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At a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, acknowledged climate change is “real” and that greenhouse gasses are making the planet hotter—but stopped short of saying the agency must regulate them.
About 90 minutes into the hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), asked Zeldin, a former New York congressmember, whether the EPA is obligated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as required by the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which defined carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. “Do you accept that as a mandate?”
“Authorized—yes, senator,” Zeldin countered Markey. “Authorized to.” His argument being that the 2007 ruling allowed the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but did not require it to do so. “There are steps that the EPA would have to take in order for an obligation to be created,” he added. “I’m just going off the actual text.”
What Zeldin failed to acknowledge, however, is that the 2007 ruling did require EPA to regulate greenhouse gases—if the agency determined they pose a danger to public health.
And the agency did make that determination, in 2009. As Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, explains, that year the EPA issued its “Endangerment Finding,” concluding that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” This obligated the agency to regulate the emissions. While the incoming Trump administration could try and reverse that finding, doing so, Gerrard says, would be a “fool’s errand”: “The amount of scientific evidence available when the Endangerment Finding was first made in 2009 was overwhelming. It’s now overwhelming-squared.”
Zeldin: “I believe that climate change is real.”
Jillian Blanchard, the vice president of Climate Change and Environmental Justice at Lawyers for Good Government, says Zeldin’s response “may be a signal” that he’s considering changing the Endangerment Finding, but she agrees the science remains clear: “If anything,” she says, “the science has made it more clear that more regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is going to be necessary to protect the public health.”
Zeldin, as the New York Times reports, received more than $270,000 from oil and gas interests over the years, and has little environmental experience.
Still, his testimony offered a contrast to Donald Trump, who’s repeatedly called the climate crisis a “hoax” and promised to “drill baby drill.” As Zeldin told the committee on Wednesday, “I believe that climate change is real,” adding, “we must, with urgency, be addressing these issues.”
Watch the Markey-Zeldin exchange here:
