The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Trump Chooses Lee Zeldin to Run E.P.A. to Gut Climate Rules
Dear Diary. Last week we saw yet another reason why our climate will continue to break down without much hope for governmental help to stem the tide of incessant warming. We learned Monday that Trump chose Representative Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protect Agency…into the ground. Trump 2.0 will doom us to a hot world full of worse heatwaves, storms, and rising seas.
Lee Zeldin will knock out the teeth of the E.P.A. such that it won’t be able to regulate carbon and other polluting chemicals that detrimentally effect our environment, absolutely undoing any inroads the Biden Administration has made on climate. For more details here is a New York Tines article:
Trump Chooses Lee Zeldin to Run E.P.A. as He Plans to Gut Climate Rules
The former congressman from New York is a strong supporter of Donald Trump and voted against certifying the 2020 election.
Former Representative Lee Zeldin speaking at a rally for Donald J. Trump in Hazel Township, Pa., earlier this month. Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
By Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman
Nov. 11, 2024
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.
Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.
In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.
A former congressman from Long Island who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, Mr. Zeldin, 44, is an avid Trump supporter who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.
“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator,” Mr. Zeldin wrote on X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”
Mr. Trump added that Mr. Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”
Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been a particular target for Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.
Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.
Michael McKenna, who worked in the first Trump administration on energy issues, said that as two New Yorkers, Mr. Trump and Mr. Zeldin “speak the same language.” He also said Mr. Zeldin’s experience as an Army reservist would make him adept at navigating bureaucracies.
“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.
Others, including some close to the Trump transition team, were baffled by the choice. Mr. Zeldin has not been known for showing a particular interest in the E.P.A. And Mr. Trump has tended to select agency heads from regulated industries; he put Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist, in charge of the E.P.A. during his first term.
Mr. Zeldin’s record on climate policy appears to be mixed, especially during his years representing a swath of the East End of Long Island that includes hundreds of miles of coastline and a bipartisan tradition of environmental conservation.
He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters, wrote in an email that Mr. Zeldin’s score “is obviously not what you would hope to see from the person who could be in charge of protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and combating the climate crisis.”
Although he boasted about securing federal funds for the E.P.A.’s Long Island Sound program, Mr. Zeldin voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate law that has pumped at least $370 billion into clean energy and electric vehicles.
When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”
“Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.
During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.
He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.
During his run for governor, Mr. Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.
He has not spoken at length about whether he accepts the established science of climate change. But in a 2014 interview with the Newsday editorial board he expressed doubts about the severity of the problem.
“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times. More about Coral Davenport
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities. More about Lisa Friedman
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 12, 2024, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. Pick Is New York Politician Who Opposed Certifying 2020 Vote. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Environmental Protection Agency, Donald Trump
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)