Notes from the Mercury Department

The piece arrives via Fresh Air, of all things — Terry Gross interviewing Elizabeth Kolbert about a new New Yorker article titled “Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?” — and I am driving north on the Long Island Expressway with the windows down and a half-eaten DoorDash bagel on the passenger seat, listening to a Pulitzer-winning journalist explain, in the unhurried cadence of someone who has stopped being surprised, that the agency built to keep mercury out of your blood is currently being dismantled by a man who used to represent the part of Long Island that floods first.

I pull over at a diner in Riverhead. A waitress refills my coffee. I order eggs. I write DAGGER THROUGH THE HEART OF THE CLIMATE CHANGE RELIGION on a napkin in block capitals and she does not ask. The vibes are immaculate. The vibes are also felonious.

Lee Zeldin is what happens when the bureaucratic id realizes it can simply walk into the building and unscrew the smoke detectors. Earlier this week he sat in a House Appropriations hearing room and explained to Rosa DeLauro that the Clean Air Act, written in 1970, does not contain the literal phrase climate change — therefore the Clean Air Act does not concern itself with climate change — therefore he is going to rescind the Endangerment Finding, the regulatory keystone built atop the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which has for almost two decades been the single load-bearing column propping up the federal government's ability to regulate what comes out of the tailpipe of your neighbor's F-150. Zeldin calls it “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.” He says this with the conversational warmth of a dental hygienist explaining a deep cleaning. On a podcast called Ruthless last summer he described it more vividly — as “driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.” The hosts laugh. They say Yes. They say Yes (ph). Somebody, somewhere, types up the transcript and sends it to a federal archivist who briefly considers a different career.

Here is the part the news will skip: in 2016, when he represented New York's 1st Congressional District — Suffolk County, Long Island, sea-level rise central, the part of the island where every new flood map is more ominous than the last — Zeldin joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. He was not a denier. He was, by the modest standards of his caucus, a man who had glanced at the science and noticed that the water was getting closer to his constituents' kitchens. Now he stands at a podium and describes climate science as a “religion.” A thing to be daggered. A thing whose adherents are willing to “bankrupt the country.” There is a 73% chance the man's own driveway is underwater by 2040. The math does not care that he is currently winning.

(I'm reading this article in a Riverhead diner forty miles from his old district line and I'm starting to hallucinate, which, ironically, is what mercury exposure is supposed to do — neurological symptoms, tremors, cognitive impairment — and the new EPA, freshly stripped of its regulatory teeth, has just become a cheerleader for coal, the burning of which dumps mercury and arsenic into the air, so the symptoms are at least administratively consistent.)

The Office of Research and Development — 1,500 scientists scattered across the country, most famously at Research Triangle in North Carolina, doing the kind of unglamorous chemical-toxicity work that decides what level of which compound will give you cancer — is gone. Eliminated. Over the objections of Congress. It has been replaced, theoretically, by “a much smaller office” inside headquarters, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of replacing your home alarm system with a Post-it note that says be vigilant. Last summer, more than 150 EPA staffers signed a letter raising concerns about Zeldin's leadership. The agency's response was to put them on administrative leave, suspend several without pay, and fire several more. Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect now back inside the building, has said on tape that the explicit goal is to put federal employees “in trauma.” The trauma is not a side effect. It is in the spec.

The numbers are where it goes from cruel to comedic. Zeldin's own EPA analysis says rescinding the Endangerment Finding will save the country $1.3 trillion — mainly, they claim, through cheaper cars. The same analysis allows for a scenario in which it costs the country $1.4 trillion — mainly because Americans will burn more gasoline. So the deal is: a coin flip with the atmosphere, the upside is roughly equal to the downside, and the downside doesn't even count the lives. The administration has, in adjacent rulemaking, literally stopped calculating lives saved as a benefit. Too uncertain, they say. The figure is too hard to pin down. There is something almost honest about this — the math has been quietly evicted from the conference room because it kept producing the wrong answer.

Meanwhile insurance is doing what insurance always does when you ignore physics: it is leaving. Florida homeowners cannot get policies. West Coast fire zones are uninsurable. Long Island flood premiums are rising on a curve that looks suspiciously like a hockey stick. The bill is being sent — it is just being sent to the wrong department.

William K. Reilly, who ran the EPA under George H.W. Bush back when the Republican Party still held the position that perhaps the air should be breathable, gave Kolbert the line of the year:

Move fast and break things. By the time the courts catch up, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

This is the actual strategy. Not the cover story. The plan is to torch the building before the fire marshal can write a citation, because the citation cannot un-torch the building. The 1,500 scientists at the ORD are not coming back. The institutional memory is not coming back. The Integrated Risk Information System, which industry “particularly despised” for the inconvenient habit of finding chemicals dangerous at low doses, is gone. The Clean Air Act question is pending before a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees and a renewed appetite for re-litigating settled precedent.

I pay for my eggs. The waitress asks if everything was alright. I say yes, alright, fine, the eggs were perfect. Outside the diner the wind has shifted out of the south and the air smells faintly of sulfur, or maybe that is just the parking lot, or maybe it is psychosomatic, or maybe Riverhead is downwind of something nobody at the new ORD is being paid to measure anymore. Lee Zeldin will sleep tonight in a house his former constituents are on the hook to flood-insure. The dagger has gone through the heart of nothing. It has gone through the lungs.