This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By tapping former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally who is skilled at projecting an image of a moderate conservationist.

As a Republican representing a Long Island district “almost completely surrounded by water,” as Zeldin often said, he successfully fought in Congress for coastal resilience and nature preservation projects and expressed hope for bipartisan compromise on climate, calling it “a very important issue.”

But Zeldin never advanced any proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and like other congressional Republicans in the Trump era, consistently voted against those proposals. He came closer than any Republican in 20 years to capturing his state’s highest office by campaigning on a pledge to overturn the state’s ban on fracking.

“I think at times he spoke moderately when it was convenient to do so, but I don’t think that’s the Lee Zeldin that New York has seen for at least the past four years,” said Sam Bernhardt, the New York-based political director for Food & Water Action. He thinks the most telling item in Zeldin’s record is his vote against certifying the 2020 election.

“He did that because Trump told him to, so I think we can extrapolate that most of Lee Zeldin’s work at EPA will likewise be things that Trump has told him to do,” Bernhardt said.

In a Fox News interview on Monday, shortly after his selection was announced, Zeldin made clear that the president-elect has given him a long list of regulations to roll back.

“The president was talking about unleashing economic prosperity through the EPA,” Zeldin said. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that end up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction. And President Trump, when he called me up, gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20, different priorities.”

The agency that has spent the past four years spearheading policy to cut greenhouse gas pollution throughout the US economy would shift gears within “the first 100 days,” said Zeldin, into becoming a vehicle for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Zeldin is a markedly different choice than the leaders Trump chose to head up the EPA during his first term. Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was an Oklahoma attorney general who had sued the agency repeatedly, leading Republican states’ push-back against President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives.

But upon arriving in Washington, Pruitt quickly became entangled in multiple controversies—over his travel practices, his use of government employees for personal errands, and his relationships with lobbyists. Pruitt resigned under pressure and was replaced by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, a behind-the-scenes player on Capitol Hill and in the EPA. He stirred less drama as he pursued the Trump deregulatory agenda, ultimately rolling back more than 100 environmental rules.

Zeldin comes to the EPA not as a combatant or a bureaucrat, but as a politician with a record of successfully delivering Republican messages in Democratic strongholds. Trump trusted Zeldin to act as a surrogate for him on the campaign trail—from Iowa at the beginning of the race through to Georgia and Pennsylvania at the end.

“He certainly is a savvy political operator,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell, which represents a range of energy-industry clients. 

“He wasn’t particularly well known for taking in-depth positions on EPA issues, but I’m not surprised that he gets a position like this,” Maisano said. “I’m certain what he’ll do is be a good leader, and a good spokesman for the president’s energy and environment agenda.”

Zeldin in recent years has advocated unleashing fossil fuel production without challenging climate science outright. That also sets him apart from Pruitt and to some extent, Wheeler, both of whom were proteges of one of Congress’ most outspoken climate science deniers, the late Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who died earlier this year.

Zeldin was one of 12 Republicans who voted with House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.

In 2019, during a debate on the first climate legislation to reach the House floor in a decade, Zeldin praised the Democratic sponsors for “their intentions and advocacy” on a measure that sought to hold the Trump administration to the goals of the Paris Agreement. But he still reeled off the reasons why he agreed with Trump’s decision to exit: there had not been enough debate or study of its potential economic impact, the measure had never come before Congress for a vote and China and India should be forced to make greater cuts.

“We needed a better deal for the world and other countries to step up and do more, more transparency and debates, and a vote here in Congress,” Zeldin said. “That is in the best interests of all our constituents. Hopefully, we can agree on the numbers and a process going forward, and we can work together on a bipartisan basis.”

But no bipartisan effort would ever emerge in Congress to deal comprehensively with the need to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution as aggressively as scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic climate risk. Zeldin, like all Republicans in Congress, voted against the legislative solution that the Biden administration hit upon, the massive incentives and subsidies for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The future of the IRA is now unclear, with Trump about to regain the presidency and Republicans poised to take control of Congress. And the other crucial part of Biden’s climate agenda—regulations on vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas industry—are on the chopping block. Zeldin has been given the axe.

Zeldin, a native of Suffolk County, became one of the youngest attorneys ever in New York State at the age of 23. He then served four years on active duty in the US Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006, and holding roles as an intelligence officer, a prosecutor, and a magistrate. Zeldin continues to serve as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.

In 2020, he talked about the damage that Superstorm Sandy did in his district eight years earlier when he spoke out in favor of water resources development legislation that later became part of the omnibus budget bill Congress passed and Trump signed.

“The widespread devastation emphasized the dire need to ensure our communities were better prepared for the future,” Zeldin said, speaking in favor of prioritizing and increasing spending limits for dredging and coastal storm risk management projects along the Long Island coast.

Zeldin also helped lead a long and ultimately successful effort to preserve Plum Island on Long Island Sound, which has become a key habitat for birds, seals, fish and coral. The federally owned island had been at risk of being sold off for development.

He was one of 12 Republicans who voted with the majority of House Democrats in 2019 in favor of a ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, a measure that the Senate never acted on.

But there were limits to Zeldin’s advocacy of coastal protection. He unsuccessfully sponsored legislation in 2016 that sought to block presidents—in particular, Obama—from creating any national monuments in the exclusive economic zone along the coasts of the United States. “I do this on behalf of commercial fishermen on Long Island and throughout the nation who, like so many other hard-working Americans, are increasingly under assault from the executive overreach of this administration,” Zeldin said at the time.

Over his four terms in Congress, from 2015 to 2023, Zeldin generated a pro-environmental voting record of 14 percent, according to the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV. That’s a high score relative to other House Republicans (their average was 4 percent in the last Congress), but environmental advocates said it signaled a lack of concern over the issues that he would be in his purview at EPA.

“Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during the campaign,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs. “During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe and the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change.”

If Zeldin’s past statements are any guide, he is likely to vow to protect clean air and water, even while touting the economic benefits of expanded fossil fuel development.

“We all have constituents who want access to clean air and clean water,” Zeldin said before his 2019 vote against holding Trump to the Paris Agreement goals. “It is something that, whether you are representing a district in Flint, Michigan, or you are in Tampa, Florida, or the east end of Long Island, we all want to advocate for that for our constituents.”

When he ran against Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 in his bid for New York’s top office, Zeldin advocated overturning the fracking ban that had been enacted under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If New York would reverse the Cuomo-Hochul ban on the safe extraction of resources under many parts of the state, jobs will be created, energy costs will go down, communities will be revitalized, and our state can prosper again,” Zeldin posted on Twitter during his campaign. 

Zeldin lost, but garnered more votes than any Republican who ran for the state’s top office since former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller 50 years earlier. Maisano said that message apparently resonated with many New Yorkers, who live on the same geological formation, the Marcellus Shale, as their neighbors to the south.

“In many cases, the fracking ban in New York has been a scourge, because Pennsylvania is reaping the benefits and New York is not reaping anything,” Maisano said.

Trump, who is now seeking to lift restrictions on all oil and gas development in the nation, said Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Trump, who once frequently called climate change a “hoax,” but dropped that rhetoric before his 2016 presidential run, has honed a message on environmental protection that has allowed him to successfully campaign on a pro-fossil fuel agenda at a time when polls showed swing voters preferred clean energy and climate action. In Zeldin, Trump has found someone to lead that agenda who is skilled at the same kind of messaging.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An Alabama mining company is taking final steps toward a major buildout of its operations in the central part of the state. 

The expansion, which is proposed to include the mining of federally owned coal, comes in the wake of a settlement over the company’s environmental record and as its mines continue to be cited by regulators for alleged safety violations. 

The project’s fate has become a litmus test for the Biden administration, which has moved to phase out mining of federal coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Warrior Met Coal, based in Brookwood and one of the largest producers of metallurgical coal in the United States, is nearing regulatory approval for expanded operations at its Blue Creek facilities between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, according to corporate filings.

The project would be among the largest recent expansions of coal mining in Alabama, expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent.

If approved by state and federal regulators, the project would be one of the largest expansions of coal mining in Alabama in recent years, with the new facilities expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent. Public financial support for the facility and its export of coal to overseas markets for use in steel-making may top $400 million. 

The project is set to use the destructive longwall mining method, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses as wide as 1,000 feet, extracting coal from an area that can extend well over a mile. The rock ceiling, called “overburden,” then collapses behind the cutting tool. When the ceiling of the mine collapses, the ground above the mine sinks, sometimes by several feet, even though it may be hundreds of feet above the mine.

This subsidence, or sinking of land, caused by longwall mining can lead to serious surface impacts, such as damage to buildings and draining of creeks and ponds, as well as increasing risks related to methane escape. Oak Grove, a small community about 25 miles southeast of Warrior Met’s expansion, has become an ominous example of those impacts, with residents outraged by closing businesses, undermined homes and a fatal home explosion atop the mine. 

Unlike the operation in nearby Oak Grove, however, Warrior Met’s expansion at Blue Creek may also include the extraction of publicly-owned coal managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. 

In Alabama, as in many other states, so-called “mineral rights”—the right to, for example, mine for coal under one’s property—have been separated from surface ownership over time. One person or entity can own a surface property under Alabama law while another person or entity can own the rights to all of the resources below that same piece of land, a situation known as a “split estate.” In significant portions of Alabama, for example, the federal government retains mineral rights despite private land ownership on the surface. 

BLM announced in April that it would conduct an environmental assessment related to Warrior Met’s proposal to mine 14,040 acres of federal minerals underlying privately owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Warrior Met’s applications to lease the coal rights propose to extract approximately 57.5 million tons of recoverable public coal reserves, documents show.

In July, the Biden administration announced that the federal government plans to phase out coal leasing in Montana and Wyoming, a decision lauded by environmentalists and criticized by industry representatives and right-wing politicians. Now, Biden must decide whether his administration will adopt the same policy concerning federally-owned coal in Alabama. 

According to records from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal underground mine regulator, the Blue Creek facility is regularly fined for safety violations. Records show that just this year, employees of Warrior Met and their contractors inside Blue Creek No. 1 have been cited 76 times for safety violations, 22 of which were labeled “significant or substantial.” In each of these 22 cases, federal inspectors found “a reasonable likelihood the hazard…[would] result in an injury or illness of a reasonably serious nature.” The violations pertained to mining coal through private, not federal, mineral rights.

Warrior Met has also been the target of litigation over its environmental record. In September, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, an environmental group founded to protect and restore the Black Warrior River and its tributaries, settled a suit with the company over a leaking coal slurry impoundment at Warrior Met’s No. 7 Mine in Brookwood. The riverkeeper had documented nearly two dozen distinct leaks from the coal waste pond in the year before the suit was filed, the organization’s lawyers wrote in a court filing earlier this year. The settlement agreement, approved by a federal judge on Sept. 18, requires Warrior Met to limit and monitor leaks from the site, pay $250,000 to the Freshwater Land Trust for a conservation project and reimburse the nonprofit for its legal fees. 

“This case is a textbook example of why citizen suits are a critical enforcement mechanism when governments fail to enforce the law,” Eva Dillard, a staff attorney with Black Warrior Riverkeeper, said in September. “We are pleased that [Warrior Met] was willing to take responsibility for the problems at Mine No. 7…”

Public officials have already made major commitments to Warrior Met related to its planned expansion, including both infrastructure investments and tax abatements. 

The project would receive an estimated $26.5 million in total tax breaks from Tuscaloosa County.

In March, Gov. Kay Ivey announced that, with the support of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the Appalachian Regional Commission would provide $500,000 in taxpayer funding to install public water service to the proposed Blue Creek mine site. 

“Access to dependable local water service is essential to attract and grow new business and jobs,” Ivey said at the time. “I am pleased to support this grant to extend water service to support Warrior Met Coal’s expansion in west Alabama.”

Warrior Met also managed to secure a $26.5 million tax abatement from the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority before the project began initial moves toward construction in 2020. 

At the time, a breakdown of the tax incentive estimated that Warrior Met would receive $18 million in tax breaks during the project’s construction and $8.5 million over a decade afterward. 

“This project represents a significant investment in our community by Warrior Met Coal,” said Mark Crews, chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority, “but also represents valuable job opportunities for our citizens for several decades to come.”

The coal produced at Blue Creek is metallurgical coal, most commonly used in the production of steel. Nearly all met coal extracted in Alabama is shipped overseas to places like China and South America through the Port of Mobile, according to federal records. 

When it comes to campaign messaging, Kamala Harris’ past as a prosecutor has served as both a strength and a liability. As a first-term senator from California, her rigorous cross-examination during the confirmation hearings of several Trump appointees—including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt—raised her profile and put her on the political map.

At the same time, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, criminal justice advocates criticized her prosecutorial past. Memes declaring “Kamala is a cop” circulated on social media and were picked up by bad-faith detractors who Harris saw as attempting to “distort” her record. Throughout her campaign, she struggled to reframe her résumé until, finally, she shut down operations in late 2019.

But all that changed last month, shortly after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed her as his heir apparent. At that point, the vice president wasted no time leaning into the “prosecutor” label she earned as a lawyer in the courtroom, district attorney, and California’s attorney general to position herself in opposition to the former president, GOP presidential candidate, and convicted felon Donald Trump, who last May was found guilty on 34 counts related to hush-money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

His “type,” notably, included climate sellouts. She described that during her stint as district attorney, she created “one of the first environmental justice units in our nation” to prosecute polluters. “Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago,” she continued, “and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution.” She, Harris argued, was the anti-Trump.

It was a noticeable shift in tone from just five years ago, when Harris fought to stand out in a crowded Democratic primary. Of the more than 20 candidates vying to take on Trump in 2020, including Harris, most supported achieving net-zero carbon emissions, a carbon tax, and the newly introduced Green New Deal, a resolution to slash greenhouse gas emissions that has yet to pass in a divided Congress.

“Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.”

At the time, with no climate debate on the books, Harris joined Mother Jones, the Weather Channel, and Climate Desk for a series of conversations with 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls that became part of a one-hour Weather Channel special, “2020: Race to Save the Planet.” She said that she planned to use the Department of Justice to prosecute “crime[s] against the environment” and go after fossil fuel polluters. “Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook,” Harris said at the time, “but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether this is still part of her platform, or what “serious penalties” meant, specifically.)

As my former colleague Rebecca Leber wrote in 2019, when Harris was head of California’s Department of Justice, she did indeed sue major oil and gas companies. But the environmental justice unit at the San Francisco DA’s office—one of the first in the country, Harris often notes—might not have been all that she claimed it to be. As Grist reported last month, under Harris’ leadership, the unit prosecuted some companies including U-Haul for unlawfully disposing of hazardous waste, among other charges, and brought a few lawsuits against low-level offenders. In terms of the major polluters in the region, her office reportedly failed to pursue them.

As vice president, however, she served in the most climate-forward administration to date. In 2021, the White House announced plans to target at least a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, part of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement, which former President Donald Trump famously backed out of during his tenure.

In 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in fighting climate change ever passed by Congress. And, as Grist noted, Harris represented the Biden administration at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where she promised a $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund to support developing countries in the fight against climate change. The administration’s list of climate achievements is so long, Harris said in March at a conference of climate activists, that her husband, Doug Emhoff, jokingly describes it as a “CVS receipt.” “We could just go on and on,” she said. As of this week, more than 350 environmental justice advocates and politicians—including former presidential climate envoy John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy—have signed a letter endorsing Harris.

Now, with Trump as her primary opponent, Harris’ prosecutor brand might land differently. “In 2020, her past made it hard for her to break through,” my colleague Jamilah King wrote in early July. But now, “it could be exactly what’s needed.” On climate change, Trump has vowed to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act and use fossil fuels, which he described as the “liquid gold” just sitting “under our feet,” and promised to “drill, baby drill.” When asked on the debate stage last June whether he’d take “any action” to slow the climate crisis, he dodged. If Harris is the anti-Trump, her momentum among environmental voters could suggest that a climate prosecutor might be exactly what they’re looking for.