STEVENS COLUMN: Gutting the environment

Putting Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the direction of businessman Lee Zeldin earlier this year was like contrasting the Flat Earth Society with building a rocket for moon travel. Last week Zeldin proposed to throw out the regulations that were aimed at controlling climate change and kick-starting the clean energy industries.

If Trump is successful it will gut the 55-year-old agency that was charged with protecting the environment and human health. The EPA — which I saw being formed in 1970 — would now be better labeled The Environmental Pollution Agency.

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David Ross Stevens was the Courier-Journal’s first investigative environmental writer, from 1968 to 1978. From 1993 to 2003 he taught a course — Environment and People — at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany. His email is dbqwriter@gmail.com

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