added, notably environmental justice. “We need to mitigate its enormous harms. It took away
from what we should be trying to achieve in terms of mitigat- ing harms on the ground.” As a practical matter, he stated, “Funding just went out
the door, through the Inflation Reduction Act. EPA was given $63 billion. Our usual budget is $10 billion. The stan- dard for the agency for the past four years was to do every- thing possible to get money out the door. “It was spent on programs that had nothing to do with
EPA’s core mission, which is about remediating problems on the ground” like air, water, and ground pollution. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Ener-
gy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Founda- tion, is happy to see Zeldin reverse the actions of the Biden administration. “You can’t have a functioning economy without afford-
able energy. Under Biden, energy prices were skyrocketing.” Furchtgott-Roth notes that under President Donald
Trump, the EPA has rolled back the California law on no gasoline-powered cars to be sold after 2035. Eleven other states had signed on to that mandate as well. Zeldin asked Congress to pass a resolution ending the law,
which they did. On June 12, Trump signed on to it. In theory, that should be final. In our fractious politics, California Gov. Gavin Newsom immediately went to court to fight it. The EPA is also rolling back incentives for wind and solar
energy, as opposed to gas and coal. According to Furchtgott-Roth, “To provide consistent
power, wind and solar need backup natural gas power plants. It’s less expensive to have natural gas power plants than to constantly alternate. “One hundred years from now we’ll look back and think,
‘How could we have been so stupid?’” she added. “Europe is weakening itself with its net-zero mandate. They’re spending €350 billion on climate. If it’s successful, this will lead to a one-tenth of one-degree difference in temperature by 2100. In the U.S., it will be two-tenths of a degree. “Meanwhile,” she notes, “China is spewing emissions
from coal-fired plants.” Furchtgott-Roth brings it back to the high costs Ameri-
cans are paying for alternate energy policies. “Why are elec- tricity prices soaring in blue states?” she asks. “In the top 10 states, solar is 32 cents a kilowatt/hour. In
the bottom 10 red states, without these policies, people are paying 11 cents a kilowatt/hour.” But, in China and Russia, energy is going for 1 cent a kilowatt/hour. “So, we’re giving an advantage to our enemies.” Furchtgott-Roth believes that what we need is more nucle-
ar and natural gas energy, which the Trump administration is pushing for. Those reduce emissions. The U.S. has decreased carbon emissions over the past 15 years by 1 billion metric tons. Meanwhile, China has increased carbon emissions in the same period by 6 billion metric tons, using coal.
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