What Lee Zeldin’s Nomination Means for the EPA

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After president-elect Donald Trump announced Lee Zeldin as his nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the former Republican representative from Long Island, New York, phoned into Fox News from Mar-a-Lago. “You know, the EPA has been in some ways an enemy to a lot of these businesses across America, because they’ve had a long arm,” the Fox News presenter said after congratulating Zeldin on his nomination. “It’s a top priority.” And then he returned to what seemed to be his main point: “So I’m excited to get to work to implement President Trump’s economic agenda.” The second half of the six-minute interview was spent discussing other matters—New York governor Kathy Hochul’s recent phone call with Trump and the indictment against the former president still making its way through New York’s Supreme Court. In a similar rhetorical tact, Trump said that Zeldin “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.” Without saying it directly, Zeldin signaled a tough road ahead for the thousands of community advocates who have spent years pushing for stronger regulations in the nation’s “sacrifice zones”—towns like Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, where a concentration of fossil fuel infrastructure and petrochemical plants dump cancer-causing pollutants into the air and water.