EPA’s chief saboteur, Lee Zeldin, announces plan to delete climate science

In an Orwellian move, the Chief Saboteur of the Environmental Protection Agency, oil industry plant Lee Zeldin announced plans to delete the EPA’s endangerment finding today, which is the EPA’s official finding recognizing the scientific reality that climate change is harmful to human health. And he’s doing it so he can raise your fuel costs, letting the oil industry extract more money from your already-strained pocketbook.

(Update: Even the Energy Department’s own numbers acknowledge this rollback will cost you money, in the form of higher gas prices by $.76/gal)

To begin this article, here are some facts:

• The global climate is warming, and it is warming due to human activity.
• The human activity that is warming the global climate the most is fossil fuel combustion.
• There are other things warming the global climate as well, including the meat industry (both through methane emissions from livestock and through deforestation of the land to grow them and their feed), construction (cement releases significant CO2, though not as much as the previous influences), and others. But fossil fuels are the primary cause.
• That global temperature rise puts many ecosystems out of balance, with disastrous results for those ecosystems.
• Humans rely on functioning ecosystems for their most basic needs – water, air, food, temperature regulation, and so on.
• As ecosystems are disrupted, this will make humans’ lives harder and worse, and lead to greater conflict.
• The fossil fuel industry spends a lot of money and effort to deny and obfuscate these facts, and their tactics have shifted over time, retreating from a hard-line “it’s not happening” position to softer-sounding, but similarly-insidious, positions that still minimize the importance of the problem or delay action.
• The longer we wait to solve climate change, the harder it will be.
• Thus, climate change is a huge and real problem we all need to work to solve quickly, and will require collective cooperation from everyone, whether they be corporations, media, governments, or individuals.

These are all facts that no serious person contests. Lee Zeldin, however, is not a serious person.

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Instead, he’s a plant by the oil industry. This can be seen in the lies he constantly tells, which his employees have had to call him out for. It can be seen in his efforts to poison you, raise your fuel costs and harm US industry. And it can be seen in his Orwellian doublespeak, like saying that he’s going to make the air cleaner by making it dirtier.

And all it took the largest and richest industry the world has ever seen was a paltry few hundred thousand dollars in bribes.

In exchange, what they’re getting is the deletion of actual science, the imposition of willful ignorance in a desperate plea to save their industry which kills millions per year globally.

That comes in the form of a plan to delete the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” today, which is the scientific basis of EPA’s regulation of harmful greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding found that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, recognizing a scientific fact that every serious person has known for a long time – but now it was at least codified into federal procedure.

It focused specifically on carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), sulfur hexaflouride (SF6), hydroflourocarbons (HFCs), nitrous oxide (N2O), and perfluourocarbons (PFCs, now more commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”), all of which cause climate change.

All of these chemicals in the air have deleterious environmental effects which harm humans, and we know this to be the case.

But Lee Zeldin has bribes to answer to, so of course, we can’t let these facts get in the way.

The problem is – or at least, it’s a problem to people who are hostile to human life like Zeldin and the oil industry he so cheaply has been influenced to lick the boots of – the endangerment finding means that the government can’t just eliminate clean air rules, because eliminating clean air rules would harm people and that would be bad.

Not only would it harm people’s health, it would also raise their fuel costs – by eliminating fuel efficiency regulations, which Zeldin wants to do, so his oil industry donors can profit more off of you.

So, why not just get rid of the finding? Then we can pretend we aren’t harming people, and we can force more pollution on everyone to help our oil buddies!

That’s what Zeldin announced today that he wants to do, and the reason is because he thinks eliminating the finding will allow him to roll back fuel efficiency standards, making the cars you drive more dangerous for you, but more importantly for his greedy oil buddies, more expensive to run, which means more profits for them.

Zeldin announced the move at an auto dealership in Indiana (car dealers are another industry that has opposed environmental progress). He was joined there by Chris Wright, titular head of the Department of Energy, who is a former oil CEO (surprise, surprise).

The presence of the two showed that Zeldin is not just going rogue here, but in fact is working lock step with the squatter in the White House and the whole republican party to harm American interests by making us less healthy, less wealthy, and less competitive globally.

Zeldin wrongly claimed the move would save money, but by the EPA’s own analysis, rolling back Biden’s emissions rules would in fact cost the US trillions of dollars. Just three months ago, the Department of Energy under Chris Wright, who joined Zeldin on stage today, estimated that this rollback would increase gas prices by 76 cents per gallon.

Zeldin also claimed that this would allow him to end an EV mandate which doesn’t actually exist, showing that he doesn’t even know the most basic information about the job he’s been thrust into.

This isn’t the first time that republican know-nothings have tried to pretend science doesn’t exist. Just this month, Zeldin deleted several climate reports from government websites and moved to shut down the EPA’s science office. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk, while playacting as a government official, tried to cancel the lease for the NOAA Mauna Kea climate observatory which acts as the most important continuous atmospheric monitoring site on the planet.

It’s a strategy that was once fiction, detailed by George Orwell in his book 1984. In that book, an oppressive totalitarian government routinely changes facts to fit its current motives, pretending that events never happened if it deems knowledge of them contrary to the government’s current interests. Zeldin seems to think the book was an instruction manual, when in fact it was a warning against compulsive liars like himself.

However, the Clean Air Act still requires the EPA to regulate air pollutants, which the six pollutants listed above still are, regardless of whether Zeldin closes his eyes and puts his fingers in his ears. The EPA is also required to regulate these harmful pollutants by Massachusetts v. EPA, a successful lawsuit against the last unelected republican who used Orwellian tactics to try to justify harming Americans with more pollution and higher costs.

The proposed regulation will go to a public comment period, as if climate science is subject to a vote (it’s not – science is science, and facts don’t care about your feelings).

During that public comment period (which we’ll let you know about when it happens), we’re sure the majority of feedback from actual humans will be resoundingly negative on the plan to raise your fuel costs and harm your health. Sierra Club, the Environmental Protection Network, Environmental Defense Fund, and America is All In (a group of mayors, governors and former officials of the EPA and Dept. of Health and Human Services) have come out against the plan already.

But given that Zeldin’s intent is to harm Americans and help his oil buddies, we could see him trying to go through with it anyway. But if the backlash is loud enough, he may have to give up – as he did with his plan to bring asbestos back.

And, finally, just like the last time a reality TV host who got fewer votes than his opponent squatted in the White House, even if the move goes through, it is likely to be countered with legal action due to its arbitrary and capricious nature, showing clear disregard for the public interest as Zeldin, Wright and Trump try to satiate the oil industry that bribed them into the position they’ve stumbled into.

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