President Donald Trump’s environment chief looked like a deer in headlights when confronted with his previous remarks about climate change.
CNN host Katie Hunt quizzed Environmental Protection Agency Commissioner Lee Zeldin about his announcement on Tuesday that the agency would reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse emissions pose a threat to human health.
“You’re sounding pretty skeptical ... of this overall scientific consensus that these greenhouse gas emissions are the overwhelming, manmade, climate change driver,” Hunt said on State of the Union Sunday.
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“That might be your way to try to twist my words,” the former New York Congressman snapped.
“What I’m saying is that we get our power at EPA from what the law states,” Zeldin added, suggesting the agency had overstepped its bounds by making a determination that should be made by Congress.
Noting that Zeldin “sounded a lot different” than he did as a member of Congress, Hunt played a clip of remarks he made on the subject in 2016.
“Our climate is changing. We need to do more to be better stewards of the air, our land, the water,” Zeldin said in the clip. “The key is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, to become more environmentally friendly and pursue more alternative energy, clean and green energy.”
“What’s changed for you?” Hunt asked.
After a four-second pause in which Zeldin looked like he’d seen a ghost, he mustered a response.
“Nothing. The climate has always been changing,” he said. “We should not be relying on all of these foreign sources of energy; we should be unleashing energy dominance here in this country.”
Under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, more than 194 sovereign states have pledged to work at keeping global average temperatures below 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of manmade climate change.
Trump withdrew from the accords in 2017, calling them an “unfair” deal for the United States, before the Biden administration rejoined in 2021. On the day of his second inauguration, Trump charged the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations with submitting a formal notice of withdrawal again under an executive order titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements.”
