During the “By the Way” segment on Friday’s CBS Mornings Plus, CBS environmental correspondent David Schechter decried the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Administrator Lee Zeldin by giving away the game on the climate alarmists by reupping a line that’s been deployed for at least five decades, which is we have “less than ten years” to save Earth from climate change.
Co-host Adriana Diaz twice teased his appearance and spelled doom about what deregulation at the EPA would mean, ominously wondering “what” the “big changes at the EPA” “could cost you” as the “administration...mak[es] good on the President’s campaign promise to roll back climate protections.”
With the liberal media, any and all regulations are nearly always seen as a benefit and for our own good, not a hassle.
“[O]ne of the things the EPA will now, ‘reconsider’ is what its press release calls a burdensome greenhouse gas reporting program where thousands of companies have to submit their emissions levels. Zeldin said the agency would try to undo a total of 31 environmental regulations from rules governing wastewater to emission standards. The Trump administration has also...revealed plans to shut down the EPA’s Environmental Justice Division,” she added.
Schechter came out swinging with the apocalyptic analysis that Zeldin has changed “the way we interface with the environment” as the EPA has decided it has “nothing” to do with “the environment or ensuring “we have clean air and...clean water.”
He continued with the claim Zeldin doesn’t want to “talk about the environment and why we need to keep it clean and why climate change has become such an existential threat with increased floods and fires and droughts and how the EPA has a role in trying to make sure that we control that and contain that.”
Moments later, he dropped the tiresome claim about having less than a decade or we’re goners:
I think the biggest risk is that we have a small window to deal with climate change, really. It’s getting smaller and smaller, less than 10 years, to sort of level out and reduce our emissions and we had and have currently a lot of rules that deal with that. To throw those all out would undo a lot of progress that’s been made to try to reach these new standards for our country and for the world. And we will lose our opportunity to really get ahead of this problem or even stay current with the problem.
Co-host Tony Dokoupil next summarized Zeldin’s view of the EPA as “if companies save money by not having to report a bunch of things that are a waste of time, they can take that saved money and make the energy process cleaner.”
Schechter was obviously not having it because, you can’t trust non-governmental parties to behave (click “expand”):
SCHECHTER: I don’t know if, I guess if that’s your reading of that claim, I think that’s an interesting way to look at it. You know, companies, corporations, many of them do, do the right thing and do spend a lot of time on their environmental issues and reporting and things like that, but, you know, the government’s job is to set a level playing field, if that’s how you view the government’s job, to set a level playing field with regulations so that everyone is following the same rules. Some companies do get in trouble when they get ahead of their competitors and they have rules that are maybe more stringent than what their competitors have. And then the market kind of catches up to them and they take a lot of criticism for being too far ahead of the pack. So, you know, having stoplights and roads and, you know, rules of the road, is what keeps everybody sort of moving in the same direction. That’s the idea of the EPA. That’s the power of the EPA. And to say we care about the earth and we care about clean water, that’s what we’re going to do, is one thing, but to look at what they did and want to cut 31 important regulations is really what you should be looking at.
DOKOUPIL: It’s interesting. Yeah, but this is the claim from the EPA press release. Hundreds of millions of dollars saved could better be used, “to improve and upgrade environmental controls to have a noticeable impact and improvement on the environment.” We’ll see what happens.
DIAZ: Yeah.
SCHECHTER: Yeah.
DIAZ: And if companies take it upon themselves to try to make that environmental improvement without the regulations.
This Friday segment actually capped three days of rage at CBS.
Rolling back to Thursday, senior White House and campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe appeared on both CBS Mornings and the Plus editions to say the EPA will now be “rolling back...regulations” that said “greenhouse gasses are bad for public health[.]”
And, on Tuesday, CBS Evening News co-anchor Maurice DuBois said the agency was doing away with red tape “aimed at protecting public health and fighting climate change.”
Co-anchor John Dickerson commiserated with former Obama EPA official Matthew Tejada a half-hour later on CBS Evening Plus.
Tejada went full doomsday and fearmongerer by saying Zeldin’s announcement was “taking us back to the 1960s, from before the times when we had regulations that actually cleaned up our water, protect people from across our country, from cancer-causing agents in our air, actually cleaning up legacy contamination sites that people had been living on top of for generations.”
Tejada further vented the Trump administration will “tak[e] us back to that time when we didn’t have regulation” in which Americans won’t be “healthier” as they’re purposefully “allowing polluting industries” to “hav[e] absolutely unfettered ability to pour their pollution into our communities[.]”
Always a pompous partisan, Dickerson invited Tejada to go further (click “expand”):
DICKERSON: And Matthew, one of the announcements today said the agency is, quote, “reconsidering the 2009 engagement finding.” Help us understand what that means.
TEJADA: Yeah, that was the endangerment finding. That was the finding that basically unlocked the authorities of the Environmental Protection Agency and our federal government to start combating climate change. We have seen repeatedly how our climate is changing on a regular basis and having devastating consequences, not just in our country, but across the world, how it is causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages every single year. They’re taking us back to not even square one, to the one decision that allowed us to start to make the slightest progress that was then supercharged during the last administration through the Inflation Reduction Act, another regulatory progress that we made recently. It is taking us back in time, just like all these other decisions are taking us way back to an era when we were suffering from pollution in every part of this country.
DICKERSON: And let me ask you now, finally, Matthew, about the environmental justice offices. Remind us about — define environmental justice for us and what you think will now happen as a result of these policies.
TEJADA: So environmental justice has worked for decades to make sure that every part of our country, especially those parts of our country that have not had the power to keep pollution out of their community and to bring in the positives of a clean environment, of green space, of natural resources. Those are black and brown communities. Those are indigenous communities. Those are low-income white communities. Those communities that have not had a power to actually be protected from environmental pollution. The environmental justice program at EPA worked every single day to make sure that those communities felt heard by their government and to bring their voices back into government to make it respond and serve those people too. And they are gutting that program today as we speak.
To see the relevant CBS transcripts, click here (for March 12’s CBS Evening News Plus) and here (for March 14’s CBS Mornings Plus).
