A week ago, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency would be rolling back a slew of environmental protections. Zeldin called it “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” and gleefully declared, “[w]e are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

Putting aside the Trumpian hyperbole, most of Zeldin’s proposed rollbacks are completely unrelated to climate change. Many of the rules he is targeting protect the clean air and clean water that he – and President Trump – pledged to protect. Zeldin is putting Americans in harm’s way by allowing coal-fired power plants to release more mercury and other toxic chemicals into the air we breathe. Those same plants and oil and gas frackers will release more arsenic and other toxic substances into the water we drink. And coal- and gas-fired power plants and large industrial facilities will emit more soot and other pollutants causing smog and bad air quality across the country. 

And yes, some of the protections Trump is taking away from Americans do relate to climate change.

EPA TERMINATES BIDEN ADMIN’S GREEN GRANTS WORTH $20B, ZELDIN SAYS

Climate change isn’t religion. It’s science. Scientists around the world have conclusively established that emissions of greenhouse gases – mostly carbon dioxide and methane – from production and combustion of fossil fuels are heating our planet, raising sea levels, increasing violent storms, worsening droughts, and causing more intense wildfires. Indeed, Zeldin grudgingly admitted the role greenhouses gases play during his confirmation hearing; he also promised to listen to scientists on matters of science.

Clearly, Zeldin changed his tune since his confirmation hearing. Gone is deference to scientists. In is deference to polluters. 

Despite Zeldin and Trump’s mad claims, the climate scientists got it right. Even Exxon’s climate scientists all the way back in the 1970s correctly modeled our climate’s carbon-pollution future.

But then, under the influence of fossil fuel money, politicians failed, and we have now entered the era of climate consequences. The accumulated carbon pollution altering the chemistry of our atmosphere and oceans now has financial and economic effects, which are starting to hit working families hard.

It begins in insurance markets. Homeownership is the way most American families build wealth, but that dream for many is getting pushed out of reach by climate-driven insurance problems. Last year, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, I obtained industry data on homeowners’ insurance non-renewals. As more frequent and intense storms and wildfires bombard the country, insurance companies pull back on underwriting, first in Florida, Texas, and California. I looked to see where else this was happening.

The county-level data we obtained paints a stark picture. Non-renewals are skyrocketing in counties across Southern New England, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and the Inter-Mountain West. In Zeldin’s home of Suffolk County, NY, non-renewals nearly tripled from 2018 to 2023 and annual premiums increased by almost $800. Non-renewals spiked most in counties most exposed to climate risk, and spiking non-renewals closely tracked rising premiums. It’s a trifecta. 

First and worst is Florida, where some counties have seen non-renewal rates surge by more than 1000 percent and premiums increase by thousands of dollars. In Miami, average premiums hit nearly $17,000 per year.

Things will get worse as Trump and Zeldin take American environmental policy backwards. Lies about climate change can’t defeat the fiduciary obligation of insurers to predict real future risks. The nonpartisan First Street Foundation predicts that premiums in coastal Florida will likely triple in the next thirty years, as climate risks worsen. Premiums will surge across large swaths of the southeast and Gulf coasts, southern plains, Inter-Mountain West, California, and Pacific Northwest.

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The bleeding doesn’t stop there. Property insurance failures hit mortgage markets. Recently, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get mortgages in some coastal and fire-prone regions of the country. Increasingly expensive, even unavailable, property insurance and mortgages will drive down home values, something First Street also found. The total hit to property values could be larger than in the Great Recession. The Economist magazine predicted a potential $25 trillion hit globally to real estate markets. But unlike 2008, there’s no rebound scenario for properties burdened by uninsurable risk from sea level rise, storms, and wildfire.

The resulting property values collapse can hit tax bases in those communities, potentially destabilizing the $4 trillion municipal bond market; and it can tank bank loan-to-value ratios, potentially compromising their financial solvency.

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In the face of this risk, what explains Trump’s head-in-the-tar-sands approach? Money. Lots of it. The fossil fuel industry spent almost $100 million to boost Trump in the last election, and hundreds of millions more on congressional races. That’s just the money we can trace. Trump famously asked industry executives for $1 billion in exchange for delivering an industry wish list of exactly the kind Zeldin announced last week. 

This isn’t draining the swamp. It’s wallowing in it. Polluters first, Americans last. A reckoning is coming.