2 weeks Ago By New York Daily News Editorial Board
The U.S. is marking Earth Day this week with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as the public face of a Trump administration plan to make our environment dirtier via deregulation, for example by allowing more power plants to emit more mercury and particulate matter as the president maintains a bizarre focus on revitalizing coal and unclean energy specifically.
Happy polluted Earth Day! A lot of this administration’s decisions to degrade our air and water aren’t easily reversible per se. A dismantling of scientific research, pharmaceutical development and the talent pipeline for high-skilled immigrants in those technical fields won’t easily be fixed. Neither will be reinstating regulations and limits that Zeldin is lowering as he aims to cut the budget by 65% .
Still, almost all of this, with concerted political will and effort, is potentially repairable. That is not so for the environment. Every day lost to inaction or, worse, to regression is one that we won’t be getting back and which inches us closer to points of no return, both for individual Americans and our society as a whole.
Zeldin seems to have a major misunderstanding of his role. While he often talks about American business, economic prosperity and energy independence there are other government officials tasked with promoting these things. We have a Small Business Administration, a Treasury, a Department of Energy, and so on.
The former Long Island congressman’s role is as plainly laid out in the very title of the agency he leads: “environmental protection,” his job is to steward our natural home. That means overseeing the issuance and enforcement of rules that constrain how business can affect our air, our water, our land and so on. Will this put him and EPA occasionally at odds with business leaders that are more concerned about this quarter’s profits and the long-term viability of industries like coal and gas? Sure, that’s a reality of the job.
Perhaps he can also explain to his boss the president that green energy is one of the biggest growth industries in the country for the many workers he claims to be helping with his focus on coal. As with the work of many others across government, the public doesn’t tend to really appreciate the value of all this until they begin to personally register its impact. In our lifetimes, cities were clogged with smog, which contained plenty of lead belched from then-leaded gasoline.
Air pollution as a whole has long been estimated to trigger hundreds of thousands of excess deaths per year, a culmination of higher rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Even those who the pollution doesn’t kill can suffer lifelong consequences; children who are exposed to higher levels of air pollution have been found to suffer from decreased cognitive functioning , which is an impact that can’t simply be undone later. Not to mention that on a more macro scale, hardly anything threatens our economy and our society more than the deleterious impacts of unchecked climate change.
If Zeldin and the administration he represents are so worried about national security, they should understand that superstorms, drought, floods and fires are as much or more of a threat to it as every other adversary put together. Humankind has only this one planet and we have to preserve it..
