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pollution
Trump, Zeldin, and Wright Want to Set America’s Rivers on Fire Again
The Trump administration is trying to turn back the clock on environmental and climate regulations. But they can’t control physics. Or the falling cost and rising efficiency of renewable energy.
Mar 14, 2025
I spent part of the morning reading the Powell memo—the famous document written by the future Supreme Court justice in August of 1971 arguing that American business and industry had to get its act together so it could dominate the country’s political life and prevent the threats to “the American system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
In the short run, Justice Lewis Powell was unsuccessful—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been formed a few months before his memo, the Clean Water Act passed a few months after. As William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA (and a Republican appointed by a Republican president) said, the agency “has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Over the next years the agency enacted a critical series of rules that—with surprising speed—cleaned America’s air, rivers, and lakes, and became the template for similar laws around the world.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality.
But the forces Powell helped set in motion with his memo to the Chamber of Commerce never accepted the premise that American business should be regulated—as he had recommended, they built a powerful set of institutions—think tanks, tv stations, publishers, and above all political lobbies—and now, 54 years later, they would appear, on the surface, to have won their final victory. Lee Zeldin, a distant successor to Ruckelshaus as EPA head, announced what he called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”
As the Times explained, under Zeldin’s plan the agency
would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.
In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.
In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”
The reason, he said, was to help the president “usher in a golden age of American success.”
It was language echoed in a second extraordinary speech, this one by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to fellow oilmen in Houston, who promised to “unleash human potential” mostly through the use of artificial intelligence, which would require “unlimited energy.” Yes, he said, we’ve already increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50%, but climate change is simply “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” (That is a phrase that will live in infamy)
The triumphalism of those speeches is in some ways well founded—as the Trump administration ravages university budgets, as its allies turn once-great newspapers into mouthpieces, and as the GOP Congress marches in complete lockstep threatening even to impeach those judges who might rule against this crusade, it’s hard to see precisely how they’ll be stopped. Yes, there will be widespread resistance (join us at Third Act and many other groups on April 5, for the next big round of rallies), and yes there will be lots and lots of court cases. (Some good news on that front this week, as the Supreme Court denied an industry request to keep states and cities from suing them for climate damages). But for the moment these hard-faced men with greed as their compass occupy the political high ground. For the moment they can do much of what they will.
And yet and yet and yet. There are some forces they can’t control. One is physics. You can prattle all you want, as Zeldin did, about how ending efforts to address climate change will “decrease the cost of living for American families,” but thanks to global warming the price of insurance is going through the roof—the latest data I’ve seen from, say, Summit County, Utah shows premiums doubling, and in some cases going up 300%. That’s if you can get it at all—in the wake of the LA fires, California’s largest insurer said this week that “writing new policies doesn’t make any sense at this time.”
And if you can’t control physics, you also can’t control—at least completely—engineering and economics, the disciplines that have led in recent years to the breakout of renewable energy. On the same day as Wright’s speech belittling clean power, these numbers emerged from the consultant Wood MacKenzie:
The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That’s enough to power 8.5 million households.
Why do you think the energy industry spent record amounts on Trump’s election? (Fracking baron Wright and his wife gave $475,000). It’s precisely because of the size of this threat.
As Abby Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put it: “Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand. America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth.”
As the CEO of NextEra Energy (which builds both gas and renewable plants) explained at the same conference that Wright addressed:
The cost of gas turbines and the skilled labor to install them are both up threefold from just two years ago, and new gas infrastructure faces years-long delivery backlogs. Renewables plus batteries, he said, are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to meet the surging power demand from data centers driven by the acceleration in artificial intelligence.
“We’ve got to be really careful here, from an affordability standpoint, about the choices that we’re making. What we don’t want to do is drive ourselves to only one solution—that being a gas-fired solution—that’s now more expensive than it ever has been in its history,” he said. “It just so happens that the most economic solution comes with clean energy benefits, as well.”
And as the technology keeps getting better, so do the numbers—a U.K. study released today found that rooftop solar alone could supply two-thirds of the world’s electricity.
Zeldin, Wright, Trump—they want to take us back to the glory days before 1970, when rivers caught on fire. And to do so they’ll try to take us back to the days before 1958—word came yesterday that the federal government was planning to break the lease on the Hawaii facility that supports the carbon observatory on Mauna Loa.
“It would be terrible if this office was closed,” atmospheric scientist Marc Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said.
“Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations.”
Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder, after the White House froze credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE’S “cost efficiency initiative.”
“It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas monitoring network,” an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA’s measurements said, asking not to be named.
“It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit cards anymore… It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,” the scientist said.
But even if they stop monitoring carbon it will continue accumulating—in fact, the instrument at Mauna Loa showed that CO2 passed the 430 parts per million mark for the first time this week. And even if the federal government does all that it can to shut down renewable energy, the embarrassing numbers will keep piling up—Texas, world capital of hydrocarbons, set remarkable records this week for renewable energy generation.
In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.
The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality (hats off to those Texans who rallied outside the conference that Wright addressed, and that’s why you’re supposed to set aside Sept 20-21 for Sun Day). Wright, Zeldin, Musk, Trump—they have powerful sticks to try and beat reality into submission. But reality has a way of biting back.
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'Billionaires Over Life on Earth': Trump EPA Guts Vast Array of Environmental Protections
"The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of critical health and safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and are all that's standing between us and runaway climate change," said one campaigner.
Mar 12, 2025
While U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin boasted Wednesday of canceling billions of dollars worth of green grants, considering the rollback of dozens of regulations, and shutting down every environmental justice office nationwide, critics warned the moves will have dire consequences for people and the planet.
Zeldin—a former Republican congressman from New York with an abysmal 14% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters—said in a statement that the EPA "will undertake 31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history."
"We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more," Zeldin said. "Alongside President [Donald] Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission."
In one of the biggest moves of the day, the EPA will reconsider its endangerment finding, which the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) described as "the landmark scientific finding that forms the core basis of federal climate action."
"Removing the endangerment finding even as climate chaos accelerates is like spraying gasoline on a burning house," said Jason Rylander, legal director of the CBD's Climate Law Institute. "We had 27 separate climate disasters costing over a billion dollars last year. Now more than ever the United States needs to step up efforts to cut pollution and protect people from climate change. But instead Trump wants to yank us backward, creating enormous risks for people, wildlife, and our economy."
Zeldin said the EPA is "eliminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental justice offices and positions immediately," a move that will result in the closure of 10 regional facilities. The EPA chief explained the move complies with Trump's executive order on "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences" and other presidential directives.
The agency also moved to cancel a $2 billion grant program to help communities suffering from pollution.
"This is a fuck you to anyone who wants to breathe clean air, drink clean water, or live past 2030," Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said in a statement accusing the Trump administration of choosing "billionaires over life on Earth."
"The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of critical health and safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and are all that's standing between us and runaway climate change," Shiney-Ajay continued. "Trump doesn't care about working people, all he cares about is pleasing the oil and gas billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. They know their industry is dying. Wind and solar are cheaper and safer than fossil fuels."
"So, they are trying to buy their way to profitability by rigging the rules in their favor," she added. "If they get their way, they will wreck our air, our water, burn down our homes, and hand future generations an unlivable climate."
TRANSLATION: Fuck you and fuck your future. Corporate polluters can dump sewage in your water, spew toxic gas into your air, and double down on burning the fossil fuels driving us into climate apocalypse. Billionaires can do whatever they want, and everyday people can eat shit.
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— Sunrise Movement ( @sunrisemvmt.bsky.social) March 12, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Matthew Tejada, a former deputy assistant administrator at the Office of Environmental Justice for over a decade before leaving the EPA in December 2023, now serves as senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He toldCBS News Wednesday that "generations of progress are being erased from our federal government."
"Trump's EPA is taking us back to a time of unfettered pollution across the nation, leaving every American exposed to toxic chemicals, dirty air, and contaminated water," Tejada said in a separate NRDC statement Wednesday.
Tejada continued:
The grants that EPA moved to cancel are some of the most important to help make communities across the nation safer, healthier, and more prosperous. They are helping rural Virginia coal communities prepare for extreme flooding, installing sewage systems on rural Alabama homes, and turning an abandoned, polluted site in Tampa, Florida into a campus for healthcare, job training, and a small business development.
Those who have paid the highest price for pollution, with their health, are now the first to be sacrificed by Trump's EPA. But they will not be the last. Every American should be worried about what this portends. We are witnessing the first step of removing environmental protections from everyone, as the chemical industry and fossil fuel producers get their way—and the rest of us will pay with our health and lost legal rights.
On Tuesday, the EPA also canceled grant agreements worth $20 billion issued during former President Joe Biden's administration as part of a so-called green bank meant to fund clean energy and climate mitigation projects. The move prompted a lawsuit by Climate United Fund, a nonprofit green investment fund.
In another alarming development, The New Republicreported Wednesday that the FBI under Director Kash Patel is "moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration."
Responding to Zeldin's sweeping actions Wednesday, the environmental group Sierra Club said the EPA is "attacking safeguards to limit pollution from power plants and vehicles, methane and other deadly emissions from oil and gas sources, mercury and air toxics standards, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, wastewater regulations at coal plants, and many other critical protections for the environment and public health."
"The standards that the EPA seeks to undermine are based on a strong scientific record and serve a number of public interests, including lowering the amount of deadly toxins fossil fuel-fired plants are allowed to release into the air and water; reducing pollution at steel and aluminum mills; and requiring fossil fuel companies to control pollution like soot, ozone, and toxic and hazardous air pollutants at power plants," the group continued.
"If these rules are withdrawn, the American public will see devastating health impacts," Sierra Club warned. "EPA estimated that just one of the rules would prevent 4,500 premature deaths and save $46 billion in health costs by 2032. The health toll and cost of rescinding all the rules listed in the EPA's announcement would be vastly higher."
"Donald Trump's actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year."
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said: "Donald Trump's actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year. It will send thousands of children to the hospital and force even more to miss school. It will pollute the air and water in communities across the country. And it will cause our energy bills to go up even more than they already are because of his disastrous policies. But as they put all of us at risk, Trump and his administration are celebrating because it will help corporate polluters pad their profit margin."
David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen's Climate Program, said that "no matter how the EPA disguises the decision to roll back pollution rules, today's moves will make our air and water dirtier and make Americans sicker."
"Zeldin is granting the wishes of Trump's billionaire corporate cronies, plain and simple, at a massive cost to our health and wallets," he added. "The announcement flies in the face of the EPA's core mission to protect human health and safeguard our environment."
Green groups vowed to fight the Trump administration's attacks on environmental protections and justice.
"Come hell and high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people's lives," said CBD's Rylander. "This move won't stand up in court. We're going to fight it every step of the way."
Jealous of the Sierra Club said, "Make no mistake about it: We will fight these outrageous rollbacks tooth and nail, and we will use all resources at our disposal to continue protecting the health and safety of all Americans."
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EPA Will Close All Environmental Justice Offices, Zeldin Says
"So many people will needlessly die because of this," said one critic.
Mar 12, 2025
In the Trump administration's latest move to obliterate three decades of work to address the systemic injustices faced by low-income and minority communities across the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday announced plans to shutter all ten of the agency's environmental justice regional offices as well as its central hub addressing the issue in Washington, D.C.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent an internal memo to agency officials saying that "reorganizing" and eliminating the offices would help fulfill President Donald Trump's "mandate" to end "forced discrimination programs.
The EPA's Office of Environmental Justice was opened during the Clinton administration and expanded by former Democratic President Joe Biden, who emphasized the office's mission of ensuring "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income" with respect to environmental policies.
But Zeldin likened the office's goal of addressing pollution in regions like "Cancer Alley," an 85-mile stretch of land in Louisiana where the high number of petrochemical plants has been linked to higher-than-average cancer rates in predominantly Black and poor communities, to "discrimination"—apparently against wealthy households and white Americans.
"Wait a second, so trying to address environmental pollution and high cancer rates in poor, rural, or minority areas is racist, but the actual fact that polluting is happening is not bad?" asked one critic on social media.
Zeldin's memo came days after the EPA and the Department of Justice dropped a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration against Denka Performance Elastomer plant in Louisiana, where regulators found the company's chloroprene emissions were fueling health problems across nearby communities.
"If anybody needed a clearer sign that this administration gives not a single damn for the people of the United States, this is it," Matthew Tejada, who led EPA environmental justice work for a decade until 2023, toldThe New York Times after Zeldin sent the memo Tuesday.
Zeldin also announced on Monday that he was cancelling 400 grants for environmental justice and diversity initiatives—despite numerous court orders against Trump's attempt to freeze federal funding that has already been appropriated, including one in which the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland prohibited federal agencies from terminating "equity-related" grants.
The administrator claimed Monday that the EPA is "working hand-in-hand with [the Department of Government Efficiency] to rein in wasteful federal spending," but Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said that "cleaning up pollution is only 'wasteful' if you don't believe everyone in America has the equal right to breathe clean air."
"Lee Zeldin's idea of 'accountability' is apparently to create a world of hurt for the most vulnerable while spitting in the face of the law and giving wealthy corporate interests the ability to pollute at will," said Alt. "All the while Elon Musk lines his pockets with billions of taxpayer dollars as his so-called efficiency agents take a hatchet to programs designed to help people at risk survive. Congress must put a stop to Trump's brazen refusal to follow the law and demand these illegally canceled funds already promised to disadvantaged communities are released."
The coming closure of all EPA environmental justice offices suggested that "the GOP way" includes letting "the kids drink sewage water and breathe polluted air to make the 1% richer," said columnist Wajahat Ali.
Former New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Kathy Sullivan said that for the Trump administration, it is "not enough to ban talking about discrimination," a reference to words and phrases like "inclusiveness" and "inequality" that agencies have flagged in government documents.
"Trump's policies bring back discrimination," said Sullivan.
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