The Environmental Destruction Agency

For them, it’s all about money

Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator, he has recently announced the agency’s largest deregulation action in U.S. history under Donald Trump.

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of Under the Radar, where we take a look at what the Trump regime is doing to this country. Because while Donald keeps us distracted, the decisions being made in the background are changing our lives in ways we’re going to be dealing with for a very long time. This week, we’re talking about our planet because without that, quite literally, nothing else matters.

Donald: Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people. This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change.

As for the hoaxes he mentioned, I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Russia did indeed interfere with the election in 2016 to get Donald elected, and Russia did indeed invade Ukraine and has been at war with that country ever since. Everything else he said was a lie, of course.

And that’s because he gets paid a lot of money by the people at the forefront of AI and the people and corporations most responsible for catastrophic climate change, oil and gas industry corporations. He doesn’t care about the long term impact of those things, as was made very clear during those remarks to the United Nations he gave on September 22, 2026.

Two weeks before that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the United States had just experienced its hottest summer in 132 years of record keeping. I don’t want to call Donald’s remarks a speech because they were nothing more than propaganda and disinformation. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, followed by the hottest August on record. By September 1, drought covered 59 percent of the contiguous United States.

And there’s another enormous new demand on America’s water supply: data centers. They don’t cause droughts, but many consume huge amounts of water for cooling. A 15 megawatt data center can use 80 to 130 million gallons of water a year.

As Donald pretends that artificial intelligence is now super intelligence, his administration is pushing a massive expansion of the very infrastructure needed to power it. All of this is, of course, worsening the impacts of climate change. And again, it’s called climate change because the climate is changing in ways that are directly related to the ways in which human beings consume fossil fuels and consume energy and fail to find alternatives to the kinds of fuels we currently use.

Not only are these catastrophic decisions worsening the problem, they’re hastening the degree to which climate change is impacting us. And it is deeply offensive to hear that man say that nobody has died from climate change because it isn’t just about extreme heat, which, again, is getting more extreme. Thousands of people die every year from extreme heat events, particularly in places like Europe and Africa. And thousands of people are dying every year because of extreme weather events like worsening hurricanes, for example.

Getting back to the fact that the climate is changing and the globe is warming, from June through August, the average temperature across the contiguous United States was 74.4 degrees. That’s three degrees above the 20th century average. NOAA reported that the extreme conditions contributed to a destructive wildfire season and unhealthy smoke across large parts of the country, while Lake Mead and Lake Powell fell to record low levels.

While Americans were living through the hottest summer on record, much of Donald’s climate agenda was being carried out by the man he chose to run, which is to say destroy, the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin.

At his confirmation hearing on January 16, 2025, Zeldin told senators he had a moral responsibility to be a good steward of our environment for generations to come. Less than two months later, Zeldin went to East Palestine, Ohio, the site of the 2023 toxic train derailment, and announced 31 environmental rollbacks in a single day.

Standing in the fire station of a community that had experienced one of the country’s most notorious environmental disasters, Donald’s EPA administrator described his mission this way:

EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars. Our actions include the Biden administration’s deeply flawed Clean Power Plan 2.0, mercury and air toxic standards, Quad OBC, particulate matter 2.5, light, medium, and heavy car and truck rules, knee shapes, and the so called social cost of carbon.

For these people, it is all about saving money, which means finding ways to make them money or help their corporate cronies make more money, not about protecting us or our environment.

Under Zeldin, the EPA has rescinded the endangerment finding that provided the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles, eliminated federal greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks, moved against greenhouse gas limits for power plants, and tried to terminate the $7 billion Solar for All program, which intended to bring solar power to more than 900,000 low income houses. A federal judge ruled the termination unlawful on September 18. Whether or not that will stop the Trump regime from going ahead remains to be seen.

Zeldin is, of course, a lawyer and former Republican congressman, not a climate or environmental scientist. Before becoming EPA administrator, he had no experience running an environmental regulatory agency at all. During eight years in Congress, the League of Conservation Voters gave him a 14 percent lifetime environmental voting score. Another fox in yet another henhouse.

Zeldin called the Solar for All program a boondoggle. Most recently, on September 14, the EPA announced what it calls the largest power sector deregulatory action in American history, repealing most federal greenhouse gas requirements for fossil fuel power plants and proposing to eliminate the rest.

The administration says the changes will save $310 billion and help provide more reliable and affordable electricity. At the expense of what, though? An Associated Press analysis found that the Trump regime’s broader environmental rollbacks could eventually contribute to roughly 30,000 additional deaths annually, but they don’t care.

And the EPA now claims that even eliminating all United States carbon dioxide emissions would have no meaningful climate impact because greenhouse gas emissions are global. That is the position of the federal agency charged with protecting the environment.

This is what Zeldin said:

It’s a different day under President Trump. The overbearing and often unlawful rules that were sought by prior administrations to destroy reliable base load power made energy prices skyrocket and threatened many communities and states throughout our country. Today we’re cutting the red tape to deliver the largest power sector deregulatory action ever, saving $310 billion for American families.

The EPA’s own analysis of the 2024 power plant carbon standards projected that in 2035 alone, they would prevent approximately 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital emergency room visits, 1,900 new cases of asthma, and 360,000 asthma symptom cases. And that’s just a power plant carbon rule.

An Associated Press analysis of the broader environmental protections targeted by Donald’s EPA found that those protections were projected to prevent more than 30,000 deaths a year. But while Donald and Zeldin have been dismantling all things climate change, Americans have been living through some kind of hell on Earth.

On July 11, 2025, one week after catastrophic flooding killed at least 135 people in the Texas Hill Country, Donald traveled to Kerrville, Texas. CBS News Texas reporter Marissa Armas asked him what he would say to families who believed earlier warnings could have saved lives.

Marissa Armas: Several families we’ve heard from are obviously upset because they say that those warnings, those alerts didn’t go out in time, and they also say that people could have been saved. What do you say to those families?

This is how Donald responded:

Well, I think everyone did an incredible job under the circumstances. This was, I guess Christie said, a one in 500, one in a thousand years, and I just have admiration for the job that everybody did. There’s just admiration. The only bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you. I don’t know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that. I think this has been heroism. This has been incredible, really. The job you’ve all done, it’s easy to sit back and say, Oh, what could have happened here or there? Maybe we could have done something differently. This was a thing that never happened before.

So says the evil person. The reason we ask questions like that is to figure out what went wrong, what we need to change so we can do better next time so 135 people don’t die needlessly.

And obviously, as I said, by continuing to change the mission of the EPA, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, will continue to die, and they don’t need to. But Donald and the Republican Party don’t care if your air and water are poisoned, and they don’t care if our environment worsens, making life increasingly unsustainable on the only planet we have.

But here’s the thing: for them, it’s all about money. It’s all about enriching themselves and their cronies, but they seem not to care about their future or the future of their children and grandchildren either, which is something I have a very difficult time wrapping my head around.