In June of last year, we connected with the always colorful David Roberts to get his take on why media coverage of the presidential campaign made him feel like he was losing it.
“We’re in a situation where we have this lying, abusive, obviously nutbag figure, and we can’t acknowledge to ourselves what’s happening,” he said. “The political commentariat is trying so hard to process this into a normal thing that they’re familiar with. It’s just surreal to me.”
The whole interview holds up remarkably well as a time capsule into a summer when America was enduring a national nervous breakdown. So last week, as we were discussing how to cover EPA Administration Lee Zeldin’s efforts to revoke the “endangerment finding” that basically gives the federal government the power to fight climate change, we knew just who to talk to.
Roberts is a climate journalist who I got to know and admire when we worked together at Vox. He’s now the author of the excellent Volts newsletter covering clean energy and politics. In our latest conversation, he described Zeldin’s move against the endangerment finding as “real old school early 2000s climate denialism.”
“It's plausible to me that it could go to the Supreme Court and they could find some tortured bullshit reason to let it go through, in which case EPA would be entirely freed from the obligation of regulating greenhouse gasses,” he added. “That is what they want.”
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Zeldin: "They'll say that carbon dioxide endangers public health, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and they'll never talk about anything that is good or important about it."
But, Roberts told us, the economy will keep progressing toward cleaner energy whether the Trump administration likes it or not.
“Economic forces are out there doing what they're doing, and change is rapid regardless,” he said. “You could make the argument that this just isn't that big a deal, though I think it'll be a big deal in the auto industry. The removal of the EV subsidies combined with the removal of basically any regulation is going to slow the transition to EVs.”
A transcript of the conversation between Roberts and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
