Over the past four years, President Joe Biden set in motion a massive investment in clean and renewable energy that will be hard for the incoming Donald Trump administration to stop. But he’s sure going to try.
The president-elect has been clear about his climate and energy priorities, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and picking an oil executive as energy secretary. What does that mean for the environment?
Benjamin Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, joined KNX News’ daily show Countdown 2024. He said the good news is that climate activists already have a playbook from the first Trump administration.
Listen here:
“We sued him more than 300 times. We won overwhelmingly in those cases,” Jealous said. “We put in Freedom of Information Act requests against his nominees to show their corruption. With that, we helped to drive out his failed EPA chief Scott Pruitt.”
Trump has talked about wanting clean air and water while also promising more oil and gas drilling. Jealous said that’s not possible – burning fossil fuels inevitably makes the air and water more polluted.
“There's an actual algorithm for each coal-fired power plant that shows how many people they kill each year and how much increasing production would kill, you know, how many more people would be killed each year – people being killed by asthma, COPD, heart attacks,” he said. “And that's even before you get to climate change and increasing the power of these super-storms.”
Jealous called Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, "totally unqualified” and said he’s there to appease the fossil fuel industry leaders who funded Trump’s campaign.
“Trump literally had a meeting with a bunch of fossil fuel execs and said if they gave him a billion dollars for his, you know, his campaign and his PACs and all the things, you know, he would do whatever they wanted,” he said. “The fossil fuel industry is approximately 40% of the dollars going into the Republican PACs, and what you're looking at is a phenomenally corrupt system and a president who does not mind being corrupted by the fossil fuel industry.”
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Still, Jealous said Trump will have difficulty rolling back Biden’s investment in green jobs.
“Whether it's bringing back, you know, chip production or the production of EVs and batteries and solar panels, what's true is that Americans of all political stripes want those jobs in their cities, want those jobs in their communities, want to rebuild the American manufacturing sector,” he said.
Listen to the full episode above to hear a different perspective from oil and gas trader Dan Eberhart, who’s been helping the Trump transition team, and catch new episodes of Countdown 2024 every weekday at 2:30 p.m.
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