EPA’s Zeldin starts efforts to poison you, raise fuel costs and harm US industry
Lee Zeldin, titular head of the Environmental “Protection” Agency, officially announced several efforts to harm Americans’ health, increase their fuel costs by tens of billions of dollars per year, and to ensure that US manufacturing be less competitive into the future.
Zeldin called his actions today, mostly in the form of press releases declaring rollbacks of money-saving and pollution reducing measures, “the greatest day of deregulation in US history.”
Between the Obama and Biden administrations, the US saw significant progress on the environmental front, with federal rules cleaning up air and water pollution from power plants and vehicles, encouraging the onshoring of clean manufacturing, and increasing efficiency thus saving Americans money on energy costs.
All in all, the Biden-Harris administration’s policy improvements would save over $250 billion per year and 200k lives, all while making US industry more prepared for the global green transition that is happening now whether you like it or not.
However, that’s all bad news for the enemies of America, and so today, one of them started efforts to reverse all of those positive moves.
Unfortunately for America and the world, the current occupier of the White House is convicted felon Donald Trump, who finally received more votes than his opponent on his third attempt (despite committing treason in 2021, for which there is a clear legal remedy).
And, in what is a common trend, his appointee to the position of Chief Saboteur at the Environmental Destruction Agency is one of the worst people possible for the job: Lee Zeldin, a man who has taken $269,608 in lifetime political bribes from the oil industry and, in return for those bribes, says he wants to protect clean air by making the air dirtier.
Today Zeldin put that claim into action… er, well, into more talk… by releasing a swath of unspecific press releases declaring his intent to increase harm and costs for Americans in all sorts of realms.
Most of these press releases focus on the same platitudes and Orwellian doublespeak that we have come to expect from a bought-and-paid oil stooge, claiming that the efforts will reduce costs when they in fact will raise costs, and that they will somehow clean up the environment while they dirty it.
A few specific efforts are pointed out, such as trying to reverse an electric vehicle mandate that doesn’t exist, showing that Zeldin is not just hostile to Americans, but also ignorant of the policy that he’s supposed to be administering. And, flying in the face of science, an effort to remove the EPA’s endangerment finding – a scientific finding which correctly acknowledges the danger of greenhouse gas emissions.
Zeldin also uses some questionable language, such as acknowledging that he’s putting a “dagger straight into the heart” of efforts to lower your costs and rid your life of the poisons that he has been paid to spread.
However, the true effects of these initiatives has not yet been seen, and is even hard to predict given the unspecific nature of the claims made and the long timelines for US rulemaking.
US rulemaking is a long and deliberate process that requires consensus and for rulemaking to have a scientific basis. Rules cannot be “arbitrary and capricious” – which makes it hard for a group of people who embody those terms more than almost anyone on Earth to push anything through.
This is also why Biden’s EPA rules took years to implement and went through many rounds of modification and hundreds of pages of well-considered scientific backing (I read it, and doing so gave me a lot of faith in the way government thinks through things. You should try the same, in a field you have expertise in). And why some rules didn’t make it in under the deadline before the saboteurs took over. In the same way, you can’t just blow everything up overnight – there’s a process involved here.
Further compounding Zeldin’s attempted sabotage of American interests is a recent court opinion overturning the Chevron rule. The effect of this would be that administrative agencies like the EPA have less authority to make changes on their own without going to courts or Congress first, which means that any changes made by Zeldin can potentially be challenged even moreso by the actual environmental protectors of this country – nonprofits like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and others.
These groups had significant success in challenging moves made by corrupt oil stooge Scott Pruitt and ignorant coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to sabotage American health during Mr. Trump’s first occupation of the White House. The NRDC, for example, won over 90% of the cases they brought during that time frame.
And the groups are all lining up to oppose these harmful actions today.
“The Trump administration’s plans, as announced by executive order, would gut the bedrock national and state clean air standards that have been reducing air pollution and protecting communities across the country. They would also undermine investments, jobs and affordability for clean vehicles. The public has a right to know what the Trump administration is doing and why they are pursuing this harmful agenda. We are going to court to ensure they do.”
-Alice Henderson, Director and Lead Counsel for Transportation and Clean Air, Environmental Defense Fund
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin today announced plans for the greatest increase in pollution in decades. The result will be more toxic chemicals, more cancers, more asthma attacks, and more dangers for pregnant women and their children. Rather than helping our economy, it will create chaos.
-Amanda Leland, Executive Director, Environmental Defense Fund
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.
The American people should be furious. The EPA exists to protect us from serious pollution that endangers our lives and wellbeing, but Trump and Lee Zeldin are attempting to turn it into corporate polluters’ best friend.
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.
-Ben Jealous, Executive Director, Sierra Club
Breaking faith with the American people and breaking 50 years of laws of the land, the Environmental Protection Agency today abandoned protecting human health and the environment. Repealing or weakening these important safeguards on pollution from cars, power plants, and oil producers would mean higher energy bills, more asthma and heart attacks, more toxins in drinking water, and more extreme weather.
At a time when millions of Americans are trying to rebuild after horrific wildfires and climate-fueled hurricanes, it’s nonsensical to try to deny that climate change harms our health and welfare.
Still, today’s announcement is only the start of the process – not the end. Before finalizing any of these actions, the law says EPA must propose its changes, justify them with science and the law, and listen to the public and respond to its concerns. NRDC’s scientists and lawyers will be there to fight back at every step of the way.
Jackie Wong, senior vice president for climate and energy, Natural Resources Defense Council
Finally, it should be noted that, while the US is attempting policy suicide by saddling it’s people with more harm and higher costs, the rest of the world is not doing the same. While the US is actively backing away from clean manufacturing, China and Europe aren’t.
China is producing more clean vehicles, and increasing exports of them every year, and Europe recently saw an opening to “declare independence from the United States” while investing over $100 billion into onshoring clean manufacturing.
Other countries are making the transition and ready to lead the world into the present, while American republicans kick and scream the country into obscurity. This is what a slim plurality of voters wanted, and it’s what you’re getting.
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Environment
‘Bitcoin Family’ hides crypto codes etched onto metal cards on four continents after recent kidnappings
The Taihuttus on a ski trip to Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. They sold everything they owned in 2017 to bet on bitcoin — and now travel full-time as a family of five.
Didi Taihuttu
A wave of high-profile kidnappings targeting cryptocurrency executives has rattled the industry — and prompted a quiet security revolution among some of its most visible evangelists.
Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called “Bitcoin Family,” said he overhauled the family’s entire security setup after a string of threats.
The Taihuttus — who sold everything they owned in 2017, from their house to their shoes, to go all-in on bitcoin when it was trading around $900 — have long lived on the outer edge of crypto ideology. They travel full-time with their three daughters and remain entirely unbanked.
Over the past eight months, he said, the family ditched hardware wallets in favor of a hybrid system: Part analog, part digital, with seed phrases encrypted, split, and stored either through blockchain-based encryption services or hidden across four continents.
“We have changed everything,” Taihuttu told CNBC on a call from Phuket, Thailand. “Even if someone held me at gunpoint, I can’t give them more than what’s on my wallet on my phone. And that’s not a lot.”
CNBC first reported on the family’s unconventional storage system in 2022, when Taihuttu described hiding hardware wallets across multiple continents — in places ranging from rental apartments in Europe to self-storage units in South America.
The Taihuttu family dressed up for Halloween in Phuket, Thailand, where they recently moved homes after receiving disturbing messages pinpointing their location from YouTube videos.
Didi Taihuttu
As physical attacks on crypto holders become more frequent, even they are rethinking their exposure.
This week, Moroccan police arrested a 24-year-old suspected of orchestrating a series of brutal kidnappings targeting crypto executives.
One victim, the father of a crypto millionaire, was allegedly held for days in a house south of Paris — and reportedly had a finger severed during the ordeal.
In a separate case earlier this year, a co-founder of French wallet firm Ledger and his wife were abducted from their home in central France in a ransom scheme that also targeted another Ledger executive.
Last month in New York, authorities said, a 28-year-old Italian tourist was kidnapped and tortured for 17 days in a Manhattan apartment by attackers trying to extract his bitcoin password — shocking him with wires, beating him with a gun, and strapping an Apple AirTag around his neck to track his movements.
The common thread: The pursuit of crypto credentials that enable instant, irreversible transfers of virtual assets.
“It is definitely frightening to see a lot of these kidnappings happen,” said JP Richardson, CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus. He urged users to take security into their own hands by choosing self-custody, storing larger sums on hardware wallets, and — for those holding significant assets — exploring multi-signature wallets, a setup typically used by institutions.
Richardson also recommended spreading funds across different wallet types and avoiding large balances in hot wallets to reduce risk without sacrificing flexibility.
That rising sense of vulnerability is fueling a new demand for physical protection with insurance firms now racing to offer kidnap and ransom (K&R) policies tailored to crypto holders.
But Taihuttu isn’t waiting for corporate solutions. He’s opted for complete decentralization — of not just his finances, but his personal risk profile.
As the family prepares to return to Europe from Thailand, safety has become a constant topic of conversation.
“We’ve been talking about it a lot as a family,” Taihuttu said. “My kids read the news, too — especially that story in France, where the daughter of a CEO was almost kidnapped on the street.”
Now, he said, his daughters are asking difficult questions: What if someone tries to kidnap us? What’s the plan?
One of the steel plates the Taihuttu family uses to store part of their bitcoin seed phrase. Didi etched it by hand using a hammer and letter punch — part of a decentralized storage system spread across four continents.
Didi Taihuttu
Though the girls carry only small amounts of crypto in their personal wallets, the family has decided to avoid France entirely.
“We got a little bit famous in a niche market — but that niche is becoming a really big market now,” Taihuttu said. “And I think we’ll see more and more of these robberies. So yeah, we’re definitely going to skip France.”
Even in Thailand, Taihuttu recently stopped posting travel updates and filming at home after receiving disturbing messages from strangers who claimed to have identified his location from YouTube vlogs.
“We stayed in a very beautiful house for six months — then I started getting emails from people who figured out which house it was. They warned me to be careful, told me not to leave my kids alone,” he said. “So we moved. And now we don’t film anything at all.”
“It’s a strange world at the moment,” he said. “So we’re taking our own precautions — and when it comes to wallets, we’re now completely hardware wallet-less. We don’t use any hardware wallets anymore.”
To throw off would-be attackers, Didi Taihuttu encrypts select words from each 24-word seed phrase — then splits the phrases into four sets of six and hides them around the world.
Didi Taihuttu
The family’s new system involves splitting a single 24-word bitcoin seed phrase — the cryptographic key that unlocks access to their crypto holdings — into four sets of six words, each stored in a different geographic location. Some are kept digitally through blockchain-based encryption platforms, while others are etched by hand into fireproof steel plates using a hammer and letter punch, then hidden in physical locations across four continents.
“Even if someone finds 18 of the 24 words, they can’t do anything,” Taihuttu explained.
On top of that, he’s added a layer of personal encryption, swapping out select words to throw off would-be attackers. The method is simple, but effective.
“You only need to remember which ones you changed,” he said.
Part of the reason for ditching hardware wallets, Taihuttu said, was a growing mistrust of third-party devices. Concerns about backdoors and remote access features — including a controversial update by Ledger in 2023 — prompted the family to abandon physical hardware altogether in favor of encrypted paper and steel backups.
While the family still holds some crypto in “hot” wallets — for daily spending or to run their algorithmic trading strategy — those funds are protected by multi-signature approvals, which require multiple parties to sign off before a transaction can be executed.
The Taihuttus use Safe — formerly Gnosis Safe — for ether and other altcoins, and similarly layered setups for bitcoin stored on centralized platforms like Bybit.
Didi Taihuttu during a recent visit to Sierra Nevada, Spain. The family’s lifestyle — unbanked, nomadic, and all-in on bitcoin — makes them outliers even in the crypto world.
Didi Taihuttu
About 65% of the family’s crypto is locked in cold storage across four continents — a decentralized system Taihuttu prefers to centralized vaults like the Swiss Alps bunker used by Coinbase-owned Xapo. Those facilities may offer physical protection and inheritance services, but Taihuttu said they require too much trust.
“What happens if one of those companies goes bankrupt? Will I still have access?” he said. “You’re putting your capital back in someone else’s hands.”
Instead, Taihuttu holds his own keys — hidden across the globe. He can top up the wallets remotely with new deposits, but accessing them would require at least one international trip, depending on which fragments of the seed phrase are needed. The funds, he added, are intended as a long-term pension to be accessed only if bitcoin hits $1 million — a milestone he’s targeting for 2033.
The shift toward multiparty protections extends beyond just multi-signature. Multi-party computation, or MPC, is gaining traction as a more advanced security model.
Didi, Romaine, and their three daughters live largely off-grid, managing crypto through decentralized exchanges, algorithmic trading bots, and a globally distributed cold storage system.
Didi Taihuttu
Instead of storing private keys in one place — a vulnerability known as a “single point of compromise” — MPC splits a key into encrypted shares distributed across multiple parties. Transactions can only go through when a threshold number of those parties approve, sharply reducing the risk of theft or unauthorized access.
Multi-signature wallets require several parties to approve a transaction. MPC takes that further by cryptographically splitting the private key itself, ensuring that no single individual ever holds the full key — not even their own complete share.
The shift comes amid renewed scrutiny of centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase, which recently disclosed a data breach affecting tens of thousands of customers.
Taihuttu, for his part, says 80% of his trading now happens on decentralized exchanges like Apex — a peer-to-peer platform that allows users to set buy and sell orders without relinquishing custody of their funds, marking a return to crypto’s original ethos.
While he declined to reveal his total holdings, Taihuttu did share his goal for the current bull cycle: a $100 million net worth, with 60% still held in bitcoin. The rest is a mix of ether, layer-1 tokens like solana, link, sui, and a growing number of AI and education-focused startups — including his own platform offering blockchain and life-skills courses for kids.
Lately, he’s also considering stepping back from the spotlight.
“It’s really my passion to create content. It’s really what I love to do every day,” he said. “But if it’s not safe anymore for my daughters … I really need to think about them.”
WATCH: ‘Bitcoin Family’ tracks moon cycles to make crypto investment decisions
Tesla’s head of Optimus humanoid robot, Milan Kovac, announced that he is leaving the automaker after 9 years.
It leaves just as CEO Elon Musk claimed that the humanoid robot is going to make Tesla a”$25 trillion company.”
Electrek first reported on Tesla hiring Kovac back in 2016 to work on the early Autopilot program. At the time, we noted that the young engineer had an interesting background in machine learning.
He quickly rose through the ranks and ended up leading Autopilot software engineering from 2019 to 2022.
In 2022, he started working on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program.
Late last year, he was promoted to Vice President in charge of the complete Optimus program, as CEO Elon Musk began to tout the program as critical to Tesla’s future.
Musk claimed that Optimus could generate $10 trillion in revenue per year and make Tesla a $25 trillion company. These claims are largely unsubstantiated as the humanoid robot market is still in its infancy.
Most market research firms currently estimate the size of the humanoid robot market to be in the low single-digit billions of dollars, with growth projections through 2032 ranging from $15 billion to $80 billion.
That would represent impressive growth, but nowhere near what Musk is touting to investors.
Today, Kovac announced that he is leaving Tesla for personal reasons:
This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for Elon Musk and the team is ironclad – Tesla team forever.
Kovac has been regarded as one of the top new technical executives at Tesla, which has seen a significant talent exodus of top engineers.
The company has made progress with the Optimus program over the last year. Still, many have been skeptical, as Tesla has been less than forthcoming about using teleoperation in previous demonstrations.
Kovac is not the only Optimus engineer to leave Tesla recently.
Figure, another company developing humanoid robots, has recently poached Zackary Bernholtz, a 7-year veteran at Tesla and most recently a Staff Technical Program Manager.
Electrek’s Take
This is a significant loss for Tesla. Kovac was one of Musk’s top technical guys and literally the head of the program he claimed would bring Tesla to the next level – although I think most people have been understandably skeptical about these claims.
I’ve been bullish on humanoid robots, and I could see Tesla being a player in the field, but it’s nowhere near the opportunity that Musk is claiming, and there’s also plenty of competition with no clear evidence that Tesla has any significant lead, if any.
In China, Unitree has been making impressive progress, and it is already selling a humanoid robot.
In the US, Figure has also been making a lot of progress lately:
I think it’s a smart space to invest in for manufacturing companies like Tesla, but there’s going to be a lot of competition.
It’s too early to say who will come out on top.
As for Kovac leaving, I’m sure his personal reason is correct. However, we often see people claim that and then they quickly turn up at another company.
If he believed that his product would soon become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, I doubt he would be leaving, but you never know. 9 years at Tesla is some hard work and it’s impressive for anyone. Congrats.
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