Ep 264 | Is Cloud Seeding Playing God? Trump EPA Chief Reacts | Lee Zeldin | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
158.02191
Summary
Glenn Beck is joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to discuss his fight against the Obama administration's environmental regulations and how they are hurting the economy and the middle class. Glenn also talks about how the deep state is trying to take control of the EPA.
Transcript
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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners,
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you.
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My guest today is, well, he's in one of the biggest battles in America right now.
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And a lot of people aren't talking about it or really paying attention to it.
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But he's already, I mean, he's taking a sledgehammer to the EPA.
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So he's probably exactly the guy to take this on.
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He finished a very close second for the governorship of New York in 2022.
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It was the best showing by a Republican there in 50 years.
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The left calls him a radical, of course, but he's cutting waste.
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He is handing the power back to the American people.
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And when we talk power, we mean power because he is on an energy kick
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And he also has a struggle from inside the deep state
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because his own people have turned against him.
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You are about to hear an amazing man, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
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And you are probably, to the left, one of the most hated men.
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Because I look at the EPA not as really environmental protection.
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I see it as the way the left has built a tool to destroy hopes and dreams
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and just crush business and everything else in America.
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I see it more of a tool of destruction than anything that protects the environment.
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We believe that you can protect the environment and grow the economy.
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That's something that conservatives believe strongly.
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There was this belief at the agency in the last administration that we had to choose between the two.
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In order to protect the environment, we would have to strangulate the economy.
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And there were these rules, regulations that were coming in, especially in 2023 and 2024,
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trying to obliterate the coal industry, to move towards the electric vehicle mandate,
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to impose costs on Americans that they can't afford.
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And we also put a lot of weight in the law, following the law, not trying to get creative,
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where you see vague language in a law that you could just say,
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well, I guess that means that we're allowed to do it because the law doesn't say we can't.
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And the Supreme Court, in a decision called Loperbright,
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which I'm sure you're familiar with, overturning the Chevron Doctrine,
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made it very clear that agencies like the EPA can't take that liberty
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of just trying to come up with trillions of dollars of regulations
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based off of language that doesn't even exist in statute.
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Now, if we can just get rid of the Commerce Clause, I think we would be sad.
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I want to get into all of this and the endangerment finding and everything,
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but can we start on, I originally reached out to you
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because I don't know what to think about cloud seeding and chemtrails and geoengineering.
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And as a casual watcher of this, when they said, oh, in Texas, it was all cloud seeding.
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I talked to the guy who was actually doing the cloud seeding,
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and the way he explained it, there's just no way that that's what caused that.
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And I just, you know, I don't even know if that can be done to cause something like that.
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I know China is doing all kinds of cloud seeding and geoengineering.
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Geoengineering really scares me because it seems like we're starting to play God a bit.
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And I see the videos of chemtrails, you know, that are coming out,
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You know, the farmers over in England are saying, look at the skies,
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and now it's going to be cloudy in 30 minutes, and it's cloudy.
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And, you know, they were having all kinds of problems.
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So when I first got confirmed, I sat down here at the agency with people and told them everything that I can know,
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everything that this agency knows about these topics, I want us to communicate with the public.
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Everything that I know as the EPA administrator should be communicated transparently with the American public,
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whatever the answer is, wherever the facts lie.
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We posted last month on the EPA website, epa.gov slash geoengineering,
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And there has been government funding that's gone towards some of these efforts.
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There are entities and people who would want to drastically scale these activities up.
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I agree with you, with your concern, just with the idea of playing God.
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The solar radiation modification, stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening.
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There are these activities to make changes to the stratosphere or the lower atmosphere
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and try to deflect sun rays from hitting the earth to instead send it back into space.
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And, you know, in the case of stratospheric aerosol injection,
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you're talking about putting sulfur dioxide, a lot of it for a long time, into the upper atmosphere,
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There are real health concerns with regards to these activities.
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And it's not like, you know, it's thoroughly studied, it's approved, it's trusted, you know, it's vetted.
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Instead, you have people who just want to do it on their own, like try to get themselves,
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you know, someone to hand over a billion dollars to just go dump a whole bunch of sulfur dioxide
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And no, that doesn't sound good, it doesn't sound right, and it shouldn't happen.
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No, no, it doesn't sound, you know, I always, I come back to when I was a kid,
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And there were the scientists that said we need to dump coal ash on the polar caps
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because that will attract the heat and stop the impending ice age that was coming.
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There are just some things that, you know, we're getting so powerful
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and we're just thinking that we are all powerful and that we have all the answers
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that when we make mistakes on stuff like this now, the whole world will pay for it.
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Yeah, and yeah, the consequences, as you point out, are grave.
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And that's why there's been concern by Americans of international activities.
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Even if the United States doesn't allow geoengineering, weather modification,
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but we're reading about activities going on in Europe or Asia,
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that same concern that you just expressed, if we do it over the U.S.,
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Americans have that concern if it's done over other continents elsewhere.
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So this is an international conversation in a way
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because what other countries decide to do impacts Americans.
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You know, something that is, you know, we're doing things that you just don't,
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you have no idea what you're doing at this point.
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That's something where the government should come in and work with other governments around
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and say, hey, let's not do that, at least until we know exactly what we're doing
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and that we all agree that this is the best idea.
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The experiments with the globe, especially when it comes to global warming,
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I mean, are we ever going to put that one to bed?
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Is that ever going to go away or are we still going to just keep lying
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that what I learned in school, actually, the trees breathe and then they breathe out oxygen
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and we, you know, we're CO2, that it's what makes trees grow.
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I think it's based off of, it really comes down to getting to that moment in the future,
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like now we're in 2025 where you can go back to predictions from 5, 10, 20 years ago
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where people were giving their pessimistic assumption of where science is going.
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Once you get to that date in the future, you're able to look back and say,
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okay, these are the facts now that we have the data.
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So six years ago, AOC was saying that in 12 years, the planet was going to end.
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You know, it seems more and more clear now, six years later,
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But, you know, in some cases, when trying to institute policies today,
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they're not just saying this is what's going to happen five or 10 years from now.
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They'll say this is what's going to happen 80 years from now.
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And they pick a date that is so far into the future
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that it will justify the tens of billions, hundreds of billions,
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or many trillions of dollars of policy, the restriction of consumer choice,
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the impact on quality of life and cost of living.
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And, you know, you have to wait 80 years to figure out whether it's true or not.
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You know, you referenced earlier the 2009 endangerment finding.
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This was the beginning of the Obama administration.
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They could rely on pessimistic predictions of what was where things were going with the science.
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They could have relied on optimistic assumptions that were being made as far as where the science was going.
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And they chose to rely on the pessimistic predictions.
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Well, the great news, now we're in 2025, we've seen that many of the pessimistic predictions
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So we could deal with 2025 facts as opposed to 2009 bad assumptions.
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Can you explain that endangerment finding and how important that was?
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I mean, that that created a whole new industry, really, I think, for the EPA.
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This ended up resulting in trillions of dollars of regulation.
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What the Obama administration did was that they said carbon dioxide,
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when mixed with a bunch of other well-mixed gases, the greenhouse gases,
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even though the endangerment finding was only with regards to vehicles.
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They say that that ends up contributing to global climate change.
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You might ask, how much did they say contributes to it?
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They don't say, but we know that's somewhere north of zero,
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And then they say global climate change endangers public health and welfare.
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It's an extraordinarily creative reading of Section 202 of the Clean Air Act,
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where they were doing things the EPA had never done before,
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like, for example, justifying this as combating global climate change
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or relying on certain emissions that aren't even coming out of vehicles
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and not drawing direct links, instead doing these mental leaps.
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And what they ended up doing was creating this new power
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that allowed them to do trillions of dollars of regulation,
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but also stationary sources like power plants and more.
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But, you know, we were just talking a few minutes ago
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about the Loper-Bright decision by the Supreme Court.
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There were also Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia versus EPA,
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And there's something called the major policy doctrine.
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There's this principle that when you're talking about trillions of dollars
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of the elected representatives of the American people
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deciding to oppose trillions of dollars of regulation on their own.
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you know, because I don't know what the correct term
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and I'm like, ooh, because that goes right directly
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And it outlined that Congress was just too ineffective,
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too slow, and they didn't have all the knowledge.
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And if the will of the people ends up resulting
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in there not being enough votes to change statute,
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there were a whole bunch of different references
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to interpreting how the law doesn't prevent them
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We completed a hazardous material removal effort
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when you switch to a Scotiabank banking package.
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which aside from the over $29 billion of grants
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you know, the grocery store costs have gone up.
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that really annoying start-stop feature on cars
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in the history of the United States of America.
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to the point you just referenced from that book,
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But what we're putting out for proposal right now
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You know, we're shutting down all these coal plants.
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We, it's impossible to build a new nuclear reactor.
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Every week, there's a new coal fire power plant coming on.
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over 30 different deregulatory actions, proposals.
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Bill Weir, the chief climate correspondent at CNN,
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Not even knowing what this major regulation is,