The head of a noted nonprofit environmental group on Long Island recently issued a blistering opinion piece in Newsday against Long Island’s own former congressman, Lee Zeldin, who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency.
The insinuation is that Zeldin has abandoned his previous support for various environmental causes since he is now working for the Trump administration and has tried to gain control over the agency’s spending practices.
Last week’s op-ed did not age well since, this week, an article surfaced uncovering that the Biden administration had suppressed a report stating that the draconian ban on natural gas exports from the U.S. did absolutely nothing to reduce worldwide carbon emissions.
So, basically, the Biden administration put a dagger in the heart of America’s natural gas program for no good reason. It was all virtue signaling. The administration’s policy was so crazy that it blocked the export of American natural gas to our European allies while encouraging them to buy gas and oil from Russia, which is encroaching on its eastern front.
This is an example of the insanity of some within the environmental left.
It doesn’t mean that everything they espouse is wacky. The environmental leaders play a very important role in overseeing corporate America and the government itself so that they are held in check and not seeking to pollute our water and our atmosphere. Their findings and advocacy play a very important role in helping us develop important environmental protections. But it would be very dangerous to allow environmental extremists to actually write U.S. policy on energy. And that’s what we’ve allowed them to do.
We should take their position papers to heart and evaluate them thoroughly, but also balance them against our other important needs, such as maintaining a vibrant economy, creating more workforce housing, and building a strong infrastructure. Many environmental extremists have tunnel vision and care first and foremost about their own issue and far less about the consequences of overzealous, single-issue policy.
Zeldin gets that. He’s trying to weed out the waste in his agency by uncovering a great deal of the fraud that is inherent in throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars to so-called good government groups. One example is the $2 billion given to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams for a program that has provided little tangible benefit.
Zeldin is also taking aim at some of the more ridiculous provisions that are put into place by administrators in the name of the environment that have crippled the American economy. A good example is the provision that makes farmers treat a rain puddle as a toxic waste site.
Zeldin will also be cracking down on bureaucrats creating new policies and regulations rather than them being promulgated by Congress.
So, rather than blasting Zeldin right out of the gate, let’s give him some time and see how things pan out. The trillions spent on green new deals and the attack on natural gas has done a number on U.S. competitiveness and our economy and has accomplished little to nothing on reducing carbon emissions.
It’s innovation, not shut-down policies, that will ultimately clean our environment and keep our economy strong.