The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, where he will be charged with executing President Trump’s orders to dismantle major environmental regulations, and possibly parts of the 55-year-old agency itself. The Senate voted 56-42 to confirm Mr. Zeldin, a former House member with little experience in environmental…
The newly confirmed transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, signed an order on Tuesday seeking to roll back key fuel economy standards set by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The order is the latest effort by the Trump administration to roll back initiatives introduced by the Biden administration aimed at promoting electric vehicles and reducing greenhouse gas…
For years, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have tried to overturn one of the most important federal rulings in the history of climate policy: the one that requires the government to limit greenhouse gases. They lobbied. They sued. And so far they’ve failed. But in President Trump, they have a new ally in…
President Trump is stocking the Environmental Protection Agency with officials who have served as lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries, many of whom worked in his first administration to weaken climate and pollution protections. Lee Zeldin, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the E.P.A., has little experience with environmental policy. He will be…
At the height of the Los Angeles County wildfires, atmospheric concentrations of lead, a neurotoxin, reached 100 times average levels even miles from the flames, according to early detailed measurements obtained by The New York Times. Levels of chlorine, which is also toxic at low concentrations, reached 40 times the average. The spiking levels underscore…
Toyota Motors’ trucking unit has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $1.6 billion in civil and criminal penalties for fraudulently concealing excess emissions from diesel engines sold in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday. For more than a decade, Hino Motors, a Toyota subsidiary, submitted false testing data to…
Of all the government agencies that President-elect Donald J. Trump has threatened to shrink or eliminate, perhaps none has been a greater target than the Environmental Protection Agency. During the first Trump administration, the nation’s top regulator of air and water pollution and industrial chemicals saw its budget slashed, leading to an exodus of employees…
Armed with two garden hoses hooked up to a sputtering tap, Matthew Craig battled fire and smoke to save his house from the onslaught of flames that devastated much of Altadena, a once leafy corner of Los Angeles County. The wind felt like dragon’s breath, he said, and “we were all eating smoke.” But even…
California has withdrawn requests that the Biden administration allow the state to enact limits on pollution from trucks, locomotives and ferries that are more strict than federal standards, on the expectation that the Trump administration would revoke them. The move will leave the state, which has become a global leader in the fight against climate…
It kills more people each year than car crashes, war or drugs do. This invisible killer is the air pollution from sources like cars and trucks or factory smokestacks. But as wildfires intensify and grow more frequent in a warming world, the smoke from these fires is emerging as a new and deadly pollution source,…
