Trump’s Pick for EPA is a Zealot

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.”

Karl Grossman

 November 22, 2024
FacebookTwitter

RedditEmail

Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.

“Unqualified,” declared Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, about Lee Zeldin being nominated by President-elect Trump to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The nomination, Jealous said, “lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs and future out to corporate polluters. Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin—or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.”

In issuing the statement, the Sierra Club noted that it “is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization with millions of members.”

What Zeldin heading the EPA is centrally about was summed up well in the first two paragraphs of the underplayed Page 14 article in the New York Times about the November 10^th nomination. Trump, it said, “announced…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’ EPA rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.”

There were also some hoorays for the nomination. “Congrats to Representative Zeldin on his nomination to be the 17th EPA administrator,” said Andrew Wheeler, an EPA administrator under Trump in his first term as president. Prior to that he was a lobbyist for major coal, chemical and uranium companies. Walker further said on Elon Musk’s X in a quote also cited by the National Review: “I know he will do a great job tackling the regulatory overreach while protecting our air and water.”

Meanwhile, Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment based in Farmingdale, Long Island told Long Island’s daily newspaper, Newsday: “The good news is: he lives here. He understands that climate change is real. He understands the value of protecting coastal waters, estuaries, the marine environment and drinking water…We’re hoping, and we need Lee Zeldin to bring perspective and strength to the Trump administration to do the right thing here and protect us.”

“Trump Picks New EPA Head Guaranteed to Destroy the Environment,” was the headline in The New Republic magazine. The subhead on its article: “This will be a disaster.”

“Meet the ‘great deregulator’ Trump chose to lead EPA,” was the headline of the E&E website of Politico. “A Trump ally with a limited environmental record will have the task of undoing President Joe Biden’s climate legacy.” Its article quoted prominent climate change denier Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team eight years ago, saying: “I think he [Zeldin] has all the ability and political savvy to be a great deregulator. I think he’s capable of mastering the technical side of it, but he also will be a great advocate in public for what they’re trying to do.”

The headline of the New York Metropolitan Area news website Hell Gate said: “Lee

Zeldin Appointed to Oversee Climate Collapse.” The subhead: “Trump choosing a Long Island lackey as EPA administrator.”

As to the record on the environment of Zeldin, he has a 14% score from the League of Conservation Voters on its National Environmental Scorecard. In the years during which he was a member of the House of Representatives—2015 to 2023—initiatives he voted against, notes the organization, included “cracking down on Big Oil price gouging, against clean water and clean air protections, against methane pollution safeguards.” The organization’s senior vice president for government affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, said after Trump announced Zeldin’s nomination: “Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during his first term and again during his 2024 campaign. During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14%.”

Zeldin has through the years been a very, very close ally of Trump.

In 2021, he was among Republican members of the House who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election that Trump insisted he won. And it has included his being a leader in defending Trump during Trump’s first impeachment hearings.

Zeldin didn’t seek re-election to the House so as to run for governor against Democrat Kathy Hochul, a contest he lost. In the House he represented the eastern two-thirds of Suffolk County on Long Island. He was raised and still lives in the suburban Long Island community of Shirley. He is an attorney.

On global warming or climate change, The New York Times article on his nomination said that in a 2014 interview with the editorial board of Newsday, Zeldin “expressed doubts about the severity of the problem” saying: “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

Trump has repeatedly called global warming or climate change a “hoax.”

The headline on Inside Climate News was: “Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA Pick, Brings a Moderate Face to a Radical Game Plan.” Its article said “Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservative.” The piece concluded by stating “the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election,” and a quote from Sam Bernhardt, political director of the environmental group Food & Water Action: “He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do.”

The New York Times piece on the Zeldin nomination related that Trump “rolled back over 100 environmental policies and regulations” during his first term. “President Biden restored many of them an strengthened several.” Now, “Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are discussing moving the EPA headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington.”

Trump in his first term pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on a global reduction in carbon emissions. Biden, on his first day in office as president, had the nation rejoin it. In the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would again have the U.S. leave the Paris Agreement.

Politico reported: “The world is bracing for President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time—only this time, he could move faster and with less restraint. Trump’s vow to pull out would once again leave the United States as one of the only countries not to be a party to the 2015 pact, in which nearly 200 governments have made…pledges to reduce their planet-warming pollution. His victory in last week’s election threatens to overshadow the COP29 climate summit…where the U.S. and other countries will hash out details related to phasing down fossil fuels and providing climate aid to poorer nations.”

It continued: “The United States’ absence from the deal would put other countries on the hook to make bigger reductions to their climate pollution. But it would also raise inevitable questions from some countries about how much more effort they should put in when the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter is walking away.”

The Zeldin nomination will need to be confirmed by the Senate.

A newspaper in Zeldin’s former House district, The East Hampton Star, ran an editorial last week headed “Lee Zeldin: Long Island’s Pollution Export.” It stated: “It is hardly surprising that Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency is a man staunchly on the side of polluters, a man who has called for the U.S. to exit the Paris climate accords. Anyone who has been paying remote attention could expect Mr. Trump to base his appointment on fealty, rather than expertise in the environmental field. But the choice of Lee Zeldin, our former congressman here in the First Congressional District, still came as an ugly shock.”

It went on: “Gutting the E.P.A. is a top priority for the incoming administration. A primary aim is to increase domestic fossil-fuel production, and climate regulations stand in the way. The first step is to undo Biden-era guardrails on power plants, oil and gas companies, and vehicles. Both the incoming president and the incoming E.P.A. chief…see green energy and environmental protections as the enemy of business-boosting, rather than the industries of the future. This backward thinking is very bad news, not just for the Earth but for Long Island.”

“The district Mr. Zeldin represented for eight years, our district, is at the vanguard of climate impact, vulnerable as we are to sea level rise. Long Island, with its high population density, is also widely affected by the modern environmental ills that government should protect its citizens from, including so-called forever chemicals and lead. There are reasons why Long Island has such high rates of cancer.”

“The last Trump administration took a very hard line at the E.P.A. Whistleblowers were punished; scientists were encouraged to delete findings that certain substances caused cancer or miscarriages. In the second Trump term, we can expect this attack on science and common sense to get worse.”

Zeldin’s “elevation is, obviously, a reward for ring-kissing,” said the editorial. “He was one of the first members of Congress to back Mr. Trump’s 2016 bid [for president] and he has been a steadfast surrogate on Fox News. Mr. Zeldin was an election denier who stood up in Congress even after the Jan. 6 insurrection to claim ‘rogue election officials’ had tainted the results. Mr. Zeldin excels at bootlicking.”

It concluded: “The best-case scenario is that the E.P.A. will lose four years in the fight for the planet. The worst-case scenario should send a shudder down your spine.”

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

DEMOCRACYNOW!

Trump Taps Fossil Fuel Ally to Head EPA, Push Anti-Environment Agenda

Should We Have Wolves or Livestock on Public Lands?

WOLVES!

Erik Molvar

 November 22, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photo by Hans Veth

In the American West, the vast majority of public lands are leased to ranchers to graze their livestock. The ranchers can’t seem to get along with any of the wild inhabitants. Coyotes, ravens, eagles, mountain lions, prairie dogs, grizzly bears, beavers are all targeted for elimination by the livestock industry, for its sole convenience. Ranchers carry rifles in their pickup trucks, and coerce state legislatures and game agencies to classify native wildlife as varmints so they can be killed in unlimited numbers. And ranchers have federal, state, and local government agencies as their private wildlife-killing death squads to roam the landscape, snuffing out wild species at their request. But the livestock industry has a special hatred for the wolf.

There is plenty of evidence that livestock and wolves can coexist on public lands, but most ranchers seem stubbornly opposed to coexistence. In light of those who refuse to coexist, let’s examine the comparative merits of having wolves versus having livestock on public lands.

First there’s the question of public safety. While most of us grew up with fairytales about the “big bad wolf,” there is precious little evidence that North American wolves are dangerous to people. Yellowstone National Park has multiple packs of wolves, and gets 4.7 million visitors every summer. Yellowstone tourists are famous for stupid human tricks, and there are plenty of incidents of visitors killed by bison or other wildlife. But although wolves are the most popular attraction in the Park, the number of wolf incidents in Yellowstone is zero. Alaska is a state with an abundant wolf population, yet humans coexist with wolves, and problems are few, and rare. I studied moose in the Alaska Range for several years, and once found myself between a wolf pack and its pups at a range of 30 yards on either side. I was never in any danger. Contrast this with cattle, which kill, on average, 22 people in the United States every year. Wolves, on the other hand, kill and average of — wait for it — zero.

Advantage wolves.

Western public lands are popular destinations for sport hunters. This demographic, like many, has a lunatic fringe, and the sportsmen’s loonies have a bloodthirsty hatred for wolves, claiming wolves kill all the game that hunters want for themselves. Let’s compare wolves and livestock for their impact to game species.

Wolves live in a dynamic equilibrium with their prey species. While prey species can reproduce rapidly and tend to fill up the landscape to the point that they become food-limited, wolves limit themselves through territoriality to population levels far below the number that could be sustained by the number of elk, deer, and other herbivores based on food availability. Wolves cannot limit prey populations except under unusual circumstances. In Alaska, where wolves are abundant, it was once thought that wolves were responsible for major caribou declines, but science later debunked this assertion. The State of Alaska had an on-again-off-again policy of aerial gunning of wolves, but when this policy was subjected to scientific scrutiny, it was found that the wolf-killing program had no effect on either prey populations or hunter success. Despite Alaska’s abundant wolf population, the state is considered a “lifetime dream hunt” destination. This experience has been repeated in the West with the Northern Rockies wolf reintroduction of 1995; elk in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are equally or more numerous today than they were before wolves were reintroduced to these states.

Now let’s consider the impact of cattle and sheep on big game species. Prior to the EuroAmerican settlement of North America, there were an estimated 10 million elk, 55 million bison, 10 million mule deer, 35 million pronghorns, and 1.5 to 2 million bighorn sheep. At the same time, there were an estimated 380,000 wolves in the western United States and Mexico. Today, thanks in significant measure to the livestock industry, we are down to an estimated 1 million elk, 31,000 wild bison, 3.4 million mule deer, 750,000 pronghorns, and 70,000 bighorn sheep. The removal of wolves from most of the West hasn’t limited prey populations; livestock have.

According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, each cow-calf pair eats enough forage to support two elk or five mule deer. Five sheep eat an equivalent amount of forage. The Bureau of Land Management authorizes 12 million Animal Unit Months (AUMs) of public lands grazing each year, equal to 1 million cow-calf pairs foraging for 12 months a year. The Forest Service authorizes an additional 9.9 million AUMs, or 825,000 cow-calf pairs all year. Assuming an equal boost to elk and mule deer, the removal of cattle and sheep from western public lands would support 1.825 million more elk and 4.563 million more mule deer if all the cattle and sheep were shipped back to private lands. Then there’s the impact of livestock diseases on game species. Domestic sheep carry pneumonia pathogens deadly to bighorns, and these are the primary reason that bighorn sheep – both in the mountains and the deserts – are a scarce remnant of their original populations.

So, from the perspective of hunters (not to mention the far-more-numerous wildlife viewers), western public lands would be far better off with abundant wolves than with cattle and sheep.

And consider the consequences from streams and rivers, the desert oases so important for western biodiversity. Cattle are especially hard on waterways because they congregate along streams, grazing heavily in the bottomlands, impoverishing these rich and important wildlife habitats. Streamside overgrazing denudes the woody vegetation that would otherwise shade the water, and causes heavy erosion that silts in and smothers the spawning gravels required by trout and salmon to complete their reproductive cycles. As a result, most native subspecies of trout in the West are dwindling toward extinction, salmon runs are depleted in grazed areas, and opportunities for recreational anglers and commercial fishers based on these stocks are badly degraded.

Conversely, wolves rebalance the distribution of native wildlife to the benefit of streams and rivers. An overwhelming body of scientific evidence from Yellowstone National Park shows that the return of wolves caused a redistribution of elk and other herbivores on the landscape, pushing them out of valley bottoms and into the timbered hills. The result was a resurgence of willows and aspens in key streamside areas, which supported a rebound of songbirds, beavers, and other wildlife, even helping to restore the steam channels themselves. That’s why a team of scientists recently recommended that the best way to restore native ecosystems in the West was to remove domestic livestock and bring back the wolves and beavers.

Finally, there is the question of what’s in the public interest. The livestock industry has long had a stranglehold on western public lands: The Bureau of Land Management currently rents out an astonishing 83% of the lands it manages to private livestock operations, authorizing the cattle and sheep to take out 50 to 65% of the edible forage that will grow for the entire year. That level of overgrazing has led to serious land health problems – according to the agency’s own assessments – on half of western public lands. And our fieldwork indicates that the ravages of overgrazing are far more widespread than federal officials are admitting. The result has been infestations of flammable, invasive cheatgrass across hundreds of millions of acres of public land. The consignment of public lands to private profit not only degrades native ecosystems and decimates native wildlife, but also ruins the recreational value of public lands by splattering it with cow manure, contaminating the water with fecal coliform, a major human health hazard, and depleting native wildflowers (including desert “superblooms”).

Now that we’ve examined the costs, let’s not neglect the benefits. Ranchers like to claim benefits to soils and carbon balance, but researchers have found a steep climate deficit for cattle production, steepest on public lands with their low-quality forage. Then there’s the mirage of food production, jobs, and economic aspects of public lands ranching. Researchers found that only 1.6% of beef production happens on public lands, so consumers wouldn’t notice any changes at the grocery store or the hamburger stand if cattle and their impacts disappeared from public lands. Owners of western ranches typically have to get jobs in town to supplement their income anyway, so there are no real job benefits. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association commissioned an economic analysis to quantify the financial impact of public-land ranching in three western states. When the economic output was compared to state economies, though, it ranged from a paltry one-half of one percent in Wyoming to a low of two-hundredths of one percent of the Oregon state economy. Thus, the employment and economic contributions of public lands ranching are miniscule, and the only real benefit of leasing public lands for private livestock production is, well….  Nothing comes to mind.

In the final analysis, the renters are trashing the premises. If it comes down to a choice between wolves and livestock on western public lands, the clear winner is wolves. Let’s extend the benefits all across the American West. The case for leasing public lands for livestock production? That’s a tougher sell.

Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and is the Laramie, Wyoming-based Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife on western public lands.