WASHINGTON—Remember when the Cuyahoga River burned as it flowed through Cleveland, due to all the oil and chemicals in its water? Or when, if you stood at the U.S. Capitol looking west, you couldn’t see the Washington Monument through the smog?
And the southern tip of Lake Michigan, southeast of Chicago and fronting what was once a big belt of steel mills, is still a polluted mess from runoff. The feds tried to clean it up. Now, there aren’t any Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional workers around to do so.
During his first term, Republican President Donald Trump tried, but failed, to recreate those polluted scenes. Now Trump’s EPA is trying again. That upsets the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups the Steelworkers lead.
EPA’s plan, announced March 12 by agency chief Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, would “overturn more than 30 regulations and other policies that protect public health, support job creation, and ensure that Americans have access to clean air,” the alliance said.
It even overturns one—“Good Neighbor” curbs on downstream emissions of carbon-filled gases from Midwestern power plants—that Zeldin may be personally familiar with. Emissions drifted eastwards on prevailing winds before raining down, literally, as “acid rain” on New York and New England.
But curbing that pollution and more costs the criminal corporate class which contributed to Trump’s and Zeldin’s campaigns billions of dollars to clean up, cutting into their profits. And lining polluters’ pockets is the point of Trump’s and Zeldin’s pollution rules revocation.
It also comes on top of Zeldin’s plan—to be carried out by Trump’s puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk–to fire thousands of EPA staffers, especially those with scientific expertise.
“Civil servants that keep our air and water clean are losing their jobs because Donald Trump cares for nobody but himself and his billionaire buddies,” said BlueGreen Alliance Executive Director Jason Walsh. “This administration has become a meal ticket for the rich to line their pockets, strip critical programs from vulnerable communities, and leave a legacy of corruption and broken promises.”
“With this announcement, Lee Zeldin is driving a dagger into the hearts of workers and the American economy. Smart regulations create a triple-win for workers, communities, and the environment while driving the private sector to be more innovative and competitive.
“These deregulations will severely harm, not help, everyday Americans. Low-income, rural, and fence line communities, as well as communities of color, will bear the brunt of this attack on EPA’s core mission,” said Walsh.
The most notable rule Trump and Zeldin are sweeping away, at the behest of the criminal corporate class, is the one that commits the U.S. to battling the greenhouse gas emissions of methane and carbon dioxide which produce global warming and climate change. Others they’re trashing include:
- Regulations to cut carbon pollution and harmful methane emissions from power plants. And soot, too. Zeldin says the U.S. “now has low levels of soot,” the Associated Press reported.
Would reconsider earlier protections
“Zeldin said the agency would reconsider the Biden administration standards to avoid constraining energy production,” AP added. “Reconsider” is a GOP cover for “eliminate.” At the Republican convention and afterwards, Trump and GOPers repeated the party mantra “Drill, baby, drill.”
- The Risk Management Program Rule, which protects workers and communities from hazardous chemicals at oil and natural gas refineries and chemical facilities. Think “Cancer Alley’ between Houston and Galveston.
- Zeldin also plans to pull a Biden administration rule banning power plants from discharging dirty wastewater, including cancer-causing substances such as mercury and arsenic, into rivers and lakes. Zeldin said two dozen states had sued to stop that rule.
- Emissions rules for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles that are driving investment in the clean vehicle sector and creating jobs.
Democratic President Joe Biden’s legislation established and boosted electric vehicles, which don’t produce such emissions. His rules also demanded the power plants either retrofit themselves to end the emissions, switch away from coal to clean fuels, or both.
The Auto Workers signed on to that EV plan and wrote into their contracts with Ford, GM and Stellantis—formerly FiatChrysler—that EV plants must be wall-to-wall union, even in the union-hostile South. Trump, catering to the polluters and to rank-and-file autoworkers fearing for their jobs, wants to pull all the EV funding.
And the Mine Workers hated the power plant emissions curbs, because utilities would switch away from coal to natural gas, costing miners jobs, UWM said. That’s the reason the union stayed neutral during the 2024 presidential campaign, endorsing neither Trump nor Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president.
- Environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the agency. Trump hates people of color and told all federal agencies to eliminate DEI initiatives, opening the way for renewed white male domination. The “equity” leg of that is particularly important at EPA, because it can issue rules to clean up the cancer alleys in Texas and Louisiana, for example.
- The 2009 “endangerment finding,” which declared greenhouse gas emissions harmful to human health and serves as the basis for key environmental protections.
- Loosening rules for company reporting of, much less cleanup from, industrial and chemical “accidents,” such as oil well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico or fatal explosions at oil company production plants.
Zeldin said Biden EPA officials “ignored recommendations from national security experts on how their rule makes chemical and other sensitive facilities in America more vulnerable to attack.”
- A two-year moratorium on national emission standards for “pollutants known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects or other serious health problems,” AP explained.
Last year, the Biden’s EPA told industry to cut down emissions of ethylene oxide, which causes cancer—but which is also used to sterilize medical equipment.
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