Washington (AP)– The head of the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a series of actions to roll back landmark environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, climate change and electric vehicles.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday his actions will eliminate trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and “hidden taxes,” lowering the cost of living for American families and reducing prices for such essentials as buying a car, heating your home and operating a business.
It’s good to see that the AP can still file and publish stories, considering that Mr. Trump has a contrived bone to pick with these folks. But beyond this, let’s take a few moments to parse the above news brief.
The EPA, like many other agencies in Washington, is being decimated, discounted, overruled. Oh, and dismantled, because it seems the Trump administration and those who authored Project 2025 would prefer to torch everything, so that we the people have to turn to the all-knowing, omnipotent Republican Party for table scraps and mercy as we fly blind and defenseless through an average day.
I suppose we are expected to be grateful to Mr. Zeldin for reducing prices for such essentials as buying a car, heating our homes, and operating a business—all movers and big ticket items that keep the wheels of commerce from falling off (not to mention continuing a steady cash flow for all those passionate environmental stewards in the fossil fuel industry).
What angers me more, though, is the fantastical figure of “trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and ‘hidden taxes.’” Has he run the numbers, or just picked a big one out of thin air?
Most of all, Mr. Zeldin and so many others in the Trump administration play the general public for simpletons and fools whose god is the belly, who, they apparently believe, will always respond with fervent support and gusto to news about cost savings of any kind—whether on another gas-guzzling, CO-spewing vehicle, a tax-sheltered business, or anything else–no matter if all this “savings” jeopardizes the air we breath or water we drink even more than it has already been compromised.
Mr. Zeldin and his ilk appear to be cut from the same cloth— caricatures, almost, who have bought into this march to the precipice with their outsized dislike of regulation and disregard for climate science. It tempts one to ask, “Who are these people, and why are they so blatantly dishonorable, so uncompromising in their focus and ignorant of facts, hell-bent on killing us all?”
Well, not all. Some will be on the next flight to Mars, or secure in their fortified and well-stocked, palatial bunkers.
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