Mr. President, I rise for the 297th time to draw this chamber’s attention to the serious threat climate change poses to American families. Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to reconsider over 30 rules and policies that protect human health and the environment. He called it “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” With a barrage of press releases, Administrator Zeldin threatened to replace the central mission of EPA – to protect the environment and the health of all Americans – with a new, more sordid mission – to protect the financial interests of President Trump’s Big Oil polluting megadonors.
EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment has guided the agency for more than 50 years, with bipartisan support. The agency was created, after all, by a Republican President, Richard Nixon. And even conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush chose administrators like Bill Ruckelshaus and Christie Whitman who took the agency’s mission seriously.
EPA’s bipartisan pedigree and mission matter little to Trump, Zeldin, and their fossil fuel donors. Administrator Zeldin claims that slashing these protections will “unleash American energy.” In reality, these rollbacks will keep Americans dependent on expensive, dirty fossil fuels. While other countries keep moving forward with energy innovation, developing cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient energy, this Administration wants to keep us handcuffed to the past. Trump is exalting an antiquated fossil fuel industry and degrading the American people.
Administrator Zeldin gleefully declared, “[w]e are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” But the protections that EPA threatens to roll back mostly relate to keeping air and water clean. In the wealthiest country in the world, does it make any sense that Trump is taking steps to increase uncertainty around whether water is safe to drink?
Administrator Zeldin likely can’t juice substantially more fossil fuel production, but slashing these protections will unleash tons more pollution—more pollution from oil and gas producers, power plants, manufacturers, cars, and trucks; fewer protections for drinking water, wetlands, and streams. Coal-fired power plants will release more mercury into the air we breathe—settling into our water and our soil—and eventually finding its way into our food. We’ll experience more bad air quality days, when the air is thick with soot and other pollutants, triggering asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases. They promise to overturn the “Good Neighbor Rule” and give states the right to foul the air in downwind states like Rhode Island with impunity, cooperative federalism be damned.
And yes, these rollbacks do threaten to remove limits on carbon pollution from power plants, oil and gas facilities, and vehicles – turbocharging the heating of our planet.
Let’s be clear: climate change isn’t religion. It’s science—and well-understood, mature science at that. Greenhouse gas emissions from the production and combustion of fossil fuels are heating our planet, raising sea levels, increasing the severity and frequency of violent storms, worsening droughts, and causing more intense wildfires. Even the fossil fuel industry’s own scientists understood the climate risks of unchecked fossil fuel emissions. Exxon’s own climate scientists warned that the burning of fossil fuels was changing our planet’s climate and correctly modeled the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures.
When Zeldin testified in January before the Environment and Public Works Committee, he pledged to “work with the scientists” and “leave the science to the scientists.” What happened to that Lee Zeldin? Where did he go?
The Lee Zeldin of January has been replaced by a Lee Zeldin willing to ignore his own scientists and ignore the facts for the benefit of President Trump’s big polluting donors.
These rollbacks will line the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and they will increase costs for American families. The fossil fuel industry spent almost $100 million that we know of to boost Trump in the last election, and hundreds of millions more on congressional races. Trump famously asked industry executives for $1 billion in exchange for delivering an industry wish list—and now Zeldin is delivering on that wish list.
For people who are not fossil fuel billionaires, growing exposure to hazardous pollutants and the increase in carbon pollution will only increase costs.
Tonight, I’ll be joined by a number of my colleagues who will talk in more detail about the various protections that Zeldin is promising to slash and the policies he is curdling.
I’d like to spend some time discussing Zeldin’s promise to overhaul the social cost of carbon.
What is the social cost of carbon? It’s a measure of the costs associated with each additional ton of carbon pollution: increased mortality from heat and storms, increased sickness from heat and air pollution, damages to agriculture and infrastructure from droughts and floods.
During the Biden administration, EPA estimated the social cost of carbon at $190 per ton, and the Office of Management and Budget ordered that this number be used in cost-benefit analysis for regulations as well as in a wider suite of government actions.
This analysis is just common sense. If the government is considering taking a step that would increase carbon pollution, it should consider the costs of doing so. And if it’s doing something that would decrease carbon pollution, it should understand the economic benefits.
Zeldin is proposing to have the government ignore the facts. He wants to ignore the science and economics and utilize a social cost of carbon whose value is deliberately and falsely set close to zero. If he succeeds, the federal government will no longer accurately assess the true costs and benefits of its actions. This isn’t new math. This is fuzzy math. Fake math to benefit Trump’s oil and gas donors who get to pretend, falsely, that the American people are not picking up the tab for the industry’s carbon pollution. The International Monetary Fund – not a green institution – pegs the costs the public bears from fossil fuel pollution at more than $700 billion per year in the U.S. alone.
Last Congress, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, I organized hearings on the economic and financial costs of climate change. We heard warnings from economists, scientists, medical professionals, insurance and investment executives, the new Prime Minister of Canada, a former Prime Minister of Australia, and even a former Republican Senate Majority Leader. Throughout the hearings, witnesses emphasized the systemic economic risks that climate change poses, and warned that if we don’t shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels, it will get much worse.
“Systemic” may sound like an academic term, but in the context of economic risks, a systemic risk is one which threatens to bring down the entire economy, much the way failures in the mortgage market led to the Great Recession in 2008.
Zeldin’s promised rollbacks will have real economic consequences. American families will bear increased health care costs. Even with a functioning EPA, health care costs from fossil fuel air pollution and climate change are estimated to total nearly $820 billion in the U.S. each year. Doctor’s appointments, emergency room visits, rehab and home health support, and prescription drugs all strain the pocketbooks of American families. Lost work and school days and reduced labor productivity cost families and the broader economy as well.
Last year the United States suffered a record-breaking 27 separate billion-dollar disasters, pushing up prices and burdening families who were in harm’s way. Economic losses from natural disasters reached more than $200 billion.
Climate-related extreme weather: hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, damage property, infrastructure, agriculture, and supply chains. These disasters are disrupting insurance markets across the country. Turmoil in insurance markets bleeds into mortgage and housing markets. If you can’t get insurance, you can’t get a mortgage, which reduces the pool of buyers and results in plunging property values. Similarly, if your insurance premium goes from $2,000 a year to $8,000, your home’s value will fall, as the carrying costs associated with owning it have just dramatically increased.
Last year, the Budget Committee obtained county-level data for the entire country. This data looked at the evolution of non-renewal rates for homeowners insurance from 2018 to 2023. We found that non-renewal rates are skyrocketing as insurers retreat from areas of the country battered by the storms and wildfires that climate change makes both more likely and more intense. While the usual suspects of Florida, California, and Louisiana are the worst-hit places, non-renewals are skyrocketing across Southern New England, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, the Northern Rockies, and Hawaii. We also found that non-renewals increased the most in the counties most exposed to climate-related risks, and that where non-renewals were surging, premiums were surging as well.
Earlier this year, the non-partisan First Street Foundation looked at what increasing premiums and declining insurance availability will mean for property values over the period of a mortgage today – the next thirty years. They found that property values will decrease in many counties by 20, 40, 60, or even 100 percent. Let’s not forget that for most Americans, their largest asset is a home; homeownership is how most people build wealth.
In a future gripped by climate change, that path to economic security is broken. What Zeldin is proposing will accelerate that future forward, bringing the inevitable day of reckoning closer. In Administrator Zeldin’s home of Suffolk County in New York, non-renewals nearly tripled from 2018 to 2023 and annual premiums have already increased by almost $800. That’s just a taste of what’s to come.
It’s not just me saying this. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell warned in 10 to 15 years, there will be entire coastal and wildfire-exposed regions of the country in which it will be impossible to get a mortgage. That’s our future.
When your insurance premium goes up by hundreds or thousands of dollars, that’s Republican climate denial in action. When your grocery bill goes up because orange juice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, and olive oil have gotten much more expensive because of climate-related extreme weather, that’s climate-flation in action.
Before I yield, one last thought. We are where we are – entering the era of climate consequences – because politicians failed to get this right. The political system failed because the American political process became corrupted by the big money influence of the fossil fuel industry. Our politics is corrupted, and that is why we have so grievously failed on addressing climate change.
