Gina McCarthy on Cutting Everything but Emissions

Climate One

News, Social Sciences, News Commentary, Science, Earth Sciences

4.7 • 583 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since its creation under President Richard Nixon in 1970, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has worked to reduce pollution and toxic exposures to ensure that Americans have clean air, clean water and clean soil. The EPA has also sought to reduce emissions to address climate change. Now that the Trump administration is in power, the EPA is being threatened with a 65% reduction in their budget. In addition to EPA cuts, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is making cuts left and right in an effort to trim $1 trillion from the federal budget. The combination of DOGE and Trump’s executive orders — plus the threatened cuts to the EPA and the federal spending freezes — have put thousands of jobs, and clean energy and climate related projects, in limbo. This could have a devastating impact on the national public health and safety standards we now take for granted, and will undermine our ability to address the climate crisis. How far do these cuts go? What is real and what is bluster? What would a country with a severely limited EPA look like? Guests: Gina McCarthy, Former Administrator, EPA Umair Irfan, Reporter, Vox This episode also includes a news feature reported by April Ehrlich of Oregon Public Broadcasting. Next week, Climate One is hosting a series of live conversations as part of SF Climate Week 2025! Tickets for all four of our events, featuring leaders such as Jenny Odell, San José Mayor Matt Mahan, Rep. Jared Huffman, Abby Reyes, Margaret Gordon and two of this year's Goldman Prize winners are on sale now through the official SF Climate Week event calendar. Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on Patreon, you’ll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. Sign up today. For show notes and related links, visit our website. Ad sales by Multitude. Contact them for ad inquiries at multitude.productions/ads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:08.3	The news has been a lot lately to process and keep track of.
1:12.9	The Trump administration has been like a bull in a china shop, intent on shattering, eliminating,
1:18.9	or rolling back so many of the norms and policies and rules that we've had for decades.
1:24.9	Yeah, I mean, of course, all new administrations want to change things. That's not new,
1:30.1	but what we have right now is decidedly not normal. There is usually at least some sense of
1:36.7	respect for legal precedent, but not this time. Yeah, and it seems like in this quest to
1:43.1	decrease the size of the federal government,
1:46.2	Elon Musk's team has been given carte blanche to lay off thousands of federal workers across the government.
1:51.3	And really, Musk's team and President Trump seem intent on hollowing out the very core of government functions that protect all of us from all kinds of things, from pollution,
2:02.5	from fraud, from disease, the list goes on. And notably, in spite of all these cuts to personnel,
2:09.6	budgets, and regulations, one big thing we're not cutting are the emissions that are overheating
	...

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