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lee zeldin
They're Called 'Super Pollutants'—And Trump's EPA Wants to Expose You to More of Them
"EPA owes it to Americans to put people’s health first—not give hidebound corporations more time to keep using outdated chemicals," said one critic.
May 21, 2026
In a reversal of his past position and what critics are calling yet another betrayal of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign pledge, US President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his administration is loosening limits on so-called "super pollutant" hydrofluorocarbons used in air conditioners and refrigerators at the expense of the environment and climate.
Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin spun the move as a measure that will "save American families and businesses more than $2.4 billion" by revising "costly overreaching restrictions" imposed during the Biden administration "limiting the type of refrigerants American businesses and families can use."
"Today, the Trump EPA is fulfilling President Trump’s promise to lower costs and is fixing every problem we can under the authority Congress gave us," Zeldin said. "Our actions allow businesses to choose the refrigeration systems that work best for them, saving them billions of dollars. This will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices.”
Grocery prices have continued to rise during Trump’s second term, driven by the administration's erratic trade wars and actual war on Iran. Critics of Thursday's move argue that it will do little to reduce consumer costs, while increasing pollution and health risks for American families.
“It’s nice that they are paying attention to affordability, but if they want to make a difference, it’s tariffs and the Iran War," Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, told NOTUS, estimating that the move would save consumers about $2 per year.
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are called “super pollutants” because they trap far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, even though they are emitted in much smaller quantities. They were originally introduced to replace ozone-depleting chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that ravaged the ozone layer.
However, scientists soon realized that HFCs are extremely powerful greenhouse gases in their own right. As air conditioning use and demand grows worldwide, so has HFC use.
As the EPA's own website acknowledges on its "Operation: Disrupt HFCs" webpage:
HFCs are potent greenhouse gases... with high global warming potential. HFCs are commonly utilized as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, foam blowing agents, solvents, and fire retardants across residential, commercial, and industrial applications. The major source of HFC emissions is their use as refrigerants—for example, in air conditioning systems in both vehicles and buildings. Emissions occur during manufacturing, as well as through leaks, servicing, and disposal of equipment containing HFCs.
Former EPA Assistant Administrator Joseph Goffman said in a statement Thursday that "families are already stretched thin by high grocery bills and everyday expenses, and weakening safeguards on these super-polluting refrigerant chemicals isn’t going to change that."
"Even manufacturers are saying this delay likely won’t lower prices for consumers because supplies of these chemicals are already being phased down in favor of cleaner, innovative replacements," he added.
Stephen Yurek, president and CEO of the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI)—an industry lobby—warned that the "reckless" new policy could actually cause refrigerant prices to increase.
“This rule works against basic supply and demand,” Yurek said. “By extending the compliance deadline, the EPA is maintaining and even increasing demand in the market for existing refrigerants while supply continues to fall under the AIM Act."
The American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act of 2020, bipartisan legislation signed by Trump during his first term, directed the EPA to "phase down the production and consumption of listed HFCs in the United States by 85% by 2036" and "facilitate the transition to next-generation technologies that do not rely on HFCs."
As of this year, more than 170 countries—including the United States—plus the European Union have ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the main global agreement to phase down HFCs.
Yurek explained that "instead of falling, refrigerant prices are likely to rise, resulting in higher service costs, and higher costs for consumers."
Addressing the EPA's reversal on HFCs, Goffman said, "All this action does is slow the shift to cleaner technologies while risking continued releases of climate super pollutants and leaving families to face the much greater costs and health threats of dangerous climate change."
"EPA owes it to Americans to put people’s health first—not give hidebound corporations more time to keep using outdated chemicals," he added. "Americans deserve affordable groceries that don’t come at the expense of the strong safeguards they count on to keep our families safer, not sicker.”
The EPA move comes amid mounting calls by over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups to fire Zeldin over his agency's deregulation spree.
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Trump Blasted for 'Unconscionable' Auto Industry Giveaway That Will Worsen Pollution
“The EPA has one job, to protect the health and welfare of the American people," said one critic. "But, yet again, the Trump EPA is choosing polluters over people.”
May 15, 2026
The US Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed postponing enforcement of vehicle emissions standards enacted during the Biden administration, a move that critics warned will worsen air pollution, one of the leading risk factors for premature death in the United States and around the world.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed delaying Biden-era emission standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for two years until model year 2029, claiming that implementation of the policy meant to ensure that a majority of new light vehicles sold in 2032 were electric is "unattainable," and that Americans "overwhelmingly rejected" electric vehicles.
“Freedom is the foundation of this nation, and this includes the freedom to choose the car you drive. The American people have been very clear; they do not want EVs forced upon them,” said Zeldin, who took more than $400,000 in Big Oil campaign donations during his tenure in the New York state Legislature and US Congress, and who questions the scientific consensus on climate change.
Zeldin claimed the proposal "is projected to save over $1.7 billion" for US automakers, "providing hundreds of dollars saved per vehicle for American families," and "aims to return EPA regulations to reality, restoring consumer choice, protecting good paying American jobs, and strengthening the nation’s global competitiveness."
It will also kill people. More than 100,000 people die prematurely in the United States each year due to breathing polluted air. According to a 2024 Environmental Protection Network analysis, President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of pollution rules could cause the deaths of nearly 200,000 people in the United States by 2050.
“In its latest unconscionable act, Trump’s EPA looked at a rule intended to protect public health from toxic tailpipe pollutants while saving tens of thousands of lives, and decided it could wait," Public Citizen Climate Program deputy director Deanna Noël said Friday.
"The decision will not just cost lives; it will cost working-class people more money in medical bills, more missed days of work, and more years chained to volatile gas prices," Noël continued.
"Working families are already stretched thin. Everything from groceries to home insurance to gas is getting more expensive, with no end in sight," she added. "Delaying commonsense emissions standards will only make communities sicker and send costs higher. The EPA’s entire reason for existing is to protect public health and the environment. Yet under this administration, it has been weaponized to serve corporate interests over the American public, no matter the cost.”
According to the advocacy group Climate Power, fossil fuel industry interests spent more than $445 million during the 2024 election cycle on campaign donations, lobbying, and other efforts to bolster Trump and other Republican candidates and causes.
Responding to Zeldin's announcement, Natural Resources Defense Council clean vehicles director Kathy Harris said in a statement that “the EPA has one job, to protect the health and welfare of the American people. But, yet again, the Trump EPA is choosing polluters over people."
“Delaying these standards is going to mean more toxic pollutants spewing from tailpipes, and more soot and smog in our cities," she continued. "That means more asthma, more heart attacks, and more lung disease."
“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims to want to provide clean air and clean water, but time after time he is acting to increase pollution," Harris added. "The Trump administration’s war on our health continues unabated.”
EPA’s vehicle rollback would leave children breathing more traffic pollution for years.Delaying Tier 4 standards means more smog, fine particles, and toxic emissions from vehicles that will stay on the road for decades.EPN’s response: www.environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/20260514_tie...
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— Environmental Protection Network (@enviroprotnet.bsky.social) May 14, 2026 at 4:45 PM
Zeldin's proposal is part of a wider Trump administration push to roll back Biden’s efforts to promote electric vehicles, and serves Trump's "drill, baby, drill" energy policy. Last year, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered the cancellation of Biden-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars and light trucks
During Trump’s second term, the EPA has moved to repeal or replace stronger carbon emission limits on fossil-fueled power plants, revoked California’s ability to enact stricter vehicle emissions rules, and signaled plans to overturn the agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard.
The EPA has also revoked the long-standing “endangerment finding” that allowed it to pass climate regulation, stopped counting the monetary value of reducing pollution, weakened water and wetland protections, rolled back regulations limiting so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water, dramatically cut or eliminated environmental justice programs, reduced enforcement of environmental violations, dismantled advisory and scientific panels, removed all mentions of human-caused climate change from its website, and more.
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Trump's EPA Wants to Count Microplastics While Corporations Keep Dumping Them
Committing $144 million to study microplastics while subsidizing fossil fuels by nearly $31 billion a year is like trying to clean up an oil spill with a spoon while the tanker is still spewing.
Apr 14, 2026
At a time when the science is clear, and action is overdue, the Trump administration’s STOMP initiative—aimed at measuring and removing microplastics from the human body—is a convenient distraction that delays real action. We do not need more studies to understand microplastics in our bodies. We need policies that prevent them from getting there in the first place.
For years, scientists have warned that we are breathing, eating, and drinking plastic. Microplastics—which contain more than 4,200 chemicals known to be hazardous to human health—are in our blood, lungs, and unborn babies.
And while there’s something validating about the Trump administration finally acknowledging this problem, putting microplastics on a watch list is not protection. Instead, this declared "war on microplastics" is a gift in disguise to the industries driving the crisis.
MAHA Promised Safety, It Gave us Plastic Straws
“Make America Healthy Again” was a rallying cry: Take on the corporate polluters, clean up our food supply, eliminate toxic chemicals, and hold the chemical industry accountable. The MAHA Report acknowledged that microplastics are found in "the blood and urine of American children and pregnant women,” and promised action from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The problem is that the only real way to fix it is to stop it at the source. That means taking on the fossil fuel industry driving plastic production—an industry to which this administration has shown deep loyalty.
That was the promise. But instead, the Trump administration gave us plastic straws and put single-use plastics back in our National Parks. They slashed the EPA's budget nearly in half—the very agency responsible for the new microplastics plan—and fired more than 1,000 of its scientists. They dismantled the agencies that protect us from chemical disasters and exposure to harmful hazards, like lead. They ramped up glyphosate production and appointed chemical-industry lobbyists to leadership roles within the EPA. They’re also weakening the Toxic Substances Control Act and rolling back protections on PFAS in drinking water.
While EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims the administration is holding itself “to the highest standards to protect the health of every American,” it continues to gut science, weaken laws, and hollow out the very institutions responsible for protecting public health—giving polluting industries a free pass to keep producing more.
Even MAHA advocates are beginning to see through the rhetoric. In a recent letter to the EPA, they urged:“The EPA must choose whether it will uphold a chemical status quo or honor the promise to make this country healthy again. The public is watching. Families are organizing. Scientists are sounding the alarm.”
$144 Million to Understand the Problem, $31 Billion to Fuel It
Microplastics don’t just randomly end up in our bodies. They come from a system designed to produce endless plastic at any cost. That system is fueled by oil, gas, and coal. Nearly 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Committing $144 million to study microplastics while subsidizing fossil fuels by nearly $31 billion a year is like trying to clean up an oil spill with a spoon while the tanker is still spewing.
The Trump administration has put a spotlight on a serious health crisis. The problem is that the only real way to fix it is to stop it at the source. That means taking on the fossil fuel industry driving plastic production—an industry to which this administration has shown deep loyalty. As Secretary of the US DHHS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., put it on Fox News: “A lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten is that you clean up after yourself. You don't force the public to do it.”
The coming months will show whether this administration is serious about action or simply delivering lip service to a disillusioned MAHA ahead of the midterms. If the administration is really committed to making Americans healthy again, it must act where it matters: Set enforceable limits on microplastics in drinking water, restore strong chemical safety laws, halt new plastic production, rebuild the EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and revoke the red-carpet access it has granted industry within regulatory agencies.
Above all, it could truly end the war on microplastics by backing a global plastics treaty that limits production in the first place.
Because you cannot detox a body you are still poisoning.
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