ICYMI: In Committee, Whitehouse Votes No on Lee Zeldin to Lead EPA, Citing Big Oil, Dark Money Ties

ICYMI: Whitehouse Rebukes Trump’s Politically Motivated Purge of EPA Science Advisers

Washington, D.C.—This afternoon, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, spoke on the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to vote against Lee Zeldin for EPA Administrator.

In his first days, President Trump issued a torrent of executive actions that rewarded big polluters while jeopardizing the health and safety of communities, raising costs for American families, crippling America’s clean energy future, and exacerbating the climate crisis.  

As the costs and systemic risks from climate change keep mounting—creating an insurance crisis that threatens to cascade into an economy-wide catastrophe—the American people need an EPA Administrator that will stand against the Big Oil political juggernaut and follow the law in the face of Trump’s power grabs.

“President Trump is under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry, and against that will stand the EPA Administrator, who has to be truthful, and factual, and support and defend our environment and our safety from climate change,” said Ranking Member Whitehouse. “[T]he likelihood of [Lee Zeldin] standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is essentially zero.”

WATCH: Ranking Member Whitehouse leads congressional opposition against Lee Zeldin for EPA Administrator

Ranking Member Whitehouse’s full remarks, as delivered:

I think clearly everybody likes clean air and clean water.

My opposition to Lee Zeldin is founded on where he's likely to be on a different issue: climate change.

Climate change is coming at us, and the context for Lee Zeldin's nomination, I believe, is this: we went through a long period of science on climate change, starting with the early days of Dr. Hansen and NASA’s work, work by Exxon and other big oil majors, themselves, lots of work in universities, and in U.S. and state government.

And the scientists pretty well nailed it. They pretty much got it right.  They warned what was going to happen, and it began to happen, and it has continued to happen.

And based on those warnings, we moved into phase two, which was the political era of climate, where it was our job, here, in this building, to listen to those warnings and figure out what the best and smartest thing was to do about them.

The problem was that the fossil fuel industry got involved with Citizens United climate money—in the hundreds of millions—behind it, and they squelched that conversation.

And as a result, Congress has failed to address the looming climate crisis, purely from fossil fuel-funded Republican opposition.

That takes us, now, into era three:  the era of the forewarned—but not prevented—consequences. And the place in which those consequences are most saliently making themselves felt is in the homeowners’ insurance industry.

Homeowners’ insurance is in crisis in this country, and in near meltdown in various states and counties in this country, because the risk that the insurers have to bear is now unpredictable to them.

So, what we are seeing is homeowners’ insurance prices skyrocketing.

We are seeing homeowners’ insurance companies going bankrupt, leaving states, firing their longtime clients because they don't want to provide coverage in these danger areas, which includes coastal areas—Florida, as a result, is kind of first and worst in the home insurance meltdown—and wildfire-adjacent areas second, which puts California and a lot of other western states very much in harm's way.

Now the problem with that is it doesn't just end with an insurance crisis.

When you get a sufficient number of properties that cannot get affordable home insurance, or cannot get home insurance at all, those properties become unmortgageable.

And if you're a billionaire living in Palm Beach, you can find another billionaire to buy your property who can write a check.  

But if you're a real-life person, a plumber in Orlando living in a development, who paid for their home with a mortgage, you're going to want to sell that home to somebody who can get a mortgage.

And when your home can't be mortgaged any longer, that will crash its property values.

In fact, if your homeowner’s insurance goes from $4,000 to $16,000—a case we heard of— then that crashes your property values, too, because a $16,000 carrying cost on a piece of property knocks its value way down.

Not from the greenies, not from the environmental community, but from Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, we heard the warning that an insurance crash turns into a mortgage crash, turns into a coastal property values crash, which is serious enough that it redoes 2008.  We have another national recession.

It is in that context that we need to understand that we need an EPA Administrator who will take climate change seriously, treat the science honestly, and stand up where necessary to the political pressure that will be coming from the White House—where we have a president who actually thinks it's a hoax—and from the huge fossil fuel forces that propelled him into office with enormous amounts of political money, and who now think they own the place.

The fossil fuel industry has done nothing but lie about this and use their power for evil.

President Trump is completely mistaken and under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry, and against that will stand the EPA Administrator, who has to be truthful, and factual, and support and defend our environment and our safety from climate change.

In that context, I have nothing against Lee Zeldin personally, but the likelihood of him standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is essentially zero. 

And that fossil fuel bulldozer is also going to be bulldozing their way into American homes in the form of an insurance crisis that is looming.

So, this is going to become very real very fast, and in that context, this is very much the wrong guy.