Suffolk County’s Lee Zeldin is the key figure in decimating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump.
The New York Times headlined a front-page lead story last month: “Trump, in Pivotal Move, Thwarts Federal Power to Curb Climate Change.” The subhead: “Rejects a Finding that Stood for Decades.”
The article reported that “Trump announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.”
“It is a knockout punch in the yearslong fight by a small group of conservative activists as well as oil, gas and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy,” said the Times.
With Trump at the White House announcement, said its piece, was “a smiling Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
“This is about as big as it gets,” Zeldin was quoted as declaring. “We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding.’”
The “endangerment finding [is] a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare” based on extensive “research and evidence,” explained the Times.
Zeldin at the White House called its end “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and Zeldin in running the EPA is towing his line—and going further.
A month earlier, Newsday ran a full-page editorial with a large photograph of Zeldin and the headline: “An EPA that doesn’t protect us.”
Source: RiverheadLOCAL
