EPA Leadership Is So, So Proud of Its Ignorance

By Dave Levitan | July 29, 2025 | 1:57pm

Photo by USDA/Wikimedia Commons

Climate Lee Zeldin

EPA Leadership Is So, So Proud of Its Ignorance

Well, they’ve followed through. After reporting last week emerged that Lee Zeldin and the Environmental Protection Agency had a draft proposal to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding” regarding the threat of greenhouse gases, on Tuesday Zeldin made it official.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis — seriously — Zeldin said they were moving to address “the concern that EPA’s GHG emissions standards themselves, not carbon dioxide which the Finding never assessed independently, was the real threat to Americans’ livelihoods.” The idea that regulations, rather than the thing they are regulating, are the real threat is more or less the core of Republican governance dating back at least to Ronald Reagan. And Zeldin, with that claim, doesn’t even feint in the direction of his agency’s actual mission — instead of “protecting human health and the environment,” he wants only to protect “livelihoods.” Of course, this won’t do that either.

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Since Zeldin’s initial deregulatory orgy was announced in March, he has made it clear that not only is he not embarrassed by the anti-science ignorance that must underpin Trump administration priorities at his and other science-adjacent agencies, he is thrilled by it. The chance to ignore every non-crank scientist on the planet when it comes to climate change, or localized pollution, or any other topic seems to jazz him up like little else. It’s not so much that they think they know better as it is a centering of the glee they feel in doing the opposite of what the experts say; yes, it’s a gift to Big Oil, but it’s also just a priority to undo what Democrats did, whatever it is.

“That greenhouse gases harm public welfare was supported by overwhelming scientific evidence when the endangerment finding was issued in 2009; 16 years later, the evidence has only gotten stronger, and the looming economic harms more dangerous,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island who has made climate change a priority during his tenure, in a statement. “Administrator Zeldin’s corrupt giveaway doesn’t change the science, but by wishing away the problem, this Administration leaves EPA without the tools to forge a solution.”

Zeldin has now, presumably, forced actual EPA employees — those that are left — craft the “reconsideration” of the endangerment finding. It’s like taking over a hospital and making the surgeons break bones instead of fix them, like suddenly requiring your engineering firm to use “three” in place of pi, like telling a three-star chef her new goal is to make all the patrons puke.

The actual proposal, posted to the EPA’s site on Tuesday afternoon, says that in 2009 “the EPA unreasonably analyzed the scientific record” — an almost impossibly rich claim. If it moves forward, along with rescinding tailpipe-specific rules, it would exempt vehicle manufacturers from “any future obligations” to control or even measure their greenhouse gas emissions; it would eventually undermine basically all attempts to limit emissions.

“This is the most pro-combustion administration since Nero,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign, in a statement. “To famous lies like ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer,’ we can now add Trump’s claim that pollution from millions of cars is healthier than rules cleaning them up.”