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corporate polluters
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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'This Is Huge': Newsom to Sign Historic Climate Disclosure Bills for Big Corporations
"These two first-in-the-nation bills will provide unprecedented insight into corporate climate emissions and financial climate risk," said one advocate.
Sep 18, 2023
Climate advocates expressed hope Monday that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would help usher in a new era of accountability for corporate polluters nationwide after he confirmed plans to sign legislation forcing companies to publicly disclose their climate-related risks and more complete accounting of their total emissions.
At a Climate Week event in New York on Sunday, Newsom said he wants to maintain California's status as a state leading the way to confront the climate crisis and that signing Senate Bill 253 is part of that effort.
The bill would require companies operating in California and earning at least $1 billion per year to disclose the climate risks at every stage of their supply chains and disclose all greenhouse gas emissions, including investments, attributable to their business practices.
"Would I cede that leadership by having a response that is anything but, 'Of course I will sign that bill?'" the Democratic governor said to a reporter at a panel discussion. "No, I will not."
Newsom said he also plans to sign S.B. 261, which would require companies in California to submit climate-related risk reports, detailing costs for increased compliance and insurance.
The governor noted that his office plans to do "some cleanup on some little language" in the bills but did not say what changes would be made.
S.B. 253 would be the first measure in the U.S. to require companies to disclose their fossil fuel emissions in scopes 1, 2, and 3 in their supply chains.
Scope 1 emissions refer to those caused directly by a company as it runs machinery to make its products, while scope 2 emissions are those created by products or equipment that a company purchases, such as fossil fuel-generated energy for its facilities.
Advocates say scope 3 emissions, which are produced by customers who use the company's products, are often overlooked by big polluters when they make climate pledges, but make up the bulk of corporate emissions.
Requiring the accounting of all emissions in a company's supply chain, said California Environmental Voters, "is nothing short of historic."
Around 5,000 companies will be required to comply with the law, illustrating where the majority of emissions are coming from in their supply chains.
In contrast, federal rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission would apply only to publicly traded companies and wouldn't require them to disclose scope 3 emissions.
Mindy Lubber, president and CEO of sustainability advocacy group Ceres, expressed hope that California's new laws will "set another leading standard to increase corporate transparency and help to mitigate financial and climate risk."
"These two first-in-the-nation bills will provide unprecedented insight into corporate climate emissions and financial climate risk," said Lubber. "This is exactly the kind of policy framework that investors have long sought to better understand how companies are working to manage and mitigate the immense financial impacts of the climate crisis."
Lubber noted that the legislation has "support from dozens of leading businesses that recognize the massive opportunity of the shift to a low-carbon economy and deserve a standardized and consistent platform to showcase their efforts."
The Greenlining Institute, which is based in Oakland, California and advocates for communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by fossil fuel emissions, called Newsom's commitment to signing the bills "a huge win."
Last year, the Biden administration proposed strict limits on vehicle pollution based on standards set by California.
Lynn LoPucki, a law professor at the University of Florida, told Capital & Main last week that S.B. 253 "is really a national bill" that will force nearly every major company that does business in California to report its emissions.
"The idea is that companies will make a greater effort to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions once they're reporting them. They know investors care, and they also, I think, know that consumers and the public care," LoPucki told the outlet. "Virtually every company is doing corporate social responsibility reporting, or webpages in which they profess concern about corporate social responsibility. And today, that means reducing greenhouse gases."
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No More False Solutions: Rising Call to Ban Corporate Polluters From UN Talks
Groups deliver petition to 'kick big polluters out of climate policy'
Jun 11, 2015
A coalition of civil society organizations declared Wednesday that corporate polluters are driving global warming and must not be allowed to steer—or even participate in—the ongoing processes of the United Nations, whose stated aim is to develop global solutions to the climate crisis.
Twenty organizations, including Amazon Watch and Climate Action Network International, delivered a petition to "kick big polluters out of climate policy"--bearing 224,000 signatures--to the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany.
With this latest round of discussions ending in disappointment for climate justice advocates, the groups set their sights on the future, focusing on the UN Conference of the Parties 21, or COP 21, negotiations slated to take place in Paris later this year.
"We call on you to take immediate action to protect COP21 and all future negotiations from the influence of big polluters," reads the petition, addressed to UN officials. "Given the fossil fuel industry's years of interference intended to block progress, push false solutions, and continue the disastrous status quo, the time has come to stop treating big polluters as legitimate 'stakeholders' and to remove them from climate policymaking."
"Big polluters have an existential profit motive to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels," said Amanda Starbuck of Rainforest Action Network, one of the organizations behind the petition. "The rest of humanity has an existential survival imperative to keep fossil fuels in the ground. These fundamentally opposed interests should automatically disqualify the fossil fuel industry from participating in the global climate talks--period."
Despite the ever-worsening crisis of global warming, the UN has a track record of giving corporations a front seat to the global climate process.
"Big polluters have an existential profit motive to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels"
--Amanda Starbuck, Rainforest Action Network
"At the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Warsaw, corporations with a direct conflict of interest in the treaty's success not only sponsored the talks, they were given preferential access to delegates," noted Corporate Accountability International, another backer of the petition.
The Paris talks are not expected to break this mold.
Pierre-Henri Guignard, Secretary-General of COP21, revealed in May that the talks will be sponsored by corporations, including French energy companies Engie and EDF, whose coal plants are responsible for nearly half of France's emissions.
"We see the dirty hands of these corporations not only reflected in their underwriting of the COP21 but also in the false solutions now proposed in the [Bonn] agreement itself, including carbon pricing, climate-smart agriculture, REDD+, Carbon Capture and Storage, nuclear, fracking, and other technological strategies which cause great harm to our communities and continue the dangerous the warming of the planet," Cindy Wiesner of Grassroots Global Justice told Common Dreams.
The corporate takeover has sparked outrage and mobilization far beyond the signatories to Wednesday's petition. Civil society and social movement organizations worldwide are already gearing up to protest the heavy role of multinationals in the Paris talks and continue their calls for a real--and system-wide--solution to the climate crisis.
A new poll by World Wide Views on Climate and Energy indicates that concern about climate change is near universal. Based on consultations with thousands of people in 75 countries, the study concludes that nearly 80 percent of the people are concerned about the impacts of global warming.
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