David Roberts on Lee Zeldin and Trump's climate absurdity

In June of last year, we connected with the always colorful David Roberts to get his take on why media coverage of the presidential campaign made him feel like he was losing it.

“We’re in a situation where we have this lying, abusive, obviously nutbag figure, and we can’t acknowledge to ourselves what’s happening,” he said. “The political commentariat is trying so hard to process this into a normal thing that they’re familiar with. It’s just surreal to me.”

The whole interview holds up remarkably well as a time capsule into a summer when America was enduring a national nervous breakdown. So last week, as we were discussing how to cover EPA Administration Lee Zeldin’s efforts to revoke the “endangerment finding” that basically gives the federal government the power to fight climate change, we knew just who to talk to.

Roberts is a climate journalist who I got to know and admire when we worked together at Vox. He’s now the author of the excellent Volts newsletter covering clean energy and politics. In our latest conversation, he described Zeldin’s move against the endangerment finding as “real old school early 2000s climate denialism.”

“It’s plausible to me that it could go to the Supreme Court and they could find some tortured bullshit reason to let it go through, in which case EPA would be entirely freed from the obligation of regulating greenhouse gasses,” he added. “That is what they want.”

But, Roberts told us, the economy will keep progressing toward cleaner energy whether the Trump administration likes it or not.

“Economic forces are out there doing what they’re doing, and change is rapid regardless,” he said. “You could make the argument that this just isn’t that big a deal, though I think it’ll be a big deal in the auto industry. The removal of the EV subsidies combined with the removal of basically any regulation is going to slow the transition to EVs.”

A transcript of the conversation between Roberts and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Thor Benson

The average person might not know what the endangerment finding is and why it’s a big deal. Why should they care?

David Roberts

To take a couple steps back, one thing people do not understand these days is how powerful the Clean Air Act of 1972 is. The Clean Air Act didn’t just say, ‘X, Y and Z are dangerous pollutants, so let’s cut those down.’ What it says is every few years the EPA needs to do the science and determine whether there are new pollutants.

If they discover new pollutants, they regulate them. It’s extremely open-ended. It basically says anything you discover in the air that’s dangerous, the EPA has to regulate it. This is the reason that environmental progress has continued, because of the power of these laws.

I read a sociology paper about it a few years ago where this dynamic was called “green drift.” The idea is that environmental progress is set up to continue in the US even if no new laws are passed. So that helps us understand what’s going on with the endangerment finding, and more importantly, it also helps explain why the US right-wing hates those fucking laws so much and has spent decades — literally since they were passed — trying to weaken and destroy them.

Thor Benson

The CO2 endangerment finding was issued in 2009. Why was it so important?

David Roberts

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