All Quiet on the Climate Front

0:00Summer's around the corner. Heat waves are going to be freaking us out. It's as good a time as any to check in on climate change here at Today Explained from Vox. So let's start with the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency was signed into existence by a Republican, Richard Nixon. Can you believe? This was way back in 1970 when it was okay for the right to care about the planet. After a massive oil spill off the California coast, there was a ton of movement around environmental stewardship in this country. We had our first Earth Day, the Clean Air Act passed with only one person in all of Congress voting no, and that same Congress, along with Tricky Dick, created the EPA.

0:3656 years later, in this Anthropocene era of ours, another Republican administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the EPA, all while we civilians contend with the effects of human-caused climate change. That story is coming up on the show today.

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1:59Hello, everybody. Hi. This is a big one if you're into environment. Elizabeth Colbert is into environment. We asked her on Today Explained because she recently wrote a big old doozy for The New Yorker called Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin? It opened with a story. Several dozen, and we're not sure exactly how many at this point, employees of the EPA signed a letter addressed to the administrator, Lee Zeldin, objecting to much of what he was doing, objecting to what they saw as the overly partisan nature of his leadership, objecting to his plans to eliminate the EPA scientific division. Today, we stand together in dissent against the current administration's focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise.

2:56We call on you to reaffirm your testimony, honor your oaths of the Constitution, and renew your commitment to become the environmental steward the public entrusted you to be. And they, according to people I spoke to, sort of didn't expect much to come of this letter. But in fact, what did occur was when they presented it to him, there ensued a sort of electronic manhunt and they searched after and everyone that they could identify, and that was about almost 150 people, they placed on administrative leave. and several of them, very senior people, were fired. How does Lee Zeldin become someone on Trump's radar?

3:43He was a big, big Trump supporter during the first impeachment inquiry. The president of the United States knows that this is a total sham. Many of my constituents, a lot of the American public, knows that this is a total charade. Lee Zeldin was on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a lot of the closed-door sessions. He questioned a lot of the witnesses very aggressively. He was constantly tweeting things out. I've sat through every interview of this so-called impeachment inquiry, and the president hasn't done anything to possibly impeach him for. Nothing. He was a big defender of Trump at that time, and Trump clearly took notice.

4:25Thanks, Lee. I think that is when Lee Zeldin really came to the attention of Trump. And does Lee Zeldin have strong feelings about climate science, the environment? What's his philosophy? Well, as a congressman, he represented the east end of Long Island, which is a very low-lying part of the world and experiencing a lot of flooding owing to sea level rise. And he actually joined a group called the Climate Solutions Caucus in 2016, which was a bipartisan group, still is, still exists. Now he refers to climate change, concerns about climate change as a religion and a lot of the programs that the Biden administration had put in place to try to limit climate change as the Green News scam.

5:18I mean, I just saw a clip yesterday where Al Gore was talking about global freezing. I'm having trouble keeping up. I thought it was global warming and now it's global freezing. All of this is believed to be a con job. Have you killed off the Green New Deal? It's done. It's dead. OK, so that's maybe what he thinks to some extent. What is he doing? It's been over a year since he was put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. How has he transformed it? Yeah, I mean, on some level, you could say it doesn't really matter what his personal beliefs are. He certainly carried out the Trump administration's agenda to dismantle anything having to do with trying to curb climate change.

6:06Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, this climate change, it's It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. That involved dismantling rules that were supposed to limit emissions from power plants. On day one and every day since, President Trump has shown his unwavering support for beautiful, clean coal. It involves dismantling rules that were supposed to limit emissions from cars and really, you know, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. The president says he's moving away from mandates for electric vehicles that he says hurt the auto industry.

6:43Trump also ended federal greenhouse gas emission standards for all vehicles and engines. It involves dismantling rules that were designed to limit methane releases. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. It gets released from oil and gas operations. He most significantly has gone after what's called the endangerment finding, which is sort of the legal basis for these other efforts. The elimination of the endangerment finding is signed, sealed, and delivered.

7:17The endangerment finding dates back to a court case, a very significant sort of landmark court case in 2007. And in that case, the Supreme Court basically directed the EPA. It said you have an obligation to decide whether greenhouse gases threaten the public health and welfare, and if so, to regulate them. And a couple years later, after the case under the Obama administration, the EPA finally did come out and say, oh, yeah, greenhouse gases, global warming, they do endanger the public health and welfare. And that set in motion these regulations that I alluded to, having to do with power plants, having to do with exhaust from cars.

7:59And by revoking that, what they're really trying to say is the EPA has no authority to regulate greenhouse gases. That's really what they're arguing. Today, we dismantle the tactics and legal gymnastics used by the Obama and Biden administrations to backdoor their ideological agendas on the American people. That flies in the face of the Supreme Court case from 2007, but it will be challenged in court. It has already been challenged in court. So whether that will stand, whether that will persist, I can't tell you, but they already have taken that step. This isn't the first time Donald Trump's been the president of the United States, and it's not the first time he appointed a guy who didn't seem to love the EPA to run the agency.

8:49Famously, the Sierra Club said that having Scott Pruitt in charge of the U.S. EPA was like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires. Is Lee Zeldin worse than, say, Scott Pruitt for the EPA? Well, I think that what we're seeing in Lee Zeldin at the EPA is similar to what we're seeing across the Trump 2.0, which is that the sort of guardrails are off. So, you know, to give one example, when Scott Pruitt, who was a pretty open climate change denier. I believe the ability to measure with precision the degree of human activity's impact on the climate is subject to more debate on whether the climate is changing or whether human activity contributes to it.

9:30He had been attorney general of the state of Oklahoma, had sued the EPA many times, including over its efforts to, you know, rain in greenhouse gas emissions. But even he said, look, the endangerment finding, that is settled law. We can't go after that. But now I think the attitude, as we see over and over again, is let's throw anything at the wall and see if it sticks. We actually, you know, are unconstrained by legal niceties like Supreme Court cases or appropriations law or administrative law. When the courts catch up, if they catch up, there's nothing you can do. It's very hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

10:09So, for example, if you cancel a grant and then it's eventually ruled that that was illegal, it's very hard to get that money back. It sounds like from what you're saying and from what Lee Zeldin and his minions are doing at the EPA, that they are trying to go farther than, let's say, a conservative administration has ever gone before to hobble this agency. Is that a reaction to something in particular? Was Joe Biden or, I don't know, President Obama going farther than ever before to institute environmental regulations? What we find in environmental protection is when we look at how dangerous something is or we look at new chemicals like PFAS chemicals, that there are lots of public health hazards.

10:56and really ultimately the EPA is a public health agency, there is a tendency over time to try to get rid of these hazards. And that runs smack into a lot of economic interests that are producing these hazards. Let's just put it that way. So there's always been a tremendous tension between the EPA and the industries that it regulates. And we have never seen in the 56-year history of the EPA, and that includes Republican administrations and Democratic administrations, an EPA that is as sort of openly siding with polluters as this one. Lee Zeldin is not going to come out and say, he doesn't come out and say, oh, yeah, we've decided, you know, to side with polluters here.

11:46He will say, you know, we can protect the environment and grow our economy at the same time, And we're going to prove that. Now, usually that means rolling back restrictions that were put in place for public health reasons. It's very difficult for people to judge what he's saying because many of these things, they're invisible and their effects are very hard to directly measure, you know, whether you breathed in these particulates. So I'll use an example of this, what's called PM 2.5, which is this very fine soot emitted in all sorts of ways, power plants, cars, etc. And the Biden administration had tightened regulations on that.

12:34And that causes lung disease. It's been proved over and over again to be a serious public health hazard. Now, do you know you're breathing into PM 2.5? No, it's invisible, right? So it's not like you see a cloud of it. But over time, we will see the effects of what they're doing show up in deaths, really. That's how it will show up in premature deaths. But, you know, will you as an individual know that you were affected? That's very difficult for an individual to trace. People will die. People will die prematurely. And I think it's pretty clear, obviously, when you're trying to prevent deaths from lung disease, you're trying to prevent deaths from cancer, and you're rolling back those protections, then you will be producing deaths from those causes.

13:23There's kind of a one follows the other.

13:31You can read more about Lee Zeldin and what he's doing over at the EPA at NewYorker.com. The Democrats don't have power, but they might soon, gerrymandering notwithstanding. When we're back on Today Explained, an environmentalist has some advice for them. Do not talk about climate change. Thank you.

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17:27Today, today it rained. I'm Matt Huber. I'm a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. Matt's also the author of a pair of books on the environment, most recently Climate Change is Class War. And even more recently still, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times telling Democrats to say less about climate change. We asked him to say more. Well, you know, I've been very invested in the piece I try to argue. It's sort of the end of what I'd call like a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where actually I think a lot of Democrats were thinking that climate would be kind of this urgent crisis issue that could kind of galvanize this kind of mass majoritarian coalition around sort of green jobs.

18:15But what I've sort of come to in the last few years is that I'm just not sure that really rhetorically centering the climate crisis as the impetus of this kind of politics is actually going to be effective in building that power, building that majority. Most Americans don't really prioritize this as an urgent issue, and they prioritize other cost of living issues much more. When did fighting climate change become such a core issue for the Democratic Party? Did Al Gore invent that too? Yeah, in addition to the internet. You know, I do, I think 2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was released.

19:03Our ability to live is what is at stake. And that did coalesce with a massive, you know, a couple of years later, a massive financial crisis. And I think in the zeitgeist, there was a lot of feeling that like, just like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this kind of mass jobs program, public investment program. And that climate change actually provided the kind of, again, the urgency and impetus to kind of center around that kind of large scale investment program. And it could create jobs and appeal to sort of these more economic concerns. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.

19:51And I think 10, 12 years later, when the Green New Deal became a big deal spread by like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, I think they too were also thinking it would actually be a more effective politics in the context of a kind of large scale economic crisis like the original New Deal was. And historically speaking, we have mobilized our entire economy around war. But I thought to myself, it doesn't have to be that way, especially when our greatest existential threat is climate change. We must implement a program consistent with the goals of the Green New Deal. By the way, the Green New Deal is not just a resolution.

20:33It's a revolution that we're talking about. It's a revolution. Unfortunately for them, I think we never really entered that kind of crisis since the Green New Deal politics took off because we did have a recession, but it was this COVID recession that was a strange kind of economic shutdown and not the kind of crisis that called for this kind of big jobs program.

21:02but that that label green new deal became so polarizing and you know exactly it was a strategy to make it so obviously do you think anything like that kind of messaging is is just bunk now yeah i'm really sad because i was a big green new deal stan if i can use that word uh i i really loved the kind of this broad vision and a positive vision, because I think a lot of climate politics can be pretty doomerous, right? It did go wrong, though. I think when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on a Green New Deal in 2019, she did this media blitz around it, and she released this FAQ document, or her office released this very bizarre FAQ document with the sort of media blitz about the Green New Deal.

21:54And in the document, it has some sort of very kind of stream of consciousness language about how we're not quite ready to ban farting cows and airplanes. And of course, as you would expect, that language got taken up by the Fox News culture war machine. And almost immediately, the Green New Deal became, We're going to ban hamburgers. We're going to ban air travel. Let's keep it real. Maybe we shouldn't be eating hamburgers. I mean, that's wild. Or driving cars or using appliances or having a middle class, which will destroy the lifeblood of our economy and take away air travel and cow meat and the automobile as we know it.

22:37What started as was supposed to be this kind of broad based majoritarian politics that could appeal to working class people became yet another kind of polarized culture war issue, unfortunately. Biden clearly realizes he can't use this Green New Deal marketing to get this kind of legislation through Congress. But he does get this kind of legislation through Congress, weirdly called the Inflation Reduction Act. Yeah. But here we are in 2026, and no one ever talks about anything that he did, Even though when they were doing it, they said it was the most consequential environmental legislation in American history.

23:18How did that happen? Oh, boy. Come on, man. I think there are a lot of things going on. I mean, in many ways, the Inflation Reduction Act was based on this Green New Deal idea that, you know, jobs and investments in the green economy will lead to material benefits and help win back some of these working class voters who have been shifting to Trumpism. But, of course, a lot of these investments were very long term. And also the style of policymaking that has been in vogue for a while in the Democratic Party is to incentivize these investments through tax credits, which means you're incentivizing the private sector to do a lot of the building of these projects.

23:59And I cite a study in the piece that found basically when you survey communities where these investments are going, they actually didn't identify it with a kind of political project coming from Biden, coming from the Democratic Party. They just sort of associated it with the private firm that is investing. And again, meanwhile, inflation is really hammering the working class and the cost of living is skyrocketing as the core issue that over and over again polls are showing are the number one issue that voters care about. The Biden administration actually was saying that the economy was actually really good.

24:34If you look at unemployment, if you look at GDP numbers, everything's going great. And so you really had no answer for the core material cost of living concerns that that really shaped the 2024 election. And of course, now with Trump in office, they've repealed a good portion of that legislation. Emissions in 2025 in the United States went up, which is very depressing. And so, yeah, it was a real disaster on a number of fronts, I would say. People are already thinking about 2028, probably because they can't wait to have some fresh blood in our politics. But there's an election this year and you write in your opinion piece in The Times about how we're already seeing Democrats shift away from climate change.

25:21Where do you see it specifically? I tried to argue that you can see a lot of working class candidates that are union members that are fighting this, again, this kind of standard, kind of progressive, call it a Bernie Sanders type agenda of taxing the rich and public investment, Medicare for all. But they are steering clear from the climate issue. And if they are talking about climate change, they are linking it directly to cost of living issues like energy affordability. affordability to win and to campaign, I think they're sort of realizing that, you know, talking about the apocalyptic existential nature of the climate crisis is not gonna really inspire and motivate people to support them.