Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA Administrator, who aspires to be governor of New York, is doing everything he can in his new job to speed up global warming, which will devastate the state that he—and I—were born and raised in. How’s that for a winning platform?
Zeldin, a “career politician with relatively little climate or energy expertise,” as the New York Times described him, made a run once already and failed. He served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Long Island before launching a losing campaign for Governor in 2022.
Now as Trump’s environmental hatchet man, he is tasked with weakening or killing environmental regulations, gutting all climate-related funding, and abandoning EPA’s mission of protecting people in the U.S. from the dangers of climate change—a key goal of Project 2025.
This is deeply disturbing nationally, and New Yorkers—who endured climate-fueled wildfire smoke last year and the year before that—especially should take note, recalling our state’s vulnerabilities and history.
Tell Congress: Freezing Federal Funding Hurts Children
My hometown of Middletown, New York, was one of the many Hudson Valley and Catskills towns devastated by the climate-fueled deluge from Hurricane Irene in 2011. It was labeled a once-in-a-century event for parts of six states.
Except it wasn’t once in the century. The very next year, Superstorm Sandy became the most devastating hurricane to hit the New York region, killing more than 100 people, destroying entire communities, and inflicting damages of more than $65 billion (equivalent to about $90 billion in 2024 dollars). That led then-Governor Andrew Cuomo to say New York “has a 100-year flood every two years now.”
What is truly alarming is that “if we continue with unabated burning of fossil fuels, we may condemn New York City to permanent Sandy-like conditions,” as climatologist Michael Mann told me eight years ago. I was reporting on his 2017 study, “Impact of Climate Change on New York City’s Coastal Flood Hazard.” A study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2013 came to a similar conclusion.
“We will have to retreat from New York City and the major coastal cities of the world at almost unimaginable cost,” Mann warned at the time, unless “we decrease carbon emissions immediately and dramatically.” Today, I work with Mann at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
But Zeldin and Trump have no concern at all about the impact of their actions on their home state or the country they have sworn to protect.
Indeed, Zeldin was tasked by one of Trump’s first executive orders to reexamine EPA’s “Endangerment Finding,” and on February 26, he recommended that the finding be struck down. In 2007, the Supreme Court found in Massachusetts vs. EPA that EPA was legally required to regulate greenhouse gas emissions once carbon dioxide was scientifically determined to endanger public health and well-being. In 2009, EPA responded to this ruling and scientific evidence of global warming’s impact on public health by issuing the Endangerment Finding.
“In the face of overwhelming science,” Natural Resources Defense Council attorney David Doniger, wrote last month, “it’s impossible to think that the EPA could develop a contradictory finding that would stand up in court.” Indeed, the Supreme Court declined a request to reconsider the finding as recently as December 2023.
“I’m pretty conservative on various regulatory issues, but I think they would waste a ton of time on something that would probably not stand up in court,” explained Jeff Holmstead, who headed President George W. Bush’s EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, in a December interview. He added that Trump’s first-time EPA administrators “were not exactly shrinking violets, and I think that they understood that it would be a fool’s errand.”
Additionally, Zeldin is pursuing “a blatant violation of the Constitution,” as one expert told the Associated Press, when he said that EPA would revoke $20 billion in contracts approved by Congress for a green bank that is set to fund tens of thousands of projects to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases—even though he admitted “there is zero reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the bank.”
To give you an idea of how misinformed or plain confused Zeldin is, he said earlier this month that he would have the green bank matter reviewed by the EPA Inspector General. But as the Washington Post noted, EPA’s IG had already been ousted in January by Trump, along with many other IGs in a “late-night purge.”
In a now-famous 2012 cover story, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” Bloomberg explained many of the links between Sandy’s unique level of devastation and climate change. The story’s sub-headline sums up our situation over a decade later—indeed, it applies to an ever-accelerating set of climate-fueled weather disasters, including the recent Los Angeles firestorms: “If Hurricane Sandy doesn’t persuade Americans to get serious about climate change, nothing will.”
Tell Congress: Freezing Federal Funding Hurts Children
Joseph Romm is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. His forthcoming book is “The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate,” Island Press, April 2025.