Suffolk Closeup: Knockout punch to environmental protection

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.”

It started: “The federal government agency in charge of protecting our environment and the peoples’ health has warped into an entity adrift of that purpose. In the first year of this Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin, failed in its core mission of safeguarding and improving the quality of our air, water and food.”

Newsday noted: “The EPA was founded in December 1970 in response to thousands of communities across the country suffering from polluted streams and air. It has done much good over the decades.” 

Now, under Zeldin, “Regulatory rollbacks, terminating grants for clean energy projects, and slashing the department’s budget by 59% do not engender confidence.”

This is not minor stuff. 

“An Associated Press analysis found that the rules Zeldin seeks to change could prevent 30,000 deaths and save society $275 billion annually,” said Newsday.

Zeldin, of Shirley, represented eastern Suffolk County — including Shelter Island — and much of central Suffolk in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2023. He was an early and has continued to be a fierce Trump advocate.  

A leading Suffolk GOP activist told me he was surprised that Zeldin was chosen by Trump to run the EPA, thinking it would have been more likely for him to be appointed to a Pentagon position considering his years as an Army captain and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve.

In elected office, Zeldin was no big friend of the environment. When he was nominated by Trump to be EPA administrator, the League of Conservation

Voters in a letter to members of the Senate signed by the Washington-based organization’s president, Gene Karpinski, called on them to reject the nomination.

The letter said Zeldin’s “abysmal 14% lifetime score on LCV’s National Environmental Scorecard, long history in Congress and the NY state legislature opposing environmental and public health safeguards for our communities, and little environmental experience render him unqualified for the role. Mr. Zeldin has a lengthy voting record and many public statements that raise troubling questions about what he will prioritize, and no experience that prepares him to lead the nation’s foremost agency tasked with protecting public health and the environment.”

“Trump Picks New EPA Head Guaranteed to Destroy the Environment,” was the headline in The New Republic magazine. The subhead on its article: “This will be a disaster.”

Comments on the latest Zeldin move, on the “endangerment finding,” included Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington, saying: “It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding: it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing.”

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said: “This action will only lead to more of this pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harms for American families.”

From this area, Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Farmingdale-based Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said: “It takes a wrecking ball to all the progress we’ve made over the last two decades.”

Esposito continued: “We’re already feeling the devastating impacts of sea-level rise, we’re threatened by the greater intensification of storms, people can’t pay their homeowners insurance, and we’re seeing the degrading of the water quality in our estuaries, all because of climate change. This is an action that helps polluters and hurts every single American, but especially Long Islanders…we live on an island…we stick out in the middle of the ocean, these sea-level rises and storms are of intense concern to us.”

A coalition of health and environmental groups has challenged the move with a lawsuit against the EPA which names Zeldin as a defendant.

An Associated Press article on the lawsuit, brought in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, describes it charging that the EPA repeal of the “endangerment finding” eliminates the “central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.” 

 It “eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as plants and oil and gas facilities.”

The lawsuit was brought by health organizations including the American Public Health Association, American Lung Association, Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment and Physicians for Social Responsibility, and environmental groups, among them the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.