Krakatoa Day, 4th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): We're fucked. Last Wednesday, Lee Zeldin, the former Long Island congressman appointed by Trump to head the EPA despite a lack of environmental experience, announced plans to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. In announcing the rule changes, Zeldin claimed he was “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” 

Last month, three former EPA Administrators published an op-ed in the New York Times warning of the likely environmental harm the Trump administration imposed by freezing funds, cutting spending, and firing more than a thousand Federal employees. 

After Zeldin's announcements last Wedensday, the former Administrators issued a follow-up statement on Friday,  saying the proposed rollbacks endangered the lives of millions of Americans and abandoned the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment. They said the plan to undo environmental regulations “sets the country on a course that will cause irreparable harm to Americans, businesses, and environmental protection efforts nationwide.” 

Former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who led the Agency under Barack Obama and was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden, called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”

Zeldin’s intention to undo environmental protections was nothing short of a “catastrophe” and “represents the abandonment of a long history” of EPA efforts to protect the environment, according to William K Reilly, who led the Agency under George HW Bush and played a key role in amending the Clean Air Act in 1990.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink." 

Zeldin also announcement that EPA is going to reconsider a scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The agency’s 2009 finding is a bedrock of US environmental law and has been the legal basis for most of EPA's actions against climate change, including regulations for motor vehicles, power plants, and other pollution sources.  

"If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about,” Whitman said. She and the other former Agency heads were stunned that the Trump administration would even try to undo the finding and other longtime agency rules. If approved, the rule changes could cause “severe harms” to the environment, public health and the economy, they said.

Zeldin "now seems to be doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry more than complying with the mission of the EPA,” said McCarthy.  Environmental protection and economic prosperity were not mutually exclusive, the three agreed, saying strong regulations had enabled both a cleaner environment and a growing economy since the agency’s founding 55 years ago.

Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, rolled back more than 100 environmental laws in his first term as president. He campaigned on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” and vowed to ease regulations on fossil-fuel companies. In this current term, he has frozen funds for climate programs and other environmental spending, fired scientists working for the National Weather Service, and cut federal support for renewable energy.

Reilly said he feared that Zeldin and Trump would return to a pre-EPA era when industry was free to pollute virtually at will, filling the air in many cities with dangerous smog and rivers with industrial waste. “I wonder if the malefactors are going to give us more burning rivers,” Reilly said in reference to the 1969 incident in which Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, spurring passage of the federal Clean Water Act and creation of the EPA a year later during the Nixon administration .

Among the changes proposed by Zeldin are plans to rewrite a rule restricting air pollution from fossil-fuel-fired power plants and a separate measure restricting emissions from cars and trucks. 

Biden, who made fighting climate change a top priority of his presidency, had said the power-plant rules of his administration would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting the reliable, long-term supply of electricity that America needs. Half of all new cars and trucks sold in the US will be zero-emission by 2030, he pledged. Zeldin and Trump have incorrectly called the car rule an electric vehicle “mandate.″

The EPA also will take ease rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins and the “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that affect downwind areas. Zeldin also targeted a clean-water law that provides federal protections for rivers, streams and wetlands.

Environmental group have said the moves would result in the greatest increase in US pollution in decades.