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

Get a $150 cash bonus just for opening a premium checking account and up to 3.50% APY on your balance at Montera Credit Union.

Open an account today at Montera.org slash checking150.

Montera Credit Union, federally insured by MCUA, Equal Opportunity Lender.

Conditions and restrictions may apply.

And now, 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.

We work tirelessly to to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it.

But to keep this fight going, we need you.

Right now, would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast?

Give us five stars and leave a comment because every single review helps us break through big tech's algorithm to reach more Americans who need to hear the truth.

This isn't a podcast.

This is a movement and you're part of it, a big part of it.

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 for the governorship 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.

The conjuring last rites.

On September 5th.

I come down here, I need your help!

Hooray!

Hooray!

Hooray!

Hooray!

The conjuring last rites only in theater September 5th.

Rigid R.

Lee, or I should call you Administrator, welcome to the program.

How are you, 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.

Well, we've made this choice.

We believe that you can protect the environment and grow the economy.

That 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 the 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

commerce clause, I think we would be set.

I want to get into all of this and the endangerment finding and everything, but can we start on the I originally reached out to you because I don't know what to think about cloud seeding and chemtrails and geoengineering.

And as

a casual watcher of this,

You know, when they said, oh,

in Texas, it was all cloud seeding.

I talked to the guy who was actually doing the cloud seeding.

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.

I see the videos of chemtrails, you know, that are coming out.

And I think this is part of geoengineering.

You know, the farmers over in england are saying look at the skies and now it's going to be cloudy in 30 minutes and it's cloudy and 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 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 as the EPA administrator should 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 into space.

And you know, 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

it's thoroughly studied, it's approved, it's trusted,

it's vetted.

Instead, you have people who just want to do it on their own, like try to get themselves

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 good.

It doesn't sound right.

And it shouldn't happen.

No.

No, it doesn't sound, you know, I always 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 yeah, the consequences, as you point out, are grave.

And that's why there's been concern 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 are we 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 in some cases, when trying to institute policies today, they're not just saying this is what's going to happen five or 10 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 2025, 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 emitted 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 done before.

Like, for example, justifying this as combating global climate change or relying on certain emissions that aren't even coming out of vehicles and not drawing direct links, instead doing these mental leaps.

And what 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 Loperbright decision by the Supreme Court.

There were also Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia versus EPA, in Michigan versus EPA in other cases.

And there's something called the 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 correct term to address people like you is, and I was told it's 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 that 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

yeah and really it's a principle that uh doesn't belong in this country uh we we should have that debate uh we should have that vote and if the will of the people ends up uh resulting in there not being enough votes to change statute then so be it we are going to follow our obligations under the law period you know in that 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 change is.

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 our 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 this raw sewage coming in from Tijuana, 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 pass-throughs, through pass-throughs.

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 is 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.

You know, it's not really a baby.

It's not really a child.

Right now, nearly one in four pregnancies end in abortion.

That's 3,000 lost every single day and 3,000 moms lost every day.

But through pre-born and the network clinics, there is hope.

And these clinics provide free ultrasounds that introduce a mom to her baby.

And that moment changes everything.

Over 350,000 babies have been sold.

No, not sold.

350,000 babies have been saved through this life-giving work, and it doesn't stop there.

Moms are being introduced to Christ, receiving practical support for up to two years, and they're choosing life.

Moms like Valeria, who just thought she didn't deserve to have a child until she searched

her options and she went into a pre-born network clinic.

She now has a beautiful daughter who is already spreading life to others.

It's amazing.

Every day this is happening and it's why your monthly support is so critical.

Just $28 a month can save a life.

Restore a precious gift from God.

Dial pound250.

Say the keyword baby.

That's pound250 keyword baby or go to preborn.com slash glenn preborn.com slash glenn

Collaprap here.

Two big things are coming this fall.

Borderlands 4 and Spotify Raft.

So stop listening to that one playlist that reminds you of your ex who only made you cry.

Talking about you, Veronica.

And pre-order Borderlands 4 coming out September 12th.

Rated mature.

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 and a half.

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 annual savings to the taxpayer.

And then we're also doing real estate consolidations.

We closed an EPA museum that nobody went to.

That cost 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, you know, some scathing letter about how you're the Antichrist or whatever and how you're going to kill the environment.

What is 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 or eight years, whatever they're pursuing, is treated, 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, you know, 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, 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 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,

we're not saying 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.

You know, we're 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.

On March 12th, we announced over 30 different deregulatory actions, proposals.

We were sending out press releases once every five minutes.

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 make the point, they put up a press release of one of our proposals on a regulation called Quado BC.

And he puts it up and says, look, they were going so quickly, they didn't even proofread 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 baseload 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 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, like that's fine.

I mean, let's have that conversation, but just be honest about it.

You know, 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 water vapor.

That wasn't even a proposal, anything to do with coal plants.

Like, you show pictures of vehicles, but by the way, you can't show

the picture of anything coming from the vehicle because what we're talking about with carbon dioxide, that you can't see it.

Like 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 2020, 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 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 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 i'm broadcasting here from my mountain uh 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 uh 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

everything and increase the amount we need 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 baseload 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 already 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, governor, so 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 baseload 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-powered 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 cause 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 an AI summit.

$92 billion getting announced for the Keystone state in Pennsylvania.

And I'm sitting there listening to it, thinking this entire announcement, $100 billion, $200 billion could be getting announced for a state like New York.

But because of the policies coming out of that state capital, the investment is not being made.

But fortunately, the investment into the trillions is being made elsewhere around this country.

I want to talk to you about pain.

So many people are living with everyday pain and they just think they're stuck with, you know, that's just the way it is, but it doesn't have to be.

Let me tell you about Stanley and his Relief Factor story.

Stanley had seen TV ads for Relief Factor more times than he could count, but for some reason, you know, he was just like, I'm not going to try.

But his leg and back pain won out, so he gave in.

He ordered it.

After one week of taking Relief Factor, his pain eased up dramatically.

He even started sleeping better.

Now Stanley says the stuff is incredible.

And of course, he wishes he would have started it sooner.

If you're living with aches and pain, see how Relief Factor, a drug-free daily supplement, can help you live and feel better, just like Stanley, just like me, every day.

Give their three-week quick start a try.

It's only $19.95.

In a few weeks, even a few days, you'll feel the difference that Relief Factor can make.

Don't feel stuck living with pain.

Visit ReliefFactor.com or call 800 for Relief.

That's 800, the number four relief.

Take the next 30 seconds to invest in yourself with Vanguard.

Breathe in.

Center your mind.

Recognize the power you have to direct your financial future.

Feel the freedom that comes with reaching your goals and building a life you love.

Vanguard brings you this meditation because we invest where it matters most in you.

Visit vanguard.com/slash investing in you to learn more.

All investing is subject to risk.

So how

when we

have 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 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

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 the message from the trump epa we 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 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 are here to help.

President Trump

during his transition was at the New York Stock Exchange ringing the opening bell.

And he said,

when Lise, this is before I was confirmed, this is before he was sworn back in, he said, when Lise Eldlin's the administrator of EPA, he will approve all requests for new nuclear sites within one week.

And so

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,

he was volunteering there as

communications director for a minute.

He says, you know, remind them that 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.

It's chaired by Doug Bergham, Secretary of Interior.

Vice Chair is Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy.

You have Howard Luttnick, 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, hey, 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, the 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 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.

In 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 permitting.

We've discovered 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?

Steve, 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 of California that California used for the state-level electric vehicle 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 funding 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 reconsideration 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 see how 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 would defer to how much time

other agencies would need, how much time Congress needs,

how much time 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, all right, 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.

We can finish with the next administration.

At the EPA, despite all 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.

Everything is year year one, you know, except for a few things that spill into year two for a very good reason that I already 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.