Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is celebrating his many rollbacks to the organization, bragging about shooting a “dagger through the heart of climate change religion” and claiming that he’s “ushering in America’s Golden Age.”
The EPA is about to experience its largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.
Zeldin is rolling back 31 environmental regulations, one of which takes aim at a rule restricting air pollution from fossil fuel-powered plants. Another measure will move away from electric vehicles, allowing a larger embrace of oil-powered vehicles and their fuel suppliers.
“By reconsidering rules that throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants, we are ensuring that American energy remains clean, affordable, and reliable,” he wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Zeldin even has the Supreme Court on his side after last week’s ruling in which the court sided with San Francisco in a monumental sewage case, making it harder for the EPA to regulate sewage discharge.
And to make regulating even more of a challenge, Zeldin slashed his workforce by more than 150 people last week.
As he wrote in his op-ed, Zeldin is working toward ending the Green New Deal—or as he put it, the “Green New Scam.”
But the Green New Deal is something that even Zeldin himself cannot kill, since it’s a platform—not legislation.
Despite these extreme rollbacks, Zeldin said that this is not a “retreat from environmental protection.”
“We are protecting the environment not by shutting down energy production but by making it cleaner and more efficient,” he wrote.
The op-ed offers a change of tone from what he said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January. Responding to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Zeldin said that he believes “climate change is real” and that “we must with urgency be addressing these issues.”
In February, leading climate change expert Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University released a study claiming that “global warming has accelerated.”
Surely it will only get worse as Zeldin takes his dagger to the EPA.
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