TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency are being chased out and departments drastically reduced or eliminated. Efforts at the EPA to slow climate change and reduce pollution are constantly being decreased. The head of the EPA, who is behind this change of direction, is Lee Zeldin. President Trump has described him as our secret weapon. Zeldin isn't known for the kind of personal drama and big personality that some other members of the Trump administration are. But he's been very successful in carrying out the dramatic changes in Trump's agenda to undo restrictions on companies that are polluters and on the chemicals in the air and water that harm our health and the environment.
My guest, Elizabeth Kolbert, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article in the current issue is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" She's also the author of the bestseller "The Sixth Extinction." Our interview was recorded yesterday.
Elizabeth Kolbert, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You start your piece in The New Yorker about Zeldin by saying that last summer, more than 150 staff members of the EPA sent a letter to Zeldin about their concerns about his leadership. What were their concerns?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, they listed five areas of concerns, and the first one was that he was terribly partisan, that he would use his public appearances and public communications to attack the other party, sometimes by name. He kept referring to these funds that had been appropriated, really, under the previous administration as a scam. So they were very disturbed by that level of partisanship, the notion that the EPA is supposed to be basically calling the shots, you know, objectively and that this seemed to be undermining that. It was clear that they were going to dismantle what was called the Office of Research and Development - which was the EPA's scientific arm - which is, you know, 1,500 people who spent their lives trying to figure out what environmental threats we are facing and also sort of scanning the horizon, what environmental threats are we going to face?
They were dismayed about his tendency to side with industry on a lot of key issues. They were very upset about his treatment of the workforce. I mean, if you go back to Russ Vought and Project 2025 and these tapes that came out of Russ Vought saying, we're going to put employees of the federal government in trauma. We want to put them in trauma. He explicitly mentions the EPA, and I think many employees felt that they had successfully been put in trauma - that that was not an appropriate way to run an agency.
GROSS: So the response that they got to that letter was most of them were terminated or put on leave.
KOLBERT: Yeah. They were put on administrative leave, which is, you know, sort of pending this investigation. And at the end of the day - so months later - many of them were suspended without pay for a few weeks, so they lost a few weeks' pay, and several of them were fired.
GROSS: Zeldin's response to this letter was to say, we have a zero tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the agenda of this administration. The will of the American public will not be ignored. Is it the job of the EPA to carry out the Trump administration's agenda?
KOLBERT: Well, quite simply, the job of the EPA - and this is their stated mission, and remains their stated mission, even now - is to protect public health and the environment. The EPA is really a public health organization. Certainly, many of the actions that they take have the effect of, you know, protecting our waterways, protecting our air and have implications for, you know, all species that share those waterways and share the air. But really, regulations are designed to be protective of human health. And that is its job.
And that has meant there's always a tug of war between what industry wants, what public health and environmental groups want and - you could argue - what the public wants. And the EPA has had to balance that, and certainly in different administrations, the balance has moved. You know, that needle has moved somewhat. But I think, in general, administrators have seen their role as protecting public health. And that is not clear that that's what's going on right now.
GROSS: There's a move you describe as a breathtaking assault on the Office of Research and Development - also known as the ORD. So explain what this office does and why it's very important.
KOLBERT: So the Office of Research and Development was - is often, or was often, described as EPA's scientific research arm. And it was distinctive in a few ways from other departments at - the EPA was not in Washington. It was not really centrally located. It was dispersed in labs around the country. One of the biggest centers was in Research Triangle in North Carolina. And that was very purposeful. And the idea was the ORD was supposed to be independent from central command, independent from the politics of the latest administration.
And it had many roles. It employed 1,500 people, and it did everything from helping states and tribes that were confronting issues that lack the resources to do a lot of their own science. It did things like set the cleanup targets for Superfund sites. It did a lot of research into the dangers of, you know, gazillions of chemicals that are out there. And it was also supposed to be doing this sort of horizon scanning of what are the environmental problems that we haven't sort of taken cognizance of yet but that are coming our way.
So it was an essential part of the EPA, and a subset of that is that their analysis often showed that chemicals, for example, were dangerous in very, very low levels, and that had big implications for industry that many industries didn't like and fought back against. And they had a - something called the Integrated Risk Information System, which was particularly despised by industry. And now all of that is gone. And so that's - you could argue - a very clear win for the affected industries.
GROSS: So the Office of Research and Development employed about 1,500 people. What were they told about their future? And what happened to that department? Does it exist anymore?
KOLBERT: Well, the short answer is no, it does not exist anymore. And what happened was, you know, rumors began to circulate that they were going to get rid of it, and there were all sorts of conversations in the agency, people, for example, thinking that if the people who are eligible for retirement retired, maybe they could sort of try to protect the younger people in the agency. All of this happening sort of while these rumors were circulated. And then, eventually, they just eliminated it, over the objections of Congress.
GROSS: So is there an office that replaced the Office of Research and Development when that was basically eliminated by EPA head Lee Zeldin?
KOLBERT: Theoretically, yes, there is a new office - a much smaller office - that is located within headquarters. So there's a lot of concern over what's happening to the independence of the science. And that's true. You know, the EPA is under this Trump administration gold standard science executive order, and gold standard science in the Trump administration seems to mean, you know, science that backs up what we want to do. So that's certainly a big concern among those scientists who are left at the EPA.
GROSS: Well, we need to take a short break here, so I'm going to reintroduce you. My guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" Zeldin is the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
You write that the most significant climate change rollback at the EPA under Zeldin has been the rollback of the Endangerment Finding. What is that?
KOLBERT: So the Endangerment Finding goes back to a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. the EPA, which Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor, has called the most important environmental decision the court has ever issued. And in that decision, the EPA was sort of dragging its feet on doing anything about climate change, and Massachusetts decided to sue. And it revolves around this section of the Clean Air Act that basically compels the EPA to regulate dangerous air pollutants - specifically, dangerous air pollutants coming out of the tailpipes of cars. And the EPA had just basically been trying to sidestep this. And the court said, you've got to decide - either the CO2, the greenhouse gases coming out of cars are dangerous or not. And if they are dangerous, you've got to regulate them.
So that case basically set in motion this process of quote-unquote deciding whether CO2 is dangerous, which was really not much of a decision. Eventually, in the first year of the Obama administration, we got this finding - yes, carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, is a threat to public health, is a danger. And then there was sort of a separate Endangerment Finding regarding emissions from power plants - CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
And those findings form the basis of everything the EPA has done since to try to rein in carbon emissions. And it's been, you know, an almost-20-year battle now as we've gone through different administrations. But even under Trump 1, even under Trump's first sort of scandal-scarred EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, the Endangerment Finding has always been accepted as settled. But what distinguishes Zeldin's EPA is the willingness or eagerness to take on the Endangerment Finding. Let's try to take this through the courts and see what happens again because now we have a new Supreme Court. Maybe this time we can get a different decision.
GROSS: He went against the previous EPA heads and decided to try to, you know, wipe out this Endangerment Finding.
KOLBERT: Right. Right now the Endangerment Finding - they have published the, you know, sort of official revocation or rescission of that finding. So, you know, therefore, we do not find that CO2 is a danger under the Clean Air Act. We don't have to regulate it. And this is already in litigation. But I think what's so crucial about this is that not only is it eliminating the regulations that Biden had put into place. But if it gets to the Supreme Court, if they get a decision that reverses Massachusetts v. EPA, then it will be basically impossible for any future administration to use the Clean Air Act to try to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. So they're really trying to handicap the agency going into the future. And that is a theme that keeps coming up.
GROSS: And this was a big subject of a debate - an argument, I should say - that ran, like, around 10 minutes about what the Clean Air Act actually says. And it was an argument between Zeldin, who was testifying before the House Appropriations Committee, and Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, a member of Congress who is the ranking member of the committee. I'm not going to play that. That just, like, went on and on and on and wasn't terribly clarifying. But I will play a clip from a podcast that you mention in your article in The New Yorker. The podcast is called Ruthless. You describe it basically as a conservative bro kind of podcast. So this is from last July, and they're talking about the Endangerment Finding. And so here's Lee Zeldin explaining why it's so important to cancel the Endangerment Finding.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "RUTHLESS")
LEE ZELDIN: So this has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion. Like, there are people who - I mean, most Americans - we care about the environment. We want clean air, land and water. Conservatives love the environment. We want to be good stewards of the environment. There are people who then, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yep.
ZELDIN: In the name of environmental justice, they will get tens of billions of dollars appropriated to their friends rather than actually remediating environmental issues. So they created this Endangerment Finding, and then they were able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of forms of - segments of our economy. And it costs Americans a lot of money. What's the significance? How big is the Endangerment Finding? Well, repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Laughter).
ZELDIN: Huge.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes. Yes (ph).
ZELDIN: So it's kind of a big deal.
GROSS: So that was Lee Zeldin speaking last July on the podcast "Ruthless." I found it interesting that he said, this has been referred to as a dagger in the heart of the climate change religion. So the first thing I want to ask you about is referring to climate change activism as a religion as opposed to actions to protect the health of people, animals and the Earth itself.
KOLBERT: Well, one of the interesting things about Lee Zeldin is he - you know, he represented this district in eastern Long Island that's very vulnerable to climate change. Sea level rise and flooding are big problems. And when he was a member of Congress, he actually joined in 2016 the Climate Solutions Caucus, which is this bipartisan group, you know, ostensibly working to further climate change solutions. So he was not a climate change, you know, denier in a sort of, you know, full blown Trumpian sense. And now he has come to the EPA and speaks of driving a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion.
Now, what does he mean by that? Well, it's never actually spelled out what the climate change religion is as opposed to climate change science. But I think that one of the big issues of our time, I have to say, is that we now have a government - you know, we turn to our government to protect us against big threats. Well, I can assure you that climate change is a big threat. And now we have a government that is denying, actually, its existence, even, at the upper levels of the government.
And, you know, when you talk about the sort of counter-reality of the Trump administration, this seems to me to be Exhibit A. We are hurtling into a future - a very, very hot and dangerous future - some of the impacts of which we are, you know, already seeing. You know, we're seeing, for example - I'll just used one example - tremendous drought in the West this year. That is partly certainly due to climate change. And we are looking at what scientists are calling a sort of super El Niño, which is this weather pattern that can cause all sorts of extreme weather around the world. So we are looking at, a you know, pretty dangerous summer even. We don't have to go very far into the future. And we're certainly looking at a very dangerous future. And we're just sticking our heads in the sand. And if that doesn't concern Americans, it should.
GROSS: So another thing that he's saying in the answer that we just heard from the podcast is that basically, people who are activists for climate change, they're willing to bankrupt the country and choose, instead, like, the most pessimistic worst-case scenario. I've heard him talk about, you know, that this is, like, the most pessimistic worst-case scenario. He chooses to be more optimistic. But he refuses also to bankrupt the country. If we acted more vigorously to protect the Earth from climate change, would that bankrupt the country? And is what he is doing saving the amount of money that he says it will save?
KOLBERT: Well, if you just take just on a very simple, you know, monetary level, if you look at the analysis for repealing the endangerment finding, they say it's going to save $1.3 trillion, and that's mainly, they claim, through lower car prices. And you look at their own analysis, there are scenarios in which it will cost us $1.4 billion. And that's just through buying more gasoline. And as gas prices, you know, go up, that scenario becomes increasingly plausible. So by their own analysis, you know, you could save $1.3 trillion, and you could lose $1.4 trillion. So that's not much of a gain there. But what these analysis do not even take into account are the economic losses from climate change, which are, you know, high and going higher every day, nor do they take into account the health risks. So this is another pollution - of fossil fuel pollution.
So this is another trend that we're seeing in this administration of calculating the cost - the cost to industry, the cost to consumers - and not calculating the benefits. If you don't calculate in the health benefits, if you don't calculate in the benefits of avoided climate change, then, of course, you get a very skewed figure. And we have now seen this in a couple of instances, where they have actually literally eliminated the calculation of lives saved on a monetary basis, saying that it's too uncertain to do that. It's too uncertain to, you know, factor in the benefits of lives saved. Well, once you do that, you know, obviously, you're going to get some pretty skewed figures.
GROSS: Well, even just as a consumer, if the price of cars goes down, the price of insurance for your home in so many places in the country now is going up between wildfires and floods. In places in Florida, insurance is really high, if you can get it at all. And certainly, like, after the West Coast fires, insurance is really unaffordable for so many people.
KOLBERT: Yes, exactly. I mean, the financial implications of climate change are enormous. And we're just talking about, you know, the financial implications. We're not talking about people who will, you know, literally not have homes, not have crops, potentially, as a result. So we are already - you know, there's no doubt about it - in the U.S., you know, a very affluent society, we are already feeling very significant effects from climate change, as you say, from flood insurance and fire insurance. Those are, you know, definitely climate-change-related. And we're also seeing it in many other ways, you know, just simply homes falling into the ocean, for example.
GROSS: It's time for another break. So let me reintroduce you. My guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article 0N the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" Zeldin is the head of the EPA and has been very successful in carrying out President Trump's agenda of eliminating many regulations on companies that release pollutants and on chemicals that harm our health and the environment. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. And also, she's the author of the best-selling book "The Sixth Extinction."
So getting back to the Endangerment Finding, so right now that has been rescinded by the head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin. There are many lawsuits - right? - about that rescission.
KOLBERT: Well, they'll probably all be consolidated into, you know, one big lawsuit. And so...
GROSS: OK. OK. But - and that's working or will work its way through the courts and most likely end up in the Supreme Court, do you think?
KOLBERT: Well, I guess the question is whether the court will want to take it on, given, you know, that it has this precedent of Massachusetts v. EPA. But I think that the sort of betting would be that, yes, it will make its way all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a very important case.
GROSS: So in the meantime, the fact that it's been rescinded is how they're proceeding. They're not waiting to see what the courts have to say. Right now they're acting as if it's legally rescinded.
KOLBERT: Yes. And they have also, in sort of separate actions, rolled back or rescinded the latest sets of regulations that were designed under the Biden administration to reduce CO2 emissions from cars, which were, you know, very explicitly aimed at sort of speeding the transition to electric vehicles. And they have rescinded the Biden administration's power plant rules, which were also pretty clearly aimed at eliminating coal-fired power plants, which are, you know, a big source of CO2 per unit of energy. You get a lot of CO2 for less energy if you're burning coal. So the idea was - and most coal plants in the country have already closed. But the idea is we were going to close basically the rest of them.
And that is - you know, sort of an astonishing part of what's going on at the EPA now is to be a cheerleader for coal, which is not only the most greenhouse-gas-intensive fuel out there, but it's a very dirty fuel. It's putting, you know, mercury and arsenic into the air. And it's creating coal ash, which is a very dangerous, you know, substance, which is sitting around next to all these old coal-fired power plants, which has in recent years caused several very bad accidents.
GROSS: One of the things we've been seeing during this second Trump administration is that the courts are so much slower than the ability of people who are heading agencies and Cabinets - you know, Cabinet secretaries. The courts are slower than the leaders' abilities to dismantle whole agencies and departments, to terminate, like, thousands of people, experts. Like, tariffs is such a good example. Like, the Supreme Court says that, you know, Trump's tariffs are illegal long after he collected the money from the tariffs. And now he's supposed to give it back, that's going to be really difficult probably both financially and bureaucratically. Have you ever seen anything like this, where there's such a discrepancy between so many actions and the delay of the courts to actually give a definitive answer on those actions?
KOLBERT: Yeah, I think we have to conclude that's a very deliberate strategy. I was talking to William K. Reilly, who ran the EPA under George H. W. Bush, and he is, you know, no fan of current leadership. And he said to me, you know, they had a very shrewd strategy - you know, move fast and break things. And by the time the courts catch up, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You know, you can't reassemble all the people. He was talking specifically about the - all the people who have left the agency, the experts that have left the agency. You're not getting them back. And they realize that. That's not - you know, we're not telling them this - anything that they don't know.
It turns out, you know, what was keeping previous administrations from doing this was a sense of, well, that's just not how government should work. You know, and now we've thrown those protocols to the wind. And anything goes until the court catches up with you, at which point you may not be able to undo the damage.
GROSS: A subject of debate now has to do with the wording of the Clean Air Act. And this was a subject of debate Monday at the House Appropriations Committee meeting - hearing between the Democratic ranking member of the committee and EPA head Lee Zeldin. So Zeldin was saying the Clean Air Act doesn't mention climate change. Would you explain the significance of what he's saying and the validity of the argument he's making?
KOLBERT: Well, the Clean Air Act was written, or what we consider the Clean Air Act is written in 1970 at a time when climate change, you know, was known about in certain circles, but it wasn't a major issue. It wasn't really being widely discussed. And the science was still pretty new. You could make the argument that the Clean Air Act was extremely forward-thinking in that it left open these possibilities. Well, we are going to discover, you know, new pollutants, and that's one of the things we're arguing about. Does the Clean Air Act have room, as you discover new things that are dangers, to regulate those? And once again, according to the 2007 Supreme Court decision, yes, you do. But what they are arguing now in this, you know, sort of contrary-to-that-decision...
GROSS: They being...
KOLBERT: ...Way...
GROSS: ...The Trump administration.
KOLBERT: They being the Trump administration. And they're sort of a grab bag of legal arguments, but they all do revolve around the wording of the Clean Air Act. And one of their arguments is that something is only a pollutant if it affects you in a local or regional way. Now, greenhouse gases are global. They're well-mixed. And their effect is not direct, so it's not directly when you breathe in that CO2. It's the indirect effects of, you know, dumping it in the atmosphere and warming the Earth. And they are arguing that that is not what the Clean Air Act meant by pollutant.
So we have this, you know, very textual, exegesis argument. And only the court, I'm afraid, will solve this. But I think that people who worked on the Clean Air Act, who actually, you know, wrote the Clean Air Act, would say that it was designed to be very forward-looking. They knew that things were going to come up, and they tried to leave room in the Clean Air Act for future generations to use this act to do what needed to be done. But the court is going to settle this question. And as many people have pointed out, this current Supreme Court has, you know, three members who were appointed by Donald Trump.
GROSS: Well, we need to take a short break here, so I'm going to reintroduce you.
My guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current Issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" Zeldin is the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
So before we get back to Lee Zeldin, I want to ask you of something that's happening on a parallel track. The independent board that oversees the National Science Foundation was basically terminated. So what does the National Science Foundation do, and what was the board's role in doing it?
KOLBERT: Well, the National Science Foundation disperses, I'm sure, billions of dollars to do scientific research. You know, that's their job. And they have an advisory board that sort of guides them in a very high level, those decisions. And anyone will tell you, you know, who is in academic science that the National Science Foundation has been really hard hit during this administration. It's really hard to know whether you're going to get your grant or not, even if it's, you know, already been awarded. But by terminating that board, once again, we're getting another, you know, very clear signal that we don't value science. Now, to live in a highly technological world where, you know, basically everything, you know, that we do and everything that we're surrounded by is in some - all the technologies that we - that are an integral part of our lives are, you know, products of science and say that we are just not interested in science anymore, once again, it's something that you would think would be eliciting more opposition because clearly, we are putting ourselves, as many people would say, at a competitive disadvantage with other countries who are eager to grab, you know, our best scientists. But it gets at this fight with reality, honestly, that is at the heart of the Trump administration. If it's something that's inconvenient, if we don't like, you know, what the facts tell us, we're going to try to suppress them.
GROSS: I don't know if you can speak to this or not 'cause this isn't really, like, your beat, but is there something transactional going on here between the Trump administration and lobbyists for companies that are polluters?
KOLBERT: Well, I can't point to you, you know, direct ways in which Donald Trump is sort of, you know, lining his own pockets through this, although there was a very famous moment during the 2024 campaign where he said to fossil fuel industry executives, you know, raise $1 billion for me and it'll be worth it to you, basically. And they did raise, I believe the estimates were about half a billion for him. And the fossil fuel industry has, I think, you know, to use this sort of untechnical term, you know, made out like bandits under this administration there. the administration has moved to dismantle any competitors to the fossil fuel industry. We just the other day got news that two more offshore wind projects were being canceled and the government is going to pay back the companies that lease that land. So that's money going, you know, sort of out of the U.S. treasury, and they're supposed to use that to, you know, search for fossil fuels. So there is a very, very concerted effort to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's gotten a lot of tax breaks under this administration, new tax breaks, even more tax breaks, while we sort of dismantle the nascent clean energy industry that might be a competitor.
Now, why is this going on? Is this some ideological crusade? Is this some - certainly some people are getting very wealthy off of it. But I think that as a society, once again, you would think that there would be more pushback against this because clearly, fossil fuels are not the fuels of the future, and we are sort of letting a lot of clean energy technologies - basically, they were already being dominated by countries like China, and we're just basically letting that happen without putting up any fight. And I think that very soon - not in the distant future, but in the pretty near future - we're really going to regret that.
GROSS: I want to ask you about the MAHA Moms - the Make America Healthy Again Moms. And they were considered to be Trump allies in part because many of the MAHA Moms are anti-vax, and Trump and some members of his administration, most notably RFK Jr., have been or remain antivaxers. However, they have gotten pretty upset about some of Lee Zeldin's actions at the Environmental Protection Agency because he is not regulating some chemicals that are known to harm children. So tell us more about what's making the MAHA Moms upset.
KOLBERT: Yeah. So, you know, the MAHA Moms who are a somewhat heterogeneous group, and different people have different priorities, but many, many influential, you know, MAHA Moms, which is, itself, a sort of - not a very technical term, are worried about, you know, what their kids are eating, you know, what they're eating, what their kids are eating, what impact is that having? What's in our food supply? What's in our water supply? You know, and for some reason, which I have to confess, I'm not sure I ever fully understood, but I guess had to do with his association with Bobby Kennedy, who, at various points in his career, has been very vocal about these issues. They thought that, you know, the Trump administration was going to, you know, finally level with the American people about, you know, these dangerous chemicals in the food supply and do something about it. Instead, what happened at the EPA, one thing that happened pretty early on was that several chemical industry lobbyists took very high ranking positions at the Office of Chemical Safety at the EPA. So that was one thing that disturbed them - to see, you know, that the lobbyists who were lobbying to keep a lot of these chemicals around were actually taking these positions at the EPA. And we have seen their influence in various decisions that have come out of that office.
And another thing. What really ticked them off or what really seemed to precipitate this open sort of rupture was the EPA approved a bunch of pesticides that have chemicals that could be defined as PFASes - these forever chemicals. There's - they're - it gets very technical what molecule actually makes a PFAS compound, but there are sort of PFAS or PFAS-adjacent compounds that could be sprayed, you know, on crops.
And that prompted a MAHA Mom named Kelly Ryerson to draft a petition to say that Lee Zeldin should be fired - he really wasn't putting public health first. And that petition quickly garnered a lot of signatures, including, once again, of some prominent, you know, MAHA influencers. And that, in turn, prompted Lee Zeldin to invite a bunch of MAHA Moms to his office to talk to them, and also then prompted a series of announcements that supposedly - once again, supposedly - were MAHA Mom wins. You know, he kept portraying these decisions as MAHA wins, though, if you look beneath the surface, it's a lot more doubtful.
GROSS: What makes it doubtful?
KOLBERT: So one of the decisions they were touting as a MAHA win had to do with chemicals called phthalates, which are in a tremendous number of consumer products and are thought to be potential endocrine disruptors. And in that case, they were setting standards - new standards for phthalates, but they involved only workers' exposure, not consumers' exposure, so that was sort of a very restricted category. And another decision they touted as a MAHA win was a decision to reevaluate a pesticide called paraquat, which has been linked to Parkinson's disease. But it turned out, when you sort of looked into that, that that decision to reevaluate paraquat had actually been made by the Biden administration.
GROSS: So the war with Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has shown us some of the dangers of depending on fossil fuels because those fossil fuel - like, the ships that carry the fossil fuels aren't getting through the strait. And this is having a much larger effect on countries in Europe, in parts of Asia and Africa. And I think Trump might not be feeling terribly affected by this 'cause he thinks that, like, we're winning 'cause we have a sufficient amount of fossil fuel, although we're paying a fortune for it at gas stations now. But has Zeldin or other people in the EPA been speaking to that dependence on fossil fuels as opposed to independent clean energy?
KOLBERT: When Lee Zeldin took over the EPA, as we talked about before, it had a very simple mission. It still officially has the mission to protect public health and the environment, but he added these other pillars to that. He called them pillars. And one of those was restoring American energy dominance. And a lot of actions have been taken by this EPA in the name of restoring energy dominance that really, I think, many, many people would argue are directly counter to protecting public health and the environment. So the EPA has definitely been, you know, very much a part of this effort by the Trump administration to pump up fossil fuel production in this country and to do something really beyond that.
And this gets to this - you know, the far-reaching nature of what's going on right now, this phenomenon called lock-in - to lock in fossil fuel infrastructure. So if you put up that plant, if you put in that pipeline, that becomes something that's that much more difficult to - you know, you have to - before the lifetime of that facility, if you want to close it down early, you're obviously, you know, costing a lot of money and you've wasted a lot of money in that case. So if you sort of try to lock in as much infrastructure as possible, the odds that that infrastructure is then going to be used for its lifetime goes up.
So we're - they're trying to actually, you know, put as much fossil fuel infrastructure into the ground in the - on the theory that that will then be used for the next 30, 40, 50 years. And that is precisely - precisely - what we should not be doing. We should not be building any more fossil fuel infrastructure. We should be turning towards other forms of energy. So this has very - and this is across agencies, across the entire federal government right now, but it has very, very long-lasting and serious consequences.
GROSS: Let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Elizabeth Kolbert. She has a new article in The New Yorker, where she's a staff writer. The article is called "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article in the current issue of The New Yorker is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" Zeldin is the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and has been very successful in carrying out President Trump's agenda.
What did he do before he was appointed to the EPA that impressed Trump?
KOLBERT: So Lee Zeldin was a congressman from Long Island from 2014 to 2022. And in 2019, I think, is when he really attracted President Trump's attention. That was when we got, you know, what would later come to be known as Trump's first impeachment inquiry. That was the one that was launched over allegations that Trump had tried to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating Joe Biden.
And Lee Zeldin was a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and as such, he was part of the closed-door depositions. We eventually got the transcript from those depositions, but they were originally closed-door depositions. And he really threw himself into the fight to protect the president, both behind closed doors and publicly. He often denounced the proceedings regularly as, you know, illegitimate, a charade, a fairy tale. Those are just a few of the descriptions he offered. And Trump started really to notice that he was one of his fiercest protectors. He started to retweet what Zeldin was tweeting out there. In one particularly, you know, frenzied morning, he tweeted him out (ph) something like - retweeted him something like nine times in three minutes.
GROSS: And what did he do in support of Trump after Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election?
KOLBERT: Well, he was one of those Republicans out there very vigorously arguing that there had been irregularities in the voting, which, you know, were obviously never - have never been substantiated. There are still people out there, obviously, arguing that, but we've never gotten any proof of that.
And on the day of January 6, which will - you know, a day that will, I guess, live in infamy to many people, he was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News. He was interviewed with Darrell Issa, who is a very, you know, conservative pro-Trump congressman who called this a bad day for the president. Many Republicans did that day. It was a pretty bad day. But Lee Zeldin was out there saying, actually, it wasn't really a bad day for the president, so I assume the president noticed that, too. He then proceeded that evening to vote against certifying both the results from Pennsylvania and from Arizona. So he was one of about 120 House members that voted against both of those.
GROSS: Well, out of office during the Biden presidency, he founded a consulting firm whose clients included the America First Policy Institute, which hired people from the first Trump administration and became a source for people in Trump's second administration. It was sometimes even referred to as the White House in waiting. I guess that also won Trump's favor.
KOLBERT: Yes. I think in the process of working with a lot of these people, you know, sort of former - once and future Trump people, I think that he was popular among that group that was around Trump. And that sort of ensured him a place in the next administration.
GROSS: So you mentioned that there were rumors that Zeldin would be considered as a replacement for Attorney General Pam Bondi. Todd Blanche is filling in as acting attorney general, and he's certainly been loyal to President Trump. Do you think that Zeldin is actually being considered now for attorney general?
KOLBERT: I'm definitely not inside the Trump administration. I think that - you know, Blanche is the acting AG. He can serve - I think it's, like, 210 or 230 days in that position, and then either Trump has to nominate him or he has to nominate someone else. And I think we will have to wait and see what happens. It's very clear that Blanche wants the job, has sort of - has been said to be auditioning for the job. But whether he will ultimately get the job or not, I don't know. The first person whose name surfaced as soon as Trump fired Pam Bondi was Lee Zeldins, but the presence of Blanche now in that acting role obviously complicates things.
GROSS: Elizabeth Kolbert, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
KOLBERT: Thanks so much for having me.
GROSS: Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article in the current issue is titled "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?" Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be Richard Gadd, the creator and star of "Baby Reindeer." It was an unexpected hit on Netflix in 2024 and won six Emmys. The series drew on Gadd's experiences being sexually abused and then stalked. Now Gadd explores toxic masculinity and repression in his new HBO series, "Half Man." I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID GRISMAN QUINTET'S "FISH SCALE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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