HOUSTON — The executive branch lacks the legal authority and Congress has no political will to regulate most climate pollution, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday at the POLITICO Pub at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston.
Zeldin, who has been hacking away at federal greenhouse gas regulations for more than a year, said that recent Supreme Court rulings have made it so that EPA cannot use the Clean Air Act to go after the pollution driving climate change.
“If Congress wants me to do trillions of dollars of regulation, my message to Congress is real simple: Change the law and I’ll do it. I’ll regulate the heck out of greenhouse gas standards if Congress tells me to,” Zeldin said. “But what I’m not going to do is look at a law and say, ‘Well, the law doesn’t say I can’t, so I guess that means we can.’”
Zeldin has already repealed all tailpipe emissions rules from cars and trucks and in the coming months will yank back climate rules for power plants, the nation’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases.
