'How much damage do you really want to do?'
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has turned an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment 'into one that openly sides with polluters.'
LEE ZELDIN SPENT THE WEEK acting as though he wished he’d been on The Apprentice.
President Trump’s “secret weapon” got combative on Capitol Hill as he defended drastic proposed cuts to the agency’s budget, picked fights with members of Congress and logged on social media later to take a few more cheap shots. All along, he bragged that his agency is showing how it’s done, protecting the environment and growing the economy. “It is not a binary choice,” he insisted.
No, it’s not. But the agency under his lead hasn’t really chosen either.
Zeldin’s EPA has weakened pollution standard after pollution standard that could have prevented thousands of premature deaths and created hundreds of billions of dollars every year in health benefits. While throwing taxpayer money at unreliable, broken coal-burning power plants, the Trump administration has taken away funding, tied up in red tape and tried to block the construction of hundreds of new energy projects that could be growing local economies and saving millions of people millions of dollars on bills.
And it’s all been done in such a hurry, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote this week for The New Yorker:
“In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the EPA’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to. The EPA has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action.”
What Administrator Zeldin appeared unwilling to say aloud at any of his committee hearings over the course of the week is that someone always ends up paying when there’s more pollution. When Hurricane Sandy swamped Long Island, where he grew up, he said at the time that he was concerned about rising sea levels. Now, he’s trying to give away the government’s authority to do much of anything about the reason sea levels are rising and repeal the Endangerment Finding — which is just what it sounds like, the science-based determination that the pollution altering the climate endangers us, too.
Getting rid of this one protection will impose up to $1.4 trillion in extra fuel costs on working families and lead to 58,000 more early deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks, my colleagues at Environmental Defense Fund found in a recent analysis. And it certainly won’t keep the Atlantic Ocean from encroaching on Administrator Zeldin’s hometown.
The American people are getting less and less environmental protection and an economy dragged down more and more by preventable pollution. That means more diseases. More destructive disasters. More loss. “This is one of those things where you shake your head and say, ‘How low can you go?’,” Christine Todd Whitman, who ran the EPA under President George W. Bush, told The New Yorker. “I mean, how much damage do you really want to do?”
Going to waste
The Trump administration’s approach to methane, which is the primary component in natural gas, is a whole other lose-lose situation.
The U.S. wastes a lot of energy. For years, enough methane to power millions and millions of homes leaked and otherwise escaped from pipelines and oil and gas equipment into the atmosphere, where it doubles as potent climate pollution. Methane is so potent that it’s responsible for more than a quarter of the warming we’re experiencing now. Not only are we throwing power away, it’s coming back around to haunt us, making extreme weather worse, driving up insurance premiums and threatening our health and safety.
Cutting methane is the fastest way to slow warming, experts agree, and more than a few of the largest oil and gas companies supported a nationwide methane standard. (Generally, it doesn’t make a lot of business sense to let one of the things you sell vanish before anyone can buy it.) That standard was on track to recoup $1.4 billion every year, but the Trump administration threw a wrench in it last March. Since then, even though demand for electricity has never been higher, the U.S. has gone back to its bad old habit and wasted another $5 billion worth of methane, according to a new tracker that went live this week. Jon Goldstein, an associate vice president at EDF, isn’t having it:
“It is unconscionable that sky-high energy prices are forcing everyday Americans to choose between gas and groceries while the worst polluters have been given a free pass to waste more energy we could be using. Sensible methane standards protect our energy supply and contribute to climate security. Instead, the Trump administration is giving Americans $5 billion reasons — and counting — why we need those standards back now.”
‘The bigger the savings’
Those sky-high prices — and demand that’s expected to spike by 30% — have spurred the formation of new markets where western states can more easily buy, sell and trade clean electricity when and where it’s needed most. If you’re a utility operator, you can stop reading here, and we thank you for your service. If you’re not, this is what’s in it for you.
Let’s say climate change has contributed to another record-breaking, face-melting heat wave pushing temperatures in Arizona past 100 for days and days on end. Ugh, right? Your A/Cs and swamp coolers are running around the clock, the grid is straining under the surge of demand, prices are climbing.
The market that went live today connects California with parts of Oregon and Washington. The ultimate aim is to link 11 western states so that your utility in Arizona can plan ahead and stock up on all the electricity it’ll need from, say, hydropower plants in Washington, wind turbines in Colorado and solar panels in New Mexico. There’ll be less risk of blackouts, then, and electricity prices will be more stable, more affordable.
Right now, western utility operators have to wait until the last minute to hack through 38 separate agreements just to move energy around from grid to grid. The formation of the new market is like the addition of a Costco down the street. Instead of having to shop at a corner store and settle for whatever, operators will have loads of options. “The bigger the market, the bigger the savings — that’s why this market decision matters enormously,” EDF’s Alex DeGolia said. How big? It could add up to $1.2 billion every year.
Add to Your Tabs
It’s the age of electricity and America isn’t ready | The New York Times
In Houston’s Fifth Ward, residents fight for the right to breathe | Word in Black
NOAA defends cuts to research and climate monitoring at budget hearing | Inside Climate News
Stories from the States
Arizona
Let’s stay in Arizona for a moment, where the Trump administration gave one of its no-questions-asked passes to pollute to one of the largest sources of the neurotoxin lead in the entire country. There’s no safe level of exposure to lead. But the company that owns a more-than-a-century-old copper smelter in a small desert community where one resident said “the air is bad enough as it is” asked EPA for a pass so it could avoid upgrading its equipment and installing widely available pollution-control technology. (The only other copper smelter in the U.S., in Utah, uses it.) Still, the pass was granted, The New York Times reported, without any “economic analysis or engineering study” or even “an exhaustive argument.” In fact, public records EDF obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show “not a single instance where the Trump EPA officials asked about the impacts of these poisons on the people” who live in the community, EDF’s Vickie Patton said. This week, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona wanted an explanation. “How is that legal?” he asked Administrator Zeldin. Their exchange is worth watching:
California
The Trump administration went 0 for 5 in court trying to keep offshore wind projects that were under construction from being completed. This year, even though wind is one of the cheapest sources of energy we have, the administration started to pay other developers to abandon their own projects instead. In January, the Department of Interior moved some money around to give nearly $1 billion to one company to cancel projects off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. (North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein wasn’t thrilled, slamming it as “a terrible deal for the American people.”) This week, though, the administration did it again, spending another $765 million to stop a project off the coast of New York and New Jersey and $120 million more to stop another off the coast of California. “The administration is using taxpayer funds that they really aren’t authorized to use to achieve a result that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” EDF’s Michael Colvin told California public radio. He added, “Obstructing clean energy projects is not energy dominance.”