Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is just following the law, he said Saturday in Munich, where he defended the Trump administration’s move this week to disengage the United States from decades of efforts to regulate climate change.
“There’s only one best reading of the Clean Air Act,” he said in an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Zeldin’s appearance at the POLITICO Pub came just days after he and President Donald Trump eliminated the underpinning of U.S. climate policy — the so-called endangerment finding — focusing on a legal, rather than scientific, argument.
Side-stepping a question about the value of U.S. leadership on climate policy, Zeldin argued Congress needs to make a direct choice to regulate greenhouse gases if that is what they want, and said recent Supreme Court decisions pushed him to rework his agency’s efforts.
