Trump's Environmental Assault Is Already Starting

By Emily Atkin, Heated

Ever since Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the agency’s singular mission has been “to protect human health and the environment.”

But on Monday, Trump’s choice to be the next EPA Administrator—Lee Zeldin, a former Republican Congressman from New York—tweeted that he intends to use the EPA to ”restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI”—three things that have nothing to do with human health or the environment. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water,” he tacked on, as if this were some secondary consideration.

The phrase “access to” was also weirdly unnecessary, as if denoting some sort of caveat. “Yes, I promise to protect access to clean water,” it felt like. “But I never said I’d protect it in general.”

Climate activist at the White House continued their demonstration for a second day calling on President Biden to declare a Climate Crisis.

Zeldin also didn’t mention climate change is his statement, but that came as little surprise. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump has already established an EPA transition team led by two former fossil fuel lobbyists with “years of experience in dismantling environmental protections.” That transition team has “already prepared a slate of executive orders,” the Times reported, including “withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.”

Of course, mass environmental deregulation is to be expected from a Trump administration. As longtime readers will recall, I covered Trump’s first term for the New Republic from 2017 to 2019 and then at HEATED for its remainder. It was a brazenly pro-polluter administration. There’s no evidence indicating things will change. (And no, Elon Musk’s presence does not count as evidence).

What can change, though, is how people who care about human health and the planet can approach the second Trump administration and the political environment surrounding it. That’s why, following Trump’s re-election, I started calling activists who I think are smart, candid, and forward-looking about where climate-concerned people can go from here.