Dayenu’s Rabbi Jennie Rosenn reacts to devastating announcements from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin
Since he stepped into the role of Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin has shown more loyalty to fossil fuel corporations than to the American people and our need for clean air and water and healthy communities. Zeldin’s actions will endanger Americans’ life, livelihood, and health – the very opposite of pikuach nefesh, the Jewish commandment to saving a life.
Zeldin, the first Jewish EPA administrator, is sadly undermining the EPA’s 55-year-old mission to “to protect human health and environment.” Yesterday, he announced “31 historic actions” which will undo decades of climate progress and environmental protections. Over a few short weeks, he purged scientists and public health experts, shut down the environmental justice division, and attempted to claw back funds for clean energy, cars, and buses.
But perhaps the most consequential and ominous move is his advice to the White House to strike down the landmark finding that established with scientific proof that greenhouse gases pose a threat to health and the climate, and directs the federal government to confront the roots of the climate crisis: fossil fuel emissions. And he did this while moving to cancel $20 billion in investments in clean energy and climate solutions that can turn the tide of the climate crisis.
Slashing longstanding protections to “unleash” more extraction and burning of fossil fuels will simply accelerate the rush toward climate catastrophe, hurting all of us, but especially communities of color, overburned by poverty and pollution.
In an op-ed published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Administrator Zeldin wrote: “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” I am not at all sure what “climate-change religion” is, but I do know that Judaism, the religion Zeldin and I share, values the protection of life. In a Midrash on Genesis, G-d warns Adam and Eve “be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world – for if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it.” (Midrash Kohelet Rabbah 7:13).
He also disregards his fellow American Jews, many of whom consider climate a key voting issue.
Mr. Zeldin should work to safeguard Americans’ health, safety, and futures. Sustaining the planet and life l’dor v’dor – from generation to generation – requires nothing less.