Big Oil has taken over the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is truly Orwellian to see the EPA—an agency signed into existence by Richard Nixon to protect the public from environmental degradation—divesting itself of the responsibility to address the ravages of the climate crisis during a summer of extreme weather and following the hottest year in recorded history.
But it is not surprising.
Performative orders like this leave businesses scrambling to understand what it means for them. Add in legal challenges to the directive, and businesses will be stuck in limbo as cases play out in court. While the administration frames this as a rebuke against an ideology, companies worldwide will feel the effects.
Yet the Trump administration would have us believe the greenhouse gases that directly contribute to intensifying storms and fires do not pose a danger to the public.
Taken in tandem with the targeted evisceration of the renewable energy industry, Zeldin is indeed “driving a dagger”— twisting it in the back of years of stability, investments, science, facts, progress, and protections for businesses and people that deserve clean air, clean water, and some degree of security.
So who benefits? The administration’s powerful fossil fuel benefactors. For them, a reversal that undermines years of hard work, investment and time from the public and private sector to protect us counts as a win.
The simplest response to the turmoil this policy will cause is to continue doing the work. If you’ve made climate commitments, don’t back down. The widespread corporate “greenhushing”—or when businesses are afraid to reaffirm their bottom-line-driven climate action policies for fear of drawing the administration’s ire—must end. To compete globally and create long-term stability, we must speak out. We are past the point of corporate “optics.” The climate crisis will worsen whether Zeldin and the Trump administration believe it or not. No executive order, law or statement can wish it away.
A committed corporate sector can prove this administration’s invitation to irresponsible behavior will not undermine commitments to shareholders, employees and customers. Our businesses and communities depend on it. If anything, this moment must become a call to the business community to show Zeldin and the federal government just how powerful the market can be.
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