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I'm David Azhar.

What's going on with the Environmental Protection Agency?

Not everyone is liking the new EPA.

Many Democrats, liberals, progressives, environmentalists, scientists.

Well, they're livid over the regulatory agencies new pollution standards.

However, to be fair, many others Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, conservative media folks, they're all applauding the new changes.

For some context, in February 2026, the Trump administration basically repealed a lot of climate change policy here in the US.

As a president began his efforts to keep his promise to deregulate the new Lee Zeldin led EPA.

Although certainly this is going to be a court battle, most likely for a while, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, several prominent environmental and public health groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration's repeal of, quote unquote, greenhouse gas endangerment findings, with the repeals also loosening restrictions on, say, for example, cars, trucks, power plants and gas operations.

Those kinds of things.

Now, critics say Trump's decision weakens the EPA and the agency's authority to regulate climate pollution, all the while endangering the Clean Air Act.

And yet many Trump proponents say, hey, listen, this helps revive the oil and energy sector and saves Americans much needed money.

And this is something great.

Joining me now to discuss this complex situation.

Our two guests who, safe to say, have very differing opinions.

Ed ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, based in Orange County, California.

This is the organization which editor so cofounded in 2013.

And joining the panel is Kathleen Hetrick.

Kathleen is an engineer.

She leads the sustainability department for the California region of the global company Burro Happold.

And Kathleen is also a Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Fellow.

Thank you both for being here.

Eddie.

Kathleen, just to begin, before we get to all the issues, can each of you just take a few seconds to explain your respective organizations?

And then we get to all of the questions.

Ed yeah, sure.

The California Policy Center is sort of a libertarian slash conservative think tank.

Were based in Southern California.

We do analysis and policy recommendations, mostly having to do with the state of California.

One of our areas of focus is energy policy.

Caffeine.

What is the borough Happold company?

Yeah.

So Borough is a global engineering and consultancy firm.

We specialize in designing and upgrading new buildings, made processes and helping cities think about the future.

So, Kathleen, let's begin with all the issues.

A lot to talk about as you both know all too well.

And give me a few seconds to sort of set the stage here.

There have been some mega key climate deregulation actions in 2025.

And here in 2026 at the Trump administration has enacted.

I'm just going to rattle off a few so we can begin the discussion.

They obviously rescinded those Obama era findings at greenhouse gases threaten public health, some of the vehicle emission standards and all that fuel economy standards.

They were repealed.

Obviously, automakers were previously forced to adhere to all of these in the hopes of reducing air pollution.

The Trump administration began changing some of the Biden administration Clean Air Act regulations on things like methane emissions from and gas operations, and the EPA is now trying to change some of the standards for the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

So these Trump actions are part of what has kind of been dubbed powering the Great American Comeback Initiative.

Obviously, it's in the hopes of maximizing domestic energy production as well as obviously cutting compliance costs.

Editor why is this a good thing in your opinion?

Well, I think we should differentiate between climate regulations and regulations that apply to genuine.

What I would consider to be genuine pollution, I think regulations that have to do with particulates and carbon monoxide and mercury and, you know, all kinds of there's a whole litany of genuine pollutants that I don't think there's a lot of serious debate over the fact that we need to regulate those.

But I would take the position, and I don't really like to paint this as a black and white sort of position.

But if I had to pick a, you know, an extreme, I would say we should just get rid of every climate regulation there is.

I think it's caused nothing but harm, both economically, obviously, but also environmentally.

A lot of the things that are happening in the world, in the United States in pursuit of net neutrality and climate change are just wreaking havoc on the environment.

We can go into all kinds of examples, if you wish.

Yeah.

Give some of those examples and we'll gets Kathleen in a moment.

Well, when it comes to climate regulations affecting the economy, it's not just fuel, it's housing, transportation, agriculture, land use.

Everything that we touch basically has.

We've developed this incredible carbon accounting industry.

And it's a I think it's really taking away some of our attention to more urgent environmental problems in the world.

But it also has had a stunting effect on housing.

For example, it's considered that we will generate greenhouse gas if we have so-called suburban sprawl.

You know, in California, there's a state that's only 5% urbanized.

So vast expanses of open space in California that we can't develop.

People don't really generally, especially people that want to have families, don't want to live in densely populated cities.

They like suburbs.

The polling that suggests that that's not true.

Or generally polls that say, if you could have, what could you afford?

Not what would you prefer?

And of course, people prefer to buy things they can afford.

And if the only thing left is a townhome on a 10th of an acre that's got common walls with all of your neighbors, that's in no yard.

That's why.

And then we don't have children and we don't have families, and people just don't like that.

And the housing industry is really almost been destroyed in California because of climate regulations that have maybe a peripheral connection to actually producing greenhouse gas.

If you actually think greenhouse gas is a problem, but the problems with the environment, and that translates to energy and transportation and everything we touch and we see the same thing, this micromanagement, hyper regulatory environment based on climate change, groups like Greenpeace, depending this sort of thing, it's it's there's so much evidence that this is very harmful and the amount of energy you're going to get from them is negligible compared to the amount of impact that they have.

So that said, with that said, and we're going to get back to that in a moment.

And Kathleen, obviously you disagree.

Certainly to a degree with what it is saying.

But talk about in your opinion, why as I'm sort of terming at the new EPA, it's not a good thing.

Yeah.

I mean, and I definitely agree with Ed on, you know, we really want to decouple climate pollution versus sort of like the health air quality pollution that, you know, has been around, you know, well-regulated.

But I think what happens here is something that we see on the engineering side is a is a term called carbon tunnel vision, where as the sustainability consultant, if I'm looking only at carbon, I can miss the proverbial force through the trees, right?

I might not be thinking about the jobs or the health aspects, or is it locally made?

And I think, you know, what's come with these?

EPA deregulation is the same thing.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You know, some of the climate regulation really does a good job of protecting our health.

Also does a great job of bringing an investment into clean steel, local battery, you know, manufacturing.

And I think what you know, we've seen from the administration is, you know, through their combination of tariffs and made in America, you know, by America, how can we think about protecting our health, creating new jobs, bringing clean manufacturing back to our cities and our rural communities so that we can reduce the cost of housing if we throw out all the regulation.

No one wants to live next to that manufacturing.

But if it's decarbonized, it's clean and it's made with local materials, maybe even some of those biomaterials.

You know that California has such a great, you know, economy for we can really hit some of these affordability costs that we're all suffering.

Speaking of affordability, Kathleen, let's stay with you on this one.

Because obviously, as you know, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, he he had announced the single largest deregulatory action in U.S.

history, claiming the EPA is saving American taxpayers.

What was it, over 1.3 trillion, trillion dollars, Kathleen, eliminating these pollution policies, so to speak.

As you know, Trump and Zeldin, they're insisting it's a sort of a historic decision.

It kind of restores consumer choice that makes vehicles more affordable for American families.

I mean, cars and trucks cost a fortune these days.

It decreases the cost of living.

And they keep saying this deregulatory process was kind of made with tons of public comments in favor in favor of all of this, as well as Trump and Zeldin.

They said they were making sure they were well within the law of doing all of this.

So with that said, is there a case to be made that at the very least, this is definitely going to save the American taxpayers a good amount of cash, a good amount of green, when all is said and done.

Because let's let's be honest, speaking of green, going green, it's very costly, as you know.

And there is a portion of American public that says, hey, we just don't want to be forced to pay for all of this anymore.

Kathleen, what do you say to all that?

I mean, I think there there are cost savings up front with, you know, deregulatory actions.

But I would just think that we need to be careful.

We need to be thinking, are those costs being passed on to families in the forms of increased health care costs?

Right.

It costs a lot of money for families to go get, you know, IVF treatment because they're fatalities declining.

It's a lot.

It's very expensive to have childhood cancer.

I grew up with asthma and I still have asthma, and I have to pay for an inhaler and seeing a doctor every year.

You know, these health care costs are increasingly, you know, taking a chunk out of the taxpayer's pocket and is increasing concern for families.

So we have to make sure that we're not trading one upfront cost for another, hidden costs for our families.

And I think, too, it's important to consider just how you know how to regulation.

Is this the proverbial stick?

Right.

Where is the carrots in this?

How can we make sure that investment to choice, you know, folks who want to drive electric vehicles because they don't like the gas prices they're seeing, you know, that they want companies that want to invest in cleaner manufacturing.

They have those investments, those tax incentives.

So if we are replacing regulation, how do we replace it with positive, you know, applications reduce permitting requirements?

I think there's a win win here that everyone can agree on.

And the health crisis, the health issues are vital to speak of.

And obviously Kathleen is mentioning her asthma.

You know, to be fair to folks like Kathleen and so many Americans who are greatly worried about air pollution, water pollution, you know, this healthy and sustainable environment, they're all insisting that people like you forgive me for saying it this way.

People like you are killing them.

You know, they're claiming that climate change is real.

There are more natural disasters.

There are more wildfires or these massive rainstorms and the mudslides and the drought, all that.

And it's taking lives.

It's costing lives.

And they believe this is the man made sort of dirty air, dirty water, dirty environment.

They're saying, as Kathleen mentioned, it's leading to everything from asthma.

She had lung illness to heart disease and cancer.

And to mitigate all of this, you've got to have these stringent rules and regulations that sort of control pollution, control the toxic fumes, all the toxic particles of smog in the air.

And obviously now with all this deregulation, that might not be the case.

And they're claiming it's the worst thing that could happen.

And what do you say to all that aplenty?

I mean, I kind of have to go back to my original statement, which is that the we have to differentiate between CO2 and genuine pollution.

I could be mistaken, but I don't think carbon dioxide causes asthma.

I think it's all of the other bad things in the air.

And I would question, you know, going too far and deregulating any of those things.

I think in some cases we might even need more regulation.

But when it comes to CO2, in my opinion, we should have no regulation.

There's quite a bit of scientific opinion out there, scientific analysis that looks at this climate crisis looks at the data, and it doesn't indicate that we actually have more extreme weather.

What we have in most cases is more people living in places that are vulnerable to extreme weather.

You know, I'm going to give you an example real quick.

Pakistan's population 60 years ago, and I could be off by a few million here, but it was about 35 million people.

And I think now it's up to about 235 million people, you know, in 60 years.

So what did they do?

You know, they stripped all their forests for firewood, for fuel because, you know, they didn't have the and and you know, I'm digressing.

But all over the developing world, we're not getting cheap energy.

And instead they're stripping the forests for fuel and they're poaching game to, to eat because they don't have access to petroleum based fertilizer and they don't have access to natural gas for electric power, for example, Pakistan also built onto all of their floodplains.

They drained their aquifers.

They created more urban surfaces where runoff can't be controlled.

And all of a sudden you have this deforested, urbanized nation with people that are moving further and further out into the floodplains because there's so many of them compared to 60 years ago.

And you see the same thing in Bangladesh.

You know, you also have the they ripped out all of their mangrove forests on the coasts.

And that's why the, you know, maybe there is some moderate sea level rise by an inch or two.

But what's really happening is you don't have anything breaking up the tsunamis when they come in.

And you can go around the world and look at cases like this and realize that much of the catastrophes that we're seeing that we attribute to climate change are actually because there's more people living in more places that are vulnerable to extreme weather events.

The forest fires in California have become fires because we stopped logging, and we made it almost impossible to do controlled burns or mechanical thinning and forests only thin.

In one manner.

You either take the wood out or it burns our forests, or ten times 5 to 10 times dense.

Nowadays in California, as they were 100 years ago.

And as a result, the trees are stressed.

It's not because it's warmer and drier, it's because there's too many trees competing for light and nutrients and water.

So again, you can go all over the place and look at what's allegedly a climate related greenhouse gas generated catastrophe and find other, more rational explanations.

Yeah, I hear you.

And to be fair, Kathleen, to add, there is a case to be made.

I've if I had a dime for every wildfire I reported on, I probably wouldn't have to work anymore.

With that said, it is sad that a majority of all these fires are because there's not been good field brush management and all that stuff.

We all know that the state of California has been extraordinarily negligent in all of this.

Let's be honest.

Oftentimes it's not reported, Kathleen, that well, the fire began because a homeless person set their encampment on fire, or it was arson, or it was a downed power line that started the fire.

And it is true that a lot of folks in LA in leadership then say, well, it's wildfire.

And so I guess my question is this, Kathleen being fair, is it possible that climate change should not be branded as this existential threat, this catastrophic threat every second of every day?

You know, there is a large sector of the US population there, kind of, for lack of a better word, sort of war weary.

Kathleen.

They're exhausted from hearing about all this constantly.

I say that because I'm just curious, can there be a more common sense solution that is possibly not so drastic?

Right?

Is there common ground to be found in all of this?

Yeah, there's so much common ground.

And, you know, I grew up in a military family.

I moved around to lots of places in the United States, and I have a mixed political family.

And I also, you know, last year it was really tough on me personally.

I live very close to the Palisades Fire.

We almost had to evacuate.

And my family also lives in Texas, and we were only just a few miles from the catastrophic floods that happened in Kerrville.

And, you know, both of those regions, they have a lot of wildfires.

They have a lot of flooding.

These are known issues, you know, and I think the science is saying that these, you know, hundred year floods, thousand year floods are happening more often.

These wildfires are larger and larger.

And there's plenty, you know, you can chalk it up to the to the carbon and the, you know, the atmosphere.

You can chalk it up to human error.

And I think regardless, we want to come together and say, how can we provide the incentives, the investments in these local communities to do the things that, you know, that Edward said, like, yeah, let's in the Santa Monica mountains, let's find the way, the thin out the forest and the natural ecosystem in a way that, you know, indigenous folks have been doing it for centuries.

And let's use those materials for low carbon housing lets, you know, incentivize having communities have these, you know, resiliency, you know, aspect system.

So people are warned about floods.

We need this investment.

We need this cooperation with each other.

And, you know, the thing that really grounds my work is, like I said, my family is mixed political.

It makes for some interesting, you know, beach sessions.

But, you know, one of my brothers is a fireman, the other is an oil lawyer.

And, you know, one of my other siblings is a day trader.

And then there's me.

I will tell you where we all fall in the political spectrum.

Some believe in climate change, some don't, you know, but what we all care about is health, you know, what are the materials that we're putting into our flooring and is that impacting, you know, my nieces and nephews, you know, what car is my niece going to be driving around?

Is it going to, you know, be clean and safe for her?

These are the kitchen table issues that I think Americans really care about.

And I think, you know, as Edward was saying, I was not not in my head because I agree with so much of what he's saying.

And I think as a politically divided nation, we are looking for these carving ground aspects that also create jobs, create more money in the pocket books.

You know, there's got to be some kind of investment other than data centers, right?

And it's waiting for our communities.

Like, I think we're still ready for this conversation.

So I think there's so much common sense good ideas out there that we can do in California and in, you know, red states like Texas to.

You know, this is so great to hear.

And thank you for that, because we don't just try to present all arguments on this program.

We also try to find common ground solutions.

So with that said, Ed, in your opinion, what could be a more sort of common sense, common ground approach that obviously keeps the air clean, keeps the water clean, keeps the environment clean but doesn't break the bank, doesn't kill our wallets in the process.

Well, I agree with Kathleen that we have to try to find common ground, and there's always a temptation if you get involved in a, you know, polarized issue, to sort of take the black and white extreme position because it will go viral, and then you'll be famous and you'll have influencers, and you can collect money from Amazon and Meta and Facebook and so forth.

I've tried to I've tried to resist that for the simple reason that there's another goal that we should try to share instead, which is to which is to retain our credibility and have the opportunity to talk to each other and come up with solutions that work in all cases.

One of the things that we try to look at when we evaluate projects in California is, is this a water or an energy project that would be palatable to people who believe in, you know, the climate crisis?

But at the same time, it would make economic sense.

And that's, you know, they're out there.

There are examples of that, you know, and we do face a bit of a paradox, because if you don't and I'm not in favor of this, but if you create artificial scarcity and high prices, you will stimulate the capital formation that you need to make the kinds of investments that a lot of us believe have to be made, whether they're investments that are in water infrastructure, where you have to have some public role, or whether they're investments that corporations need some kind of de facto consumer subsidy because they are charging so much in order to sell, for example, EVs.

A lot of this is just let it happen naturally.

You know, I'm not EV consumer yet.

My brother in law is he has two of them.

But the next generation of EVs, that'll probably be our second car, because when it gets to where, you know, I can charge it in 15 minutes and have a 600 mile range, I'm probably going to buy one of those vehicles.

In fact, we just converted to an electric lawnmower because they finally have a price performance, you know, ratio.

That's that's adequate.

But but I really, really worry about us taking the eye off of all of these other pollution and environmental issues.

We have all kinds of threats that we should be paying more attention to than CO2, in my opinion.

We have deforestation for biofuel and biomass.

We have poaching for food, we have overfished oceans, we have aquatic dead zones because and even in the San Francisco Bay, for example, all they have to do is clean the the nitrogen out of their effluent.

They're jumping like 400,000 acre feet a year of inadequately treated sewage into the bay.

It wasn't climate change that caused the algae blooms, it was the fact that there was too much imported water that was being turned into nitrogen rich effluent that caused those algae blooms, because that's what algae feeds on.

We have lost insect mass in the ocean.

We have a big garbage patch in the ocean.

We have lost insect mass on the whole planet.

These are and the things as you talk about, Kathleen, the materials we use in building, of course we have to examine that, but we can't go to such an extreme.

You know, there are some really amazing innovations in construction.

I'm sure you're familiar with mass timber.

Mass timber can't be manufactured in California because the regulations are so strict.

They have to go up to other states or they have to import it.

These are these are solutions that we should be searching for in, in common.

And we have to recognize that all natural gas and coal constitutes 80% of the world's energy.

And that percentage has been remarkably consistent for the last couple of decades, because even as renewables, if you want so-called renewables, I think some of them are more renewable than others.

But even though the production of renewables is burgeoning very quickly, total energy uses is is increasing.

So fossil fuels and we have 30s left.

I hear you, I want to give Kathleen the final 30s final word on the program.

And then we'll have you back later this year to continue this vital discussion.

Kathleen 30s, you get the final word.

Yes.

And I think, you know, what Edward is saying all along is, you know, can we find regulatory that looks at the Copa and the carbon right.

The PM 2.5 that gets into our lungs.

The knocks the benzene, the chlorine.

Those are all the important pollutants.

If we can focus on those, you know.

And also think about the carbon pollution too.

I think we've built a lot of common ground.

And again, as I was saying, it's the investments.

How do we expand mass timber in California?

How do we expand clean manufacturing?

That's local.

Get the circular economy going.

How are we going to stay competitive and make sure that people have these good jobs and we're, you know, contributing to the economy?

I just think that we need to have, you know, people talk about the abundance ideas.

But really, I think it's how do we get this back to building in California, having a manufacturing base, and we can do it if things are clean and decarbonize through the best kinds of renewables.

Again, agree with Edward that not all renewables are created equal, but I really hope that, you know, folks on the policy side, my industry on the engineering side, and our politicians can get together and figure this out because we need a plan.

We need to do it now.

Thank you.

Thank you so very much for this great interview.

It's an honor.

Thank you guys.

Thank you so much.

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