The letter notes that “Zeldin dismantled the protections that keep our children, families, and climate safe, and the air and water clean.” “He has cut critical funding, gutted agency staff, and rigged the system to put polluting corporations first, at the expense of our health. Zeldin’s EPA has rejected scientific and health data — and refuses to calculate the value of human life and health — in order to undermine commonsense public health safeguards. He has decimated environmental justice programs and hard-won progress — completely eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and Foreign Civil Rights.”
Dominic Browning, Director and Co-Founder of Moms Clean Air Force, He pointed out In a statement released Tuesday that “just in the past few months, he has supported the Trump administration in using taxpayer money to prop up the coal industry; made it easier for polluters to release mercury — a powerful neurotoxin that destroys children’s developing brains — into the air and waterways; and has rolled back the risk finding in an attempt to sabotage the EPA’s ability to cut climate pollution.”
The 2009 risk finding underpins all federal climate policies. David Arkush of the watchdog group Public Citizen — which is also part of the diverse coalition behind the new letter — warned at the time that if allowed, the repeal “would hamper the government’s ability to combat the most egregious environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come.”
Young Americans and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations quickly filed two lawsuits over the rollback. Another group of 24 states, joined by various US cities and counties, filed a lawsuit last week. It is expected that the latest files will be merged with the first coalition case. according to The New York Times, “making it one of the largest legal challenges yet against the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal climate policy.”
The new letter underscores the consequences of this decline, noting, “Because of Zeldin’s guidance, we will experience more health-harming air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin’s rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters.”
“Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already suffering the consequences of Zeldin’s actions,” the letter adds. “The damage it causes will extend for many generations. Zeldin deepens environmental injustice and will leave a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren.”
“The wreckage of the EPA created by Lee Zeldin will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, costs of preventable diseases, and communities devastated. We will pay the price for decades to come,” CAC Director Margie Alt announced Tuesday.
“Zeldin ignored science and legal and ethical precedent,” she said. “Instead, he looked at the numbers and made a choice: He has decided that the company’s bottom line matters more than our lives. He has decided that you and your family are expendable. After a year on the job, it is clear that Zeldin is either unable or unwilling to fulfill his oath of office or the EPA’s core mission. So let’s be clear: Our lives are disposable. Our health is disposable. Our climate is disposable. Lee Zeldin must go.”
Other organizations that signed the letter include: Beyond Plastics, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Environmental Action Group, Environmental Conservation Network, GreenLatinos, Indivisible Action Alliance, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and more.
“Administrator Zeldin’s entrenched pattern of putting the profits of polluters above the health and safety of people across the country cannot continue.” He said UCS President and CEO Gretchen Goldman. “The science proving the harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions is undeniable. An unprecedented climate-fueled heat wave across a large area of the United States has caused an experience “It’s just the latest example.”
“The public deserves an EPA Administrator who faces the challenge of the climate crisis, fossil fuels and toxic pollution head-on with proven policy solutions, and does not actively serve as an agent of destruction subject to the whims of oil, gas and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science American president,” she said.
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