S. and other countries will hash out details related to phasing down fossil fuels and providing climate aid to poorer nations.”
It continued: “The United States’ absence from the deal would put other countries on the hook to make bigger reductions to their climate pollution. But it would also raise inevitable questions from some countries about how much more effort they should put in when the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter is walking away.”
The Zeldin nomination will need to be confirmed by the Senate.
A newspaper in Zeldin’s former House district, The East Hampton Star, ran an editorial last week headed “Lee Zeldin: Long Island’s Pollution Export.” It stated: “It is hardly surprising that Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency is a man staunchly on the side of polluters, a man who has called for the U.S. to exit the Paris climate accords. Anyone who has been paying remote attention could expect Mr. Trump to base his appointment on fealty, rather than expertise in the environmental field. But the choice of Lee Zeldin, our former congressman here in the First Congressional District, still came as an ugly shock.”
It went on: “Gutting the E.P.A. is a top priority for the incoming administration. A primary aim is to increase domestic fossil-fuel production, and climate regulations stand in the way. The first step is to undo Biden-era guardrails on power plants, oil and gas companies, and vehicles. Both the incoming president and the incoming E.P.A. chief…see green energy and environmental protections as the enemy of business-boosting, rather than the industries of the future. This backward thinking is very bad news, not just for the Earth but for Long Island.”
“The district Mr. Zeldin represented for eight years, our district, is at the vanguard of climate impact, vulnerable as we are to sea level rise. Long Island, with its high population density, is also widely affected by the modern environmental ills that government should protect its citizens from, including so-called forever chemicals and lead. There are reasons why Long Island has such high rates of cancer.”
“The last Trump administration took a very hard line at the E.P.A. Whistleblowers were punished; scientists were encouraged to delete findings that certain substances caused cancer or miscarriages. In the second Trump term, we can expect this attack on science and common sense to get worse.”
Zeldin’s “elevation is, obviously, a reward for ring-kissing,” said the editorial. “He was one of the first members of Congress to back Mr. Trump’s 2016 bid [for president] and he has been a steadfast surrogate on Fox News. Mr. Zeldin was an election denier who stood up in Congress even after the Jan. 6 insurrection to claim ‘rogue election officials’ had tainted the results. Mr. Zeldin excels at bootlicking.”
It concluded: “The best-case scenario is that the E.P.A. will lose four years in the fight for the planet. The worst-case scenario should send a shudder down your spine.”
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