US President-Elect Donald Trump has entrusted one of his loyal supporters, Lee Zeldin, with the task of remaking the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to align it with his campaign promise of dismantling its onerous regulations. As EPA’s administrator — a cabinet-level job — “he will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses,” Trump said on media platform Truth Social.
At the same time, he said that Zeldin “will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the US to grow in a healthy and well-structured way”. Trump added, “He will 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.”
Zeldin wrote on X: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalise 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.”
His appointment with the mandate to dismantle environmental regulations came ominously on a day that the United Nations Climate Change Conference began in Baku, Azerbaijan, where countries are to negotiate measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Trump has threatened to again pull out of the Paris Climate Accord on fighting global warming.
Zeldin’s is Trump’s third cabinet nomination after his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and United Nations Permanent Representative Elise Stefanik. Like Stefanik, Zeldin also voted against certifying the election of Joe Biden in a show of loyalty by endorsing Trump’s claim that the election was “stolen”. His nomination among the first came a day after Trump announced the appointment of Tom Homan as the “Border Czar” which appeared to show his priorities.
While immigration was a key issue in his campaign, increasing fossil energy production was also important, with his cries of, “Drill baby, drill” (for oil and gas), at his rallies. Some of the laws and regulations would have to be dropped or weakened to increase drilling for oil and gas, and with this in mind, Trump wrote: “Lee, with a very strong legal background, has been a true fighter for America First policies.”
Trump, who is a climate change skeptic, criticised throughout his campaign various measures adopted by President Joe Biden like the mandate to move away from petrol cars to electric vehicles, with a target of going 50 per cent electric and stopping the building of pipelines.
In his first administration, he scrapped scores of environmental regulations and Biden reinstated many of them and introduced new ones. Zeldin is a former member of the House of Representatives from New York and ran unsuccessfully for the state’s governor.
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