BRIEF: Make America smoggy again
Big thought, small step, deep breath — for March 14, 2025
BIG THOUGHT
The day of deregulation
Well, it wasn’t enough to upend the economy that was the envy of the world. Sure, Project 2025 spelled it out, but if you’re old enough to remember breathing during the late 1960s and early 1970s, or if you’ve ever just wondered why everything looks so dingy and brown in photos of that era, it is a real shock to hear Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, say yesterday that the agency would be giving up on the “environmental protection” part of its mission. Hey, that still leaves “agency”!
Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.
There are, of course, other agencies that handle that sort of thing. But redundancies aside, turning the E.P.A. against the environment is more than just a kind of Newspeak. Though it is that — and he got into a lot more black-is-white, up-is-down in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
By reconsidering rules that throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants, we are ensuring that American energy remains clean, affordable, and reliable. This isn’t about abandoning environmental protection—it’s about achieving it through innovation and not strangulation.
Of course, energy isn’t expensive because Obama and Biden quashed coal — in fact, a big part of the reason is that energy grids are challenged by the realities of handling climate change. That thing Zeldin doesn’t want to deal with anymore. Like Zeldin’s rejection of the acceptance of the reality of climate change as a “religion,” the dismantling of the E.P.A. is a signal of how the Trump administration is dead set against what people actually want. Because — as the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has been tracking since 2008 — they want some action to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Not only is climate change real (unequivocal, as the IPCC put it in 2013), but on average, the American people are pretty worried about it — and want somebody to do something about it.
At the heart of Zeldin’s attack on the approach to climate that Americans want and expect is his promise to “reconsider” the 2009 endangerment finding that extended the E.P.A.’s obligations to the regulation of greenhouse gases — basically acknowledging climate change’s public health impacts and updating the Clean Air Act of 1970 to deal with the modern understanding of climate change. Straightforward enough. Not a nefarious power grab.
Upending it throws all of that away — which gets into some weird territory. As law professor Jonathan H. Adler puts it at The Volokh Conspiracy:
A further obstacle to reconsidering the endangerment finding is that it would effectively require the EPA to repudiate virtually everything it has said about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change for the past several decades—and then convince federal courts that these disavowals represent the sort of reasoned decision-making that courts should uphold.
And indeed, the endangerment finding represents exactly that sort of reasoned decision making, which is why it’s at the heart of most of the progress made on climate under the Biden administration, including the clean energy measures in the Inflation Reduction Act. And those, it turns out, were pretty successful at addressing climate change and bolstering U.S. manufacturing — just the sort of balance Zeldin purportedly wants.
But the revamped E.P.A. is throwing all of that progress away — to make it easy for coal plants to emit mercury into the air and flush industrial waste into waterways, roll back emissions standards for vehicles, abandoning the effort to clean up the poor and Black communities disproportionately affected by polluting industries…you get the picture. It’s a picture that looks like the one at the top of this post.
Revenge? Given what’s happening behind the scenes, it sure looks that way. It turns out that the E.P.A. isn’t just trying to overturn science and progress. There are also efforts, along with the F.B.I. and the Treasury Department, to take back climate-related grant money, and, worse yet, to prepare criminal cases against the organizations that applied for the grants — organizations like Habitat for Humanity. They’re talking about criminalizing Habitat for Humanity. Retroactively, for something above board, nothing illegal about it, not then, and not even now. A real “we have always been at war with Eastasia” approach.
But it won’t be possible for Zeldin — or Pete Hegseth or state Republican attorneys general — to memory hole climate change. Creative Republican solutions might slow progress against dealing with it and damage global efforts against it. But Americans don’t like a government that not only won’t help when they’re flooded out of their homes, or burned out of them, but won’t even do what we all know it will take to avoid that in the first place.
Because that’s what “deregulation” is all about: government deciding not to do its job on behalf of the people. The people can demand better.
SMALL STEP(S)
Keep on calling
First off, the news that Chuck Schumer has announced he’s willing to back the Republican budget has unleashed anger across the Democratic Party, revealing surprising unity on the necessity of fighting back. House Democrats feel like they’ve sacrificed for nothing; establishment fixtures and progressives alike are hopping mad. It’s a great time — as always — to call your senators and tell them what you think.
Bloc party
Back in December, we ran political strategist Waleed Shahid’s “Populist Manifesto,” a diagnosis of the problems of Democratic politics and a call to arms for Democrats to come to terms with the realities of todays’s media landscape, to embrace fighting for progressive positions instead of retreating to an imaginary center, and to repair relations with movements. Today, he’s published a follow-up piece that refines his earlier observations on how the Democrats could begin to articulate a populist economic vision, and also announced the establishment of an organization, The Bloc, built to assist progressive groups with the strategic, communications, training, and media assistance to help them build power that can make a difference. Check out what they’re up to.
DEEP BREATH
Get rid of someone else for a change
Hearing from Rebecca Solnit yesterday — and in particular the discussion of her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency — got us thinking about the Frank O’Hara poem from which her new endeavor takes its name. A reflection on emergencies more personal than political, but a great sharp, short statement of defiance, it’s a good one to reflect on in these times — as you’d expect.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
A programming note: More Lives next week!
Join us next week for more great Live conversations. Monday, March 17 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have our weekly conversation with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. And Thursday, March 20, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (a half-hour later than usual) we’ll be joined again by messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope to see you at both!
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We must stop the CR as it gives the President new powers to steal legally and to tax citizens in a way that puts the funds under Executive branch unilateral control. Give the purse to a felon? We must stop the CR. It gives the President new powers. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/fraud?r=3m1bs
The Trusk clown show will take the planet down. As you say, “it won’t be possible for Zeldin — or Pete Hegseth or state Republican attorneys general — to memory hole climate change.” That’s right, because it doesn’t matter what we think about it—the physical forces of human emissions will continue to act on those of climate. Storms will storm and ice will melt and fires will burn and coastlines will disappear. Just as America under Biden was beginning to lay a rational path out of this mess, these lunatics come along to take charge of the asylum.