The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 264 | Is Cloud Seeding Playing God? Trump EPA Chief Reacts | Lee Zeldin | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

What does the struggle against the deep state look like from inside one of the Left’s most cherished agencies? Glenn Beck asks the Left’s biggest nightmare — EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He’s fought in Iraq and in Congress, and now he’s taking a sledgehammer to entrenched special interests and even his own agency’s rebellion. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth about geoengineering and contrails; Obama and Biden’s green energy scams; and extreme taxpayer waste. From dismantling the 2009 Endangerment Finding to restoring auto jobs, nuclear, and coal, Zeldin reveals how Trump’s EPA is putting American energy dominance first.    GLENN’S SPONSORS PreBornBy introducing an expecting mother to her unborn baby through a free ultrasound, PreBorn doubles the chances that she will choose life. To donate securely, dial #250 and say the keyword “baby,” or visit https://preborn.com/glenn.   Relief FactorTired of pain controlling your life? Try Relief Factor’s three-week QuickStart for only $19.95. Visit https://www.relieffactor.com/ or call 800-4-RELIEF. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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a Blaze Media podcast. Hello, America. You know, we've been fighting every single day. We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense. of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you.

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So if you believe in what we're doing, you want more people to wake up. Help us push this podcast to the top. Rate, review, share. Together, we'll make a difference. And thanks for standing with us. Now let's get to work. My guest today is, well, he's in one of the biggest battles in America right now. And a lot of people aren't talking about it or really paying attention to it.

But he's already, I mean, he's taking a sledgehammer to the EPA. He is the administrator of the EPA. He's also a combat veteran. So he's probably exactly. the guy to take this on. He finished a very close second for the governorship of Washington, sorry, of New York in 2022. It was the best showing by a Republican there in 50 years. The left calls him a radical, of course, but he's cutting waste. He's pulling back the curtain. He is handing the power back to the American people. And when we talk power, we mean power because he is on an energy

kick that this country absolutely needs. And he also has a struggle from inside the deep state because his own people have turned against him. But wait until you hear what his goal is within the first year and a half of his term. You are about to hear an amazing man, EPA administrator Lee Zeldon, or I should call you administrator, welcome to the program. How are sir. I'm great to be with you. Yeah, I am, I think you're killing it. I think you're just killing it. And you are probably to the left, one of the most hated men. You have to be because I look at the EPA, not as really environmental protection. I see it as the way the left has built a tool to

destroy hopes and dreams and just crush business and everything else in America. I see it more of a tool of destruction than anything that protects the environment. We've made this choice. We believe that you can protect the environment and grow the economy. It sounds like a really wild concept. That's something that conservatives believe strongly. There was this belief at the agency in the last administration that we had to choose between the two. In order to protect the environment, we would have to strangulate the economy.

And there were these rules, regulations that were coming in, especially in 2023 and 2024, trying to obliterate the coal industry, to move towards the electric vehicle mandate, to impose costs on Americans that they can't afford. And we also put a lot of weight in the law, following the law, not trying to get creative, where you see vague language in a law that you could just say, well, I guess that means that we're allowed to do it because the law doesn't say we can't. And the Supreme Court in a decision called Loperbright, which I'm sure you're familiar with overturning this Chevron doctrine, made it very clear that agencies like the EPA can't take

that liberty of just trying to come up with trillions of dollars of regulations based off of language that doesn't even exist in statute. Yeah. That was a great ruling. Now, if we can just get rid of the... the commerce clause, I think we would be said. I want to get into all of this and the endangerment finding and everything, but can we start on,

I originally reached out to you because I don't know what to think about cloud seating and chemtrails and geoengineering. And as a casual watcher of this, you know, when they said, oh, in Texas it was all cloud seating. I talked to the guy who was actually doing the cloud seating. and the way he explained it, there's just no way that that's what caused that. And I just, you know, I don't even know if that can be done

to cause something like that. Maybe it can. I know China is doing all kinds of cloud seeding and geoengineering. Geoengineering really scares me because it seems like we're starting to play God a bit. And I see the videos of chem trails, you know, that are coming out, and I think this is part of geoengineering. You know, the farmers over in England, saying, look at the skies, and now it's going to be cloudy in 30 minutes, and it's cloudy,

and, you know, they were having all kinds of problems. Can you tell me what's true and what's not? So when I first got confirmed, I sat down here at the agency with people and told them everything that I can know, everything that this agency knows about these topics, I want us to communicate with the public. Everything that I know is the EPA administrator should be. be communicated transparently with the American public. Whatever the answer is, wherever the facts lie.

We posted last month on the EPA website, EPA.gov slash geoengineering. A lot of the answers I received on this topic, and there has been government funding that's gone towards some of these efforts. There are entities and people who would want to drastically scale these activities. up. I agree with you, with your concern, just with the idea of playing God. The solar radiation modification, stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud, brightening. There are these activities to make changes to the stratosphere or the lower atmosphere and try to deflect sun rays from hitting the earth to instead send it back into space.

And in the case of stratospheric aerosol injection, you're talking about putting sulfur dioxide, a lot of it, for a long time, into the upper atmosphere, which, by the way, turns into acid rain. There are real health concerns with regards to these activities. And it's not like, you know, it's thoroughly studied, it's approved, it's trusted, you know, it's vetted. Instead, you have people who just want to do it on their own,

like try to get themselves, you know, someone to hand over a billion dollars to just go dump a whole bunch of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. And no, that doesn't sound, that doesn't sound good, it doesn't sound right, and it shouldn't happen. No, no, it doesn't sound. You know, I always, I come back to,

when I was a kid, they were worried about global, cooling. And there were the scientists that said we need to dump coal ash on the polar caps because that will attract the heat and stop the impending ice age that was coming. Can you imagine if we had done that? What a stupid idea. There are just some things that, you know, we're getting so powerful and we're just thinking that we are all powerful and that we have all the answers, that when we make mistakes on stuff like this now, the whole world will pay for it. That's not good.

Yeah, and the consequences, as you point out, our grave, and that's why there's been concerned by Americans of international activities, even if the United States doesn't allow geoengineering, weather modification, but we're reading about activities going on in Europe or Asia, that same concern that you just expressed, if we do it over the U.S., Americans have that concern if it's done over other continents elsewhere.

So this is an international conversation in a way because what other countries decide to do impacts Americans. And that, to me, is a logical use of the EPA. You know, something that is, you know, we're doing things that you just don't, you have no idea what you're doing at this point. that's something where the government should come in and work with other governments around and say, hey, let's not do that, at least until we know exactly what we're doing and that we all agree that this is the best idea.

The experiments with the globe, especially when it comes to global warming, I mean, are we ever going to put that one to bed? Is that ever going to go away? or we're still going to just keep lying that what I learned in school, actually the trees breathe and then they breathe out oxygen and we, you know, we're CO2, that it's what makes trees grow. We ever going to get back to that truth? I think it's based off of, it really comes down to getting to that moment in the future, like now we're in 2025 where you can go back to predictions from 5, 10, 20 years ago

where people were giving their pessimistic assumption of where science is going, once you get to that date in the future, you're able to look back and say, okay, these are the facts now that we have the data, this is what bared out to be true, this is what wasn't. So six years ago, AOC was saying that in 12 years,

the planet was going to end. You know, it seems more and more clear now, six years later, that obviously that's not going to happen. But, you know, in some case, is when trying to institute policies today, they're not just saying this is what's going to happen five or ten years from now. They'll say this is what's going to happen 80 years from now. And they pick a date that is so far into the future that it will justify the tens of billions, hundreds of billions, or many trillions of dollars of policy, the restriction of consumer

choice, the impact on quality of life and cost of living. And you have to wait 80 years, to figure out whether it's true or not. You referenced earlier the 2009 endangerment finding. This was the beginning of the Obama administration. And they had a choice. They could rely on pessimistic predictions of where things were going with the science. They could have relied on optimistic assumptions

that were being made as far as where the science was going. And they chose to rely on the pessimistic predictions. Well, the great news, now we're in 2020. we've seen that many of the pessimistic predictions didn't actually end up panning out so we could deal with 2025 facts as opposed to 2009 bad assumptions. That's a good thing.

Can you explain that endangerment finding and how important that was? I mean, that created a whole new industry, really, I think, for the EPA. This ended up resulting in trillions of dollars of regulation. What the Obama administration did was that they said carbon dioxide, when mixed with a bunch of other well-mixed gases, the greenhouse gases, some not even admitted from vehicles,

even though the endangerment finding was only with regards to vehicles. They say that that ends up contributing to global climate change. They don't say causes. They say contributes. You might ask how much did they say contributes to it. They don't say, but we know. that somewhere north of zero, not much more north of zero. And then they say global climate change endangers public health and welfare. It's an extraordinarily creative reading of Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, where they were doing things the EPA had never done before, like for example, justifying this as combating global climate change or relying on certain emissions, not even coming out of vehicles,

and not drawing direct links, instead doing these mental leaps. they ended up doing was creating this new power that allowed them to do trillions of dollars of regulation, not just on vehicles, mobile sources, but also stationary sources like power plants and more. So it ended up leading to a lot, but we were just talking a few minutes ago about the Loper Bright decision by the Supreme Court. There were also Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia versus EPA and Michigan versus EPA in other cases. And there's something called a major policy doctrine. There's this principle that when you're talking about trillions of dollars of federal policy coming out, it should be something decided by Congress. There should be a debate

and a vote of the elected representatives of the American people instead of some bureaucrat at some agency deciding to oppose trillions of dollars of regulation on their own. I will tell you that, you know, when, you know, because I don't know what the, what the correct term to address people like you. And I was told as administrator and I'm like, ooh, because that goes right directly to Woodrow Wilson's favorite book. He read it three times while he was in office and it was called Philip Drew administrator. And it outlined that Congress was just too ineffective, too slow and they didn't have all the

knowledge. All you needed to do was get an expert in each of these fields like the EPA. It wasn't in existence yet. But you'd get an expert and you'd make him the administrator. And Congress just wouldn't pass any more laws. They'd become irrelevant. And it would just be, you know, a group of people who just knew. And they would make all of the rules.

And that is damn near what we have done. Yeah. And really it's a principle that doesn't belong in this country. We should have that debate. We should have that vote. And if the will of the people ends up resulting in there not being enough votes to change statute, then so be it. We're going to follow our obligations under the law, period. You know, in that 2009 endangerment finding, there were a whole bunch of different references to interpreting how the law doesn't prevent them from doing something.

So therefore, they must be allowed to do it. That's not how I'm going to operate. I will just follow the plain reading, the plain text of the law. And if Congress wants to change the law, then we'll follow whatever that changes. That is our job. Here at EPA, we do a lot of really good, important things. We inherited a big challenge at the start of the Trump administration. The Los Angeles wildfires ended up destroying over 13,000 properties.

there were a thousand lithium, there were electric vehicles and the battery storage sites. We completed a hazardous material removal effort in less than 30 days that a lot of folks said was going to be impossible to meet, but we did it.

We just entered into an agreement with Mexico on behalf of the Trump administration to have a permanent 100% solution to that Tijuana raw sewage crisis where millions of Americans in Southern California are dealing with all its raw sewage. coming in from Tijuana and Mexico.

There are a lot of brownfield sites and superfund sites all across the country that are getting revitalized. And that's all good. But here's the problem is that on the funding side, over the course of the prior four years, they passed tens of billions of dollars through this agency that was so much money, the agency didn't even know how to spend it.

And they'll use these words and terms to build support like, environmental justice and they'll say that there's communities that have been left behind that need help. And we'll say, yeah, okay, there's a community that's been left behind that needs help. What can we do to help? But then under that banner, under that term, they will then get tens of billions of dollars passed through their friends and then through self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, deliberately reduced agency oversight. Money will end up going through these pass-throughs, through pastors, through pastures.

You have people getting rich. The president has spoken about the example of that Stacey Abrams linked NGO. That's $2 billion of $20 billion that went through an outside bank where they got $100 in 2023. And then they get $2 billion in 2024. And the last thing I'll say on this

is that there's just been so many different grants where the dollar ends up going to an activist group on the left to tell us the next dollar should be going towards remediating an environmental issue. So you get a dollar appropriated to remediate an environmental issue, but instead of spending the dollar on actually fixing the issue, the dollar's going to some left-wing activist group to tell us that the next dollar should go towards fixing it. And we're not here saying, hey, let's take money from left-wing activist groups and give them the right-wing activist groups. We're saying that there should be a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse,

and that's why we have now canceled over $29 billion worth of grants, three times the size of EPA's annual operating budget. It is our duty to be an exceptional steward to the taxpayer and cut off all of the BS that has been using these words, these terms, abusing power, and causing extreme economic pain on this country. Children are a gift from God. We know that. And every day, unfortunately, thousands of women across our nation are facing unplanned pregnancies with nowhere to turn because they feel absolutely alone. Everybody in their life is saying, kill it.

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Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's why I think you're just knocking it out of the park, but it also makes you an enemy of almost everybody. I mean, you have, how many employees does the EPA have? This should say something.

So when we came in, the agency was at 16,155. We've been going through reorganizations, reductions in force. We're going down to 12.5. So over the course of the first six months, we were able to reduce the size by 23%, which aside from the over $29 billion of grants that we canceled, that's $750 million of assets. annual savings to the taxpayer.

And then we're also doing real estate consolidations. We closed an EPA museum that nobody went to. That costs a lot of money. We're canceling media subscriptions that were overpriced. There's just a lot of ways to save money. But you're making enemies. I've heard that there are 400 of your own employees that have turned on you and wrote some scathing letter about how you're the Antichrist or whatever.

and how you're going to kill the environment. What does it like to be you to walk into an agency where you're not the most popular? So here's the great news. I would say that a large majority of the employees, a very large majority of the employees I've interacted with, and I engage with the career employees every day here at headquarters. I've been to 30 states. So I've engaged with EPA across all 10 of our regions.

And they get it. You do a career inside of a federal agency, 20, 30, 40 years. And you'll have very different presidents from one administration to the next. Sometimes it's a president you voted for. Sometimes it's not. To the point that you just raised, we also have exceptions. And in this case, we had a letter that was drafted where agency employees, using their title written as agency employees,

were providing their own very public opinion of where the agency should go on policy, ignoring the will of the American public. There's a reason why President Trump is now in the Oval Office that I'm here in this position after being confirmed by the Senate. You can't as an employee in an agency doing a 20, 30, 40 year career,

just always insist that whatever the policy and ideology is of the furthest left president you support over the course of your term, that whatever they want during those four, eight years, whatever they're pursuing is treated at, you know, etched in stone like it's a commandment. The pendulum will swing because the American public voted for it. The American public doesn't want an electric vehicle mandate. They don't want the coal plants to be shut. They want more, they want energy dominance unleashed here in America. They want to be able to create jobs. They want us to be cognizant of their concerns. You know, I was just yesterday down in Georgia with the vice president

announcing a change that we're making regarding refrigerants and this conversion with HFCs that was done very drastic. Well, you go ask, you know, the grocery store costs have gone up. It's harmed the semiconductor industry. Residents are upset. When we take action to stop that really annoying start stop feature on cars or to make gas cans flow faster or to reverse the annoying, the terribly flawed deratements on diesel exhaust fluid systems or getting water flowing faster, there are Americans out there like, none of that matters. Why are you focusing on these little things? Well, maybe it doesn't matter to you.

But each of those things I just mentioned matter to millions of Americans. And there's no issue that's too small. There's no issue that's too large. We will do, I mean, what we were just talking about, the endangerment finding is the largest deregulatory action, the single greatest deregulatory action in the history of the United States of America. Collectively, all of the deregulation that we will do in one year is more deregulation in one year than entire federal governments across entire agencies, across entire presidencies.

And we want to, we want to get it right. We're going out to public comment. We're not saying, you know, to the point you just referenced from that book, you know, we're not saying, you know, in this perch that we know best. We want to go to the public, solicit your comments, participate in the process, and we want to get it right at the end. But what we're putting out for proposal right now are many dozens of different decisions that would end up resulting in the largest deregulatory action in the history of the country. And we're proud of it because we're heeding those economic concerns choosing both. Yes, protecting the environment and growing the economy. So we haven't built a new refinery in America, I think since the 70s because of all the

regulations. They were shutting down all these coal plants. It's impossible to build a new nuclear reactor. Our grid system is just hanging by a thread. And we're at the same time saying that we want to be the AI leader. China is building all of those things. Every week, there's a new coal fire power plant coming on. And the one who wins is the one who's going to be able to create the energy and create the energy safely, I might add. So we don't hurt the environment. But you're taking, what regulations are coming off of coal and drilling and mining and nuclear? How fast can we turn this around? Right away this year. We, we had, on March 12th, we announced over 30 different deregulatory actions, proposals. We, you know, we were sending up press releases once every

five minutes. The Bill Weir, the chief climate correspondent at CNN, was on Caitlin Collins' show that evening criticizing us for announcing too much too quickly, in his opinion. And to To make the point, they put up a press release of one of our proposals on a regulation called Quad OBC. And he puts it up and says, look, they were going so quickly. They didn't even proof free their press release. Look at this press release. It says at the top, 0-0-0-0-B-slash-C, not even knowing what this major regulation is,

the Quad-O-B-C regulation on the oil and gas industry and methane, we need more base load power. We need more coal. We need nuclear. We should be transporting natural gas, whether it's the LNG proposal for Alaska next to the Trans-Alaska pipeline. It's the Constitution pipeline to deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania through New York into New England, the Nessie pipeline into New York. There's a proposal in the southwest part of the United States to transport natural gas. So that announcement from March 12th included a lot of it.

But the media on the left has just been so dishonest about it. Listen, if you want to oppose what we are putting forth, that's fine. I mean, let's have that conversation. But just be honest about it. When we put out the endangerment finding proposal, they like to put these photos of these scary-looking smokestacks from coal-power plants. The proposal was with regards to mobile sources. The scary-looking smokestacks are over 99% coming from.

from water vapor. We're not even, that wasn't even a proposal at anything to coal plants. Like, show pictures of vehicles. But by the way, you can't show, you know,

the picture of anything coming from the vehicle because what we're talking about with, you know, carbon dioxide that you can't see it. But just be honest with this conversation. So we proposed getting rid of the 2024 mercury and air toxic standards from the Biden EPA.

a proposal to try to get rid of the entire coal industry, essentially. So the left wing media wants to say, look, they want to get rid of mercury and air toxic standards. No. If you get rid of the 2024 mercury and air toxic standards, we still have the 2012 mercury and air toxic standards. There still will be mercury and air toxic standards on the books. We just don't want to be eliminating the coal industry with these regulations. and just unfortunately you have you have people in Congress, in the media, and elsewhere who just don't want to engage in a fact-based discussion on what the right policy is.

And if you can't win the debate based on facts, if you have to lie and deceive, well, I mean, I would just say you probably lost the argument before you even started. So you have these people arguing this and trying to put it. out, coal and everything else, which, you know, if we would have followed the plan of Joe Biden, by 2030, most likely, we would begin to have such rolling blackouts and brownouts that, you know, you can't build a first world nation if you don't have reliable energy. I'm broadcasting here from my mountain house in Idaho, and there's no power poles coming in here, So I've had to bring all of the electricity in myself with solar, which is ridiculous.

It's just ridiculous. I've spent into seven figures to have renewable power. And you just can't do it on a big scale. It's just not possible to do it unless you have generators and natural gas and everything else. And for people to think that we can just get off of coal and get off of, you know, everything and increase the amount we need for. for AI, it's just not going to happen. Are they anti-human? Or do they just not know what they're talking about?

I think, I mean, first off, we have to win this race on AI. There are people who want us to hit the brakes. It'd be harder to catch up later than just winning this race right now. We need more base load power in order to win it. One of the other proposals was a proposal that we put out to eliminate something that was called Clean Power Plan 2.0. They're very good at coming up with nice names. But the Supreme Court Erie overturned Clean Power Plan 1.0 from President Obama's term in office.

And now we're taking action with regards to Clean Power Plan 2.0. We get our power from statute. Now, you're referencing solar. The president often talks wind. These are intermittent sources of energy. And you have governors, I'm from New York where the governor talks about intermittent. The state is talking about these intermittent sources as if it's a substitute for base load power. New York doesn't allow the extraction of natural gas.

They won't approve new pipelines. They won't allow gas hookups for new construction. They're trying to ban the sale of gas power vehicles. And then they've set these climate target dates that they know that they will not hit. But trying to hit it, they will call. extreme pain, including, as you pointed out, those rolling blackouts and brownouts. So it's just bad policy. And then they'll say they'll talk about the intermittent source as if it is a substitute

for baseload power. And the last thing I just want to say real quick, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was with the president. We're in Pittsburgh. It was the AI summit. $92 billion getting announced for the Keystone State in Pennsylvania. And I'm sitting there listening to it thinking this entire announcement, you know, this entire announcement, $100 billion, $200 billion could be getting announced for a state like New York,

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Book your seat at Westjet.com. or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. So how, when we, I've got so many questions on this. Let me start with this. It really bothers me that we've never been able to even talk about nuclear energy. I've been a fan of nuclear energy forever.

It's the cleanest. It's the safest form of energy man has ever done. It's 100% reliable. It is baseload power. It works in France. So why we can't do it here? And, you know, the coal plants, the nuclear power plants, any kind of plant to create energy for people was just a no-go zone. But all of a sudden, Silicon Valley says, do you know how much energy we need for the AI plants?

And all of a sudden, oh, you don't hear anything from the left. Oh, they're fine. Well, we got to do this. all the people that have been preaching this to us now, now that Silicon Valley needs that power, now it's okay, we have to do it. And I know it comes from the left and the right on this, but at least the right is consistent.

We've never had a problem with these things. How do we, when do we break ground on some of these power plants, like nuclear energy? And when can we turn them on, do you think? Yeah, I mean, there have been so many announcements that have been made since President Trump was sworn in in January of these massive, not just multi-billion or tens of billions, in some case, hundreds of billions of dollars that companies are investing, they want to, many of them want to have data centers powering

their own site. Some are talking small with nuclear. You have states and others talking about going big with nuclear. Here's the message from the Trump EPA. We want to get this stuff approved, and we want to get approved as quickly as possible. We have the power to gum up the works. We also have the power to get things fast-tracked. We can help with permitting. We can help with cooperative federalism. We want to work with states and local governments.

We can assist with siting, including on top of Superfund sites and Brownfield sites. There's so many ways that the EPA can help. You've had these announcements that have been made into the trillions of dollars, of all these companies that want to make the investment, we're here to help. President Trump during his transition was at the New York Stock Exchange ringing the opening bell.

And he said, when Lisa, this is before I was confirmed, this is before he was sworn back in, he said when Lee's Elvin's the administrator of EPA, he will approve all requests for new nuclear sites within one week. And so we start getting these, we start getting these media requests in right away. I was with the president for the whole day.

The first request comes in, very serious questions wanting to know how we're going to approve new nuclear sites in one week. And the president, you know, he was like volunteering there as, you know, his communications director for a minute. He says, you know, remind them that I was,

I was kidding around when I said one week and tell them you'll get it done and tell them you'll get it done in two weeks. The point is we are going to move as fast as humanly possible And then the other piece that's helping to get this stuff done as quickly as we can is that President Trump created a National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Doug Bergam, Secretary of Interior, vice chair is Chris Wright,

the Secretary of Energy. You have Howard Lutnik, Secretary of Commerce, multiple agencies working together. And instead of each of us being siloed off, we're all working together, our agencies working together at once to make the process as efficient as we can so that someone who wants to invest and they're seeking a permit, they don't get 15 months down the road

and then they're getting denied for something. They're like, why don't you give us a heads up 15 months ago that we were going this way? But we need to go one step further. As far as permitting reform goes in this country, one big beautiful bill was passed and signed into law. Congress might be thinking about what's next. I'll give you three principles

that would be great to guide a permitting reform bill. Permits should take less time, cost less money, and have more certainty. And if you're checking those three boxes, that will only further ramp up the amount of investment, the pace, and the amount of new projects that will get built across this country. But no matter what, we're here to help to get done as fast as we can at EPA. So do you have an idea of when the shovel will go in for a new power plant? Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it's going on all across the country with different projects at different times.

timelines over the course of months and years ahead. There's going to be a whole lot of groundbreaking and ribbon cutting with power plants coming online with small projects that will be done to power a particular site, a particular company. They might have extra power that they're able to put into a grid. But you have companies all across the entire country breaking ground. In some cases, we're talking about months, and other cases we're talking about years. But this isn't something that is a conversation

for post-Trump presidency. This is something that we're going to be able to celebrate progress on throughout the Trump presidency. Lee, you have set four new priorities for the EPA, and they are energy dominance. I think we covered that. Permitting, streamlining all, a streamlining all permitting.

We've just covered that. AI energy. We did that. The last one is auto jobs restoration. What does it mean to restore auto jobs? And how is that the purview of the EPA? I'm so happy that you asked. So when we were confirmed shortly thereafter,

we sent three Biden EPA waivers to Congress for review that were given to the state. state of California that California used for the state level electric vehicle mandate mandate and other tailpipe emissions that a whole bunch of other states had then signed on to. So California's state level tailpipe emissions weren't just California. A whole bunch of other states signed on. So now you have two different standards throughout the country. Congress reviewed it and they passed the Congressional Review Act on all three of the waivers

to get rid of the waivers, which President Trump signed, so those waivers are gone, which means that California's proposal policy for that electric vehicle mandate and the other tailpipe emissions are gone. You and I were talking about the endangerment finding a little earlier. The proposal wasn't just about a reconsideration of the 2009 endangerment finding.

The proposal also includes a rescission of all of the greenhouse gas regulations that followed regarding light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles. Earlier on, we were talking about reversing the diesel exhaust fluid system deratement. So we made that announcement in Iowa about a week and a half ago. Earlier on, I was talking about changing what is the off-cycle credit that car manufacturers were using to put that annoying start-stop feature in cars. Well, the endangerment finding, reconnoisseurs.

consideration includes getting rid of that start, stop feature in those vehicles. So there's a lot that EPA does in the space of auto manufacturing with jobs, lower cost vehicles, diesel engines for heavy duty vehicles, trucks, pickups, tractors for our farmers. We want to get all of these equipment, all this equipment, all these vehicles operating better, more efficiently, more cost effective. Last question. You know, it took FDR four terms to really completely change the nation. I asked Donald Trump before the election. I said, can we get enough done in four years? He said, no. He said, but I think you'll be, you'll see how fast we're going to move. He said, but I think we actually need 12 years to actually turn this ship and go in another direction. You think that's a fair timetable that we would need two more administrations plus this one? Well, listen, I'll, you know, I would defer to how much time, you know, other agencies would need, how much time Congress needs, you know, how much time, you know, future presidents would need to get certain things done. I will tell you, speaking for the EPA, is that we are going to get everything done. here over the course of the first year to year and a half.

That's been the biggest surprise and shock that I had coming into the position is how much we're able to do it once. We have a lot of bandwidth. We have a great team. And I thought that my team was going to tell me, we're going to do these few things first, and then a few months later, we're going to start these next few things.

And by the end of four years, we'll get through 70% of the agenda. and hopefully things work out November 28, and we can finish with the next administration. At the EPA, despite everything that we inherited and everything that needed to get fixed, I don't have anything on my calendar

that we are waiting for year three or year four to get done. Excellent. Everything is year one, except for a few things that spill into year two for a very good reason that I are a pressure tested timelines on. My goal is to fix everything out of the gate. Quite ambitious. I will tell you, I was so disappointed when you didn't win in New York. You weren't the governor of New York. That would have solved a lot of problems. But God works in mysterious ways, and I am thrilled

that you are at the EPA. You're killing it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Glenn. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.