Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said President-elect Donald Trump‘s “anti-environment” nominees will face a “rude awakening” during a press conference Saturdayat the United Nations‘ (U.N.) Conference of the Parties (COP29).
Markey and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, led the Senate delegation to Baku, Azerbaijan, for the COP29 climate summit where other heads of states, lawmakers, and environmental leaders joined. Markey and Sheldon are members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
The senators both expressed fears of a second Trump administration rolling back environmental protections during the press conference. As more nominees have been announced, Trump’s environmental agenda has been brought to the forefront more.
Speaking about the slew of recent Trump Cabinet picks, Markey said, “There’s a rude awakening that the Trump anti-environment nominees are going to receive.”
He called Trump’s recent picks as part of a plan not “on appointing a Cabinet, but appointing a cartel, who will control American environmental and energy agencies.”
The Massachusetts senator also said the various appointees are “going to create an uproar across our country,” suggesting that “America did not vote to dismantle the environmental protections in our country,” at least not in the “fundamental changes in environmental law which Donald Trump is proposing, and his Cabinet members have committed to implementing.”
It is not clear what exact environmental policies Trump may try to enact, but his picks appear to favor deregulation, roll back various Biden administration protections, lower emissions standards, and potentially eradicate the electric vehicle incentive (EV). On the campaign trail Trump also sought to increase fossil-fuel production.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s team for comment via email on Saturday afternoon.
Trump has tapped former Representative Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his announcement, the president-elect said the former congressman “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” in the role. The League of Conservation Voters, meanwhile, gave Zeldin a lifetime score of 14 percent in relation to his congressional support for various environmental bills.
Trump also nominated North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as the “energy czar” and to lead the Department of the Interior, a role in which he will oversee nearly 70,000 federal employees tasked with managing the country’s public lands, natural resources and federal trust responsibilities to Indigenous tribes. The department is also in charge of conserving endangered species and other environmental efforts.
In 2021, Burgum set a goal for North Dakota to become carbon neutral by 2030. He also formed his state’s Department of Environmental Quality in 2017 shortly after being elected into office. However, Burgum also has ties to the oil industry, including by serving as a liaison between Trump and industry tycoons whom the president-elect was pushing to fund his campaign, according to a June report from The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Trump’s nominees still need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, although it is fairly rare for a pick to not be approved, and less likely for multiple.
Markey said on Saturday that climate policy under the Trump administration “is going to be one of the most turbulent political debates that we’ve seen in a generation. It is going to give rise to young people once again.”
Markey believes that Americans will not readily agree with the potential policy shifts, but instead they will draw young people out “to lobby for all the protection of all those environmental protections, and in fact, by the end of this debate, people will wonder why we are not making them [environmental protections] stronger.”
In a Saturday post on X, formerly Twitter, the senator wrote, “@SenWhitehouse and I are at COP29 because just like climate change won’t be solved by any one president, climate action won’t be stopped by any one president. We have to keep fighting for bold climate action on a global scale.”
COP29 started on November 11 and ends November 22.
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