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air pollution
Critics Warn Trump EPA Pick Zeldin 'Will Make Our Air and Water Dirtier' to Enrich Polluters
The choice, said one climate leader, "lays bare Donald Trump's intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters."
Nov 12, 2024
As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet continued to take shape on Tuesday, climate and environmental campaigners expressed deep concerns about his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency: Lee Zeldin.
Like the EPA administrators from Trump's first term—former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler and "fossil fuel puppet" Scott Pruitt—Zeldin is expected to pursue the Republican's plan to "drill, baby, drill," despite the devastating consequences for the global climate.
In a statement announcing Zeldin as his pick, Trump unironically pledged the former New York congressman would usher in a new era of deregulation but ensure the United States has "the cleanest air and water on the planet." Zeldin similarly promised to achieve "U.S. energy dominance" while also "protecting access to clean air and water." Green groups responded with forceful criticism.
"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," Earthjustice president Abbie Dillen said Tuesday. "Lee Zeldin is not that person."
"His loyalty to Donald Trump indicates he will gladly take a sledgehammer to EPA's most recent lifesaving regulations, putting politics over science and endangering our communities," she warned. "It is clear President-elect Trump is prioritizing loyalty above actual qualifications to address our current and future environmental concerns."
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous declared that choosing a candidate "who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump's intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our 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."
"2024 will assuredly surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record," he noted. "Across the country, we are experiencing record droughts, heatwaves, and deadly storms, wiping out entire communities in a matter of hours. Americans need and deserve someone who will put them first, not millionaires sitting in board rooms seeking to increase the profits of multibillion-dollar international corporations."
"We have made too much progress to allow Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin to take us back," Jealous added. "We will not give up the clean energy manufacturing jobs rebuilding communities. We will not accept more dangerous air and water. And we will not allow Trump, Zeldin, and corporate polluters to steal our future."
While campaigning against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris—who was widely supported by green groups—Trump told Big Oil executives that he would repeal the Biden-Harris administration's climate policies if they poured $1 billion into electing him.
"Big Oil spent millions of dollars propping up Donald Trump's campaign—and he's not wasting any time giving them a good return on their investment," Climate Power executive director Lori Lodes said Monday. "Lee Zeldin is already promising to slash critical protections as head of the EPA."'
"During Donald Trump's first term in office, he slashed over 125 environmental protections and let polluters off the hook for putting harmful chemicals into our air and water," Lodes pointed out. "Trump's second term agenda will make our air and water dirtier just to make billionaires and big corporations richer—and Americans will pay the price."
After serving in the New York State Senate, Zeldin represented the 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2015 to 2023, during which he was one of Trump's allies—or as Fossil Free Media's Jamie Henn put it, "ass-kissing sycophants."
Zeldin unsuccessfully ran for New York governor in 2022, during which he campaigned on reversing the state's ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. He has a 14% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters.
E&E Newsspoke with multiple sources who believe Zeldin will be able to implement the incoming administration's playbook. Frank Maisano, a senior principal at lobbying firm Bracewell, described him as a fixture in "Trump World" who is "totally with the president's agenda."
"The EPA administrator last time... you had somebody who wasn't politically savvy and was an attorney general who just ramrodded his policy through and didn't have any real political acumen in the space," he said, referring to Pruitt.
"The agenda, I believe, needs to be radical, and there will be a lot of opposition from the mainstream media, environmental groups, the Democrats in Congress," Maisano added. "The job of deregulation is going to need someone who can also be a good defender and explainer of what they're trying to do and what it will accomplish, and why it's important and why it's not wrecking the environment."
Meanwhile, climate organizations and Democratic critics emphasize that wrecking the environment is Trump's plan and they are determined to fight against it.
"We count on the EPA to protect clean air and water and public health and that's what we'll hold the next administrator accountable to do," said Natural Resources Defense Council president Manish Bapna, taking aim at Zeldin's promises to "revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the U.S. the global leader" of artificial intelligence.
"Current EPA standards and federal incentives are already revitalizing the auto industry in precisely the way the industry sees its own future, with more than 160 electric vehicle projects totaling $82 billion in investment announced in just the past two years," Bapna explained. "Repealing these policies, as Trump has said he'll do, would devastate the industry in a moment of critical transition, threatening jobs, increasing tailpipe pollution that's wrecking the climate, and driving up consumer costs."
"Similarly, we can meet demand for data centers without scrapping EPA rules to clean up dirty power plants and cut climate pollution," he added. "We need EPA leadership that will protect the environment and public health. That's a big enough job without looking outside the agency's charge."
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Gulf Coast Advocates: 2024 Election Is 'Inflection Point' for Climate Justice
One campaigner called November "a fork in the road for what type of political economy and climate future and racial justice future and public health future we want our federal government to create."
Aug 16, 2024
A second Trump presidency would be a "complete disaster" for the global climate and for Gulf Coast communities bearing the brunt of the buildout of liquefied natural gas terminals, frontline advocates and their allies warned.
The comments came during a press briefing on Thursday organized by Gas Exports Today, during which Vessel Project founder Roishetta Ozane, Better Brazoria director Melanie Oldham, and senior energy transition policy lead at Evergreen Action Mattea Mrkusic bore witness to the harm that the LNG export boom had already done to Texas and Louisiana, and called for a permanent ban.
"We are at this inflection point, and the election in November is a fork in the road for what type of political economy and climate future and racial justice future and public health future we want our federal government to create," Mrkusic told reporters.
'We Are Not a Sacrifice Zone'
The advocates began the briefing by detailing the harm that fossil fuels—in particular the recent ramping up of LNG export facilities—have already done to Gulf Coast communities. Currently, there are around 15 LNG terminals in operation or construction in Texas and Louisiana, and six more being reviewed.
Ozane, who was born in Louisiana and lost two homes to hurricanes Laura, Rita, and Delta, explained how oil and gas emissions polluted local air, water, and soil, threatening the health of residents including her own children. She recounted how her son, while driving down the aptly-named Sulphur Avenue in Louisiana, suddenly had a seizure for the first time in his life. He totaled the car and ended up in the hospital on life support, where he had several more seizures.
"The United States can no longer approve these projects in our community for the sake of the almighty dollar for oil and gas."
Looking for answers, Ozane spoke to several doctors before one in California told her that her son's seizure was due to "long-term industrial exposure." On the day of her son's fateful drive, there were major flares at the nearby Phillips 66 refinery and Bio-Lab. A few days earlier, there had also been an explosion at Calcasieu refinery.
"We are fighting on every front here, and we just want people to listen to us and to understand that we are dying. Our children are dying," Ozane said. "They are getting sick."
She continued: "This is not made up. This is not some type of scheme. This is not fake. We are real people. We are not a sacrifice zone. The United States can no longer approve these projects in our community for the sake of the almighty dollar for oil and gas."
Oldham, who lives in Freeport, Texas, discussed research she and Better Brazoria had done into a major 2022 explosion at Freeport LNG, a facility three to four miles from her home. One of the things they discovered was that, on the day of the explosion, the plant was operating 94 employees short. The excuse that Freeport LNG gave to regulators was that they could not find enough well-trained operators.
"That's frightening," Oldham said, noting that there are currently six LNG plants along the Texas coast. If those six plants "cannot find well-trained LNG operators, then why in the heck are they building and proposing more LNGs?" she asked.
When it comes to fossil fuel emissions, what happens in Texas and Louisiana does not stay there. Mrkusic focused on two recent world records "that never should have been broken."
The first is that July 2024 saw the hottest day on record; the second is that the U.S. has become in recent years the world's leading exporter of LNG.
That LNG expansion, the Sierra Club found in 2022, "thwarted" the stated U.S. climate goal of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
"In what world does it make sense to double down on this dirty buildout?" Mrkusic asked.
'We Have an Alternative'
Whether or not the U.S. will choose to double down is one major issue at stake in the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the panelists said. That's because the election would likely determine the fate of the Biden administration's pause on the approval of new LNG exports.
The pause was put in place while the Department of Energy (DOE) updates the studies it uses to determine whether a given natural gas export request serves the public interest, as the last studies it relied on were conducted in 2018 and 2019 during the Trump administration. While a Louisiana-based, Trump-appointed judge blocked that pause in July, Mrkusic explained that no court order can stop the DOE from revising its public interest determination, something she expects it to finalize by the first quarter of 2025.
"We believe that if DOE fully accounts for... the cost of the LNG buildout in their studies, using the best available science, listening to frontline communities, measuring the cumulative public health impacts to those who live nearby, it'll be crystal clear that new export authorizations are not in the public interest," Mrkusic said.
"Under Trump, we could double down on even more dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that'll lock us into harmful pollution for decades to come."
However, the DOE deadline anticipated by Mrkusic and others falls after the election, and Trump has already pledged to approve pending LNG export terminals on day one of his administration. He also has a record of rolling back environmental protections and favoring the fossil fuel industry over climate concerns, and has promised fossil fuel CEOs to slash Biden administration climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign funds.
Oldham said that the "Trump administration set us back a decade or two when he was president regarding public health, environmental issues," and pointed to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is widely understood to be the blueprint for a second Trump administration.
"It's pretty scary what they want to do as far as the environmental issues," Oldham said.
Oldham, Ozane, and Mrkusic spoke the same week that a number of studies were released warning of the climate and public health risks of extending the LNG buildout and implementing other Project 25 agenda points.
A Greenpeace USA and Sierra Club report found that permitting more LNG would claim an extra 707 to 1,110 lives and cost an added $9.88 billion to $15.1 billion in health costs through 2050.
Another report from Energy Innovation calculated that Project 2025, if put in place, would cause more than 2,000 early air pollution deaths by 2030 and spew an extra 4,920 metric megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Finally, a third study from Evergreen Action outlined the impacts of an LNG buildout under a second Trump administration, concluding that if every pending project were approved, as is likely, this would quadruple U.S. LNG export capacity compared with 2023 levels and emit 3.9 gigatons of climate pollution annually, or 63% of the nation's total climate pollution in 2021.
"But," Mrkusic said, "we do have an alternative."
She continued: "Under Trump, we could double down on even more dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that'll lock us into harmful pollution for decades to come. Or under a potential Harris administration, we would have a much better shot of building a thriving clean energy economy. And, as one part of that, we could land the Department of Energy's updated studies so that they fully account for the cost of LNG exports."
'Climate Champions'
Beyond its potential to block Trump and Project 2025, the Gulf Coast advocates spoke with genuine enthusiasm of what a Harris-Walz administration could do for the climate and frontline communities.
Ozane pointed to Harris' record of holding fossil fuel and other polluting companies to account as attorney general of California, as well as actions she had taken in the Biden administration, such as casting the deciding vote for the infrastructure bill.
"We know that she is a leader in herself, and she has shown that even aside from the current administration, that she is not afraid of taking on oil and gas," Ozane said.
"I feel strongly that Harris will be the better candidate for our cause."
She added that Harris' choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who also has a strong climate record, as running mate signals that she is listening to the climate movement in making her decisions.
"Walz and Harris are both climate champions," Ozane said. "We know that this ticket is what would be best when it relates to environmental justice, climate justice, us meeting our climate target, and not only will that be beneficial for the United States, but it will be beneficial for the entire world."
Oldham said that she would vote for Harris, who she thought might be better than U.S. President Joe Biden on some climate issues.
"I feel strongly that Harris will be the better candidate for our cause," Oldham said, comparing her to Trump. She added, "I think she'll speak up even more than Biden."
Harris does have her own weaknesses on environmental issues. When asked about her retraction of a 2020 primary campaign promise to ban fracking, Ozane acknowledged, "We know that none of these candidates are absolutely perfect."
"But," she added, "that doesn't mean that this isn't the best ticket, that there isn't still avenues for communication for us to get to what we're trying to get for our community."
Ozane herself is working on communicating those needs. She and others have asked Harris to travel to Louisiana and see the impacts of the LNG buildout firsthand. Ozane herself is speaking at the Louisiana Breakfast at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week, and hopes to meet with Harris and Walz to articulate several asks from frontline Gulf advocates.
These include a commitment to make polluters pay for the damage they have already done in the region, a centering of frontline perspectives and solutions, continuing to fund initiatives like Justice40, revisiting the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that subsidize fossil fuels, reconsidering tax breaks for polluting companies operating in Louisiana, and not trialing experimental climate solutions like carbon capture and storage in already pollution-burdened communities.
"We no longer want to be sacrifices," Ozane said. "We no longer want things to be tried and tested in our communities."
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Expensive, Deadly, and 50 Years Old: It’s Time to Retire the Gavin Coal Plant
Blackstone has the opportunity to cement itself as a leader in the green transition by continuing to invest in clean energy solutions and closing the deadly General J Gavin Coal Plant in Ohio.
Aug 12, 2024
Private equity giant Blackstone is invested in one of the largest and dirtiest coal plants in the United States, the General J Gavin Coal Plant in Ohio. Despite Blackstone’s commitments to reducing carbon emissions in new assets, various investments in renovating and constructing energy efficient buildings, and a $100 million investment in businesses that support the energy transition, the firm remains invested in this aging, polluting coal plant. As the Gavin Coal Plant celebrates its 50th birthday this year, it’s time for Blackstone to start planning the plant’s retirement.
Contradicting their corporate commitments to emissions reduction, Blackstone’s Gavin coal plant has emitted 106 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the firm acquired the plant in 2016. These emissions impact communities well beyond Cheshire, Ohio. Because of its location, the Gavin Coal Plant is upwind of several major areas across the Eastern Seaboard such as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Baltimore, meaning the health impacts stretch across the country as well in a widespread plume of toxins. Sierra Club modeling found Gavin to be the nation’s deadliest coal plant as of February 2023, causing an estimated 244 premature deaths each year from particulate emissions.
Not only is Gavin deadly, it’s old and expensive. As the plant turns 50 this year, Gavin is an outlier among other coal plants slated for closure. Since 2000, the average age of retirement for coal-fired generating units has been 50 years. And, as coal plants age, operations and maintenance costs increase while performance decreases. In 2020, 46% of global coal plants were running at a loss, and Carbon Tracker estimates this rising to 52% by 2030 . Yet, Blackstone has not announced a retirement date for this old, inefficient asset.
Blackstone is in danger of missing this brief opportunity to leverage this program to repurpose an old, dirty, and inefficient coal plant while delivering returns for investors.
Blackstone has the opportunity to cement itself as a leader in the green transition by continuing to invest in clean energy solutions and closing the General J Gavin Coal Plant in Ohio. There’s extra funding for that green transition through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA,) but the window of opportunity for that financingis closing. Blackstone should close the Gavin Coal Plant and repurpose the site for the renewable energy transition, and the IRA funding provides a unique financial opportunity for the firm to do just that.
Blackstone executives are well aware of the investment opportunities that exist in the clean energy transition. In fact, in Blackstone’s 2023 Q2 earnings call, President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray stated that the IRA would be helpful in spurring investments in the energy transition. Gray said:
The IRA in the U.S. has made a big difference. I mean, there was $250 billion of large-scale renewable projects announced in the last seven years. And there was an equal amount announced in the last year basically since the IRA passing. So, we would say very large scale opportunity and should result in a new area for us to grow and generate incremental fees and returns for investors.
By Blackstone’s own calculus, the IRA is a critical tool for spurring investments and generating returns for investors. Blackstone should get an application in for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program by the end of the year to ensure the firm is in the running for favorable financing terms to retool, repurpose, or replace the Gavin Coal Plant.
As of March 2024, there were 203 active applications in the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office which oversees the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program. Over $262.2 billion in loans have been requested, and the program budget is only $250 billion. Blackstone is in danger of missing this brief opportunity to leverage this program to repurpose an old, dirty, and inefficient coal plant while delivering returns for investors. Blackstone must act now and retire the Gavin Coal Plant.
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