The head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said he wants to drive a dagger through the heart of climate change, religion and usher in America's golden age by taking actions to roll back landmark environmental regulations targeting dozens of rules that apply to things like vehicle emissions, wastewater from coal plants and air pollution from manufacturing.

The EPA isn't providing details on what exactly it wants to do with those rules.

Scale them back or get rid of them entirely.

But it has laid out a roadmap for deregulating the industry.

Administrator Lee Zeldin argues the move will eliminate trillions in regulatory costs and hidden taxes.

Experts, though, warn there's a lot at stake.

The U.S. is the second largest carbon polluter in the world and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

For more, I'm joined by former governor and EPA Administrator Christie Whitman.

Governor Whitman, I'm glad to get your insight.

For a topic like this, when we are looking at changes and rollbacks on everything from, emissions from vehicles to rules on power plants.

What do you see among these proposals that most concerns you?

For what would be the health impacts, really, for the American people?

Well, all of them, frankly, that combined with the number of employees they want to fire and actually new Jersey is one of the states that's going to be most adversely affected by this because we are so susceptible to air transport and salt.

But from West Virginia and Kentucky, if they start producing more coal down there, if we get it.

In fact, when I was governor, I could have closed down all the manufacturing in new Jersey and still had problems meeting the Clean Air Act because of transport from other states, which is why it is necessary.

Much as people hate it but have some national standards to protect our health and the environment.

And this what's happening now is just, to my mind, unconscionable.

They are.

There's a thing called, you know, let me back up.

The good news is that they can't just do it.

You can't wave a wand and say, this regulation is gone, because regulations are based on a lot of a study.

And scientific data.

So what you have to produce is equivalent scientific data on the other side that says we no longer need this regulation.

We can cut back this regulation.

You know, we've made improvements.

We've found out different things.

So that's a long process that's going to take a while, and it's going to be up to the courts to ensure that the agency goes through that process before they start to stop regulating.

I'm thinking, though, if if hundreds, thousands of workers are slashed from the agency, I mean by just de facto, then it doesn't it make it a lot more difficult to police this and and ensure that these policies are being carried out and that regulations, federal standards for the regulations are being met?

Absolutely.

I mean, that's what's behind all this.

You say you're going to roll back all those regulations.

That is going to take time.

That's not going to happen.

But what will happen is you're firing the enforcers and that's what you're doing.

And so you don't have anybody, as you so rightly point out, policing up these industries, starting to crack down when they are increasing their pollution, when they're endangering the communities.

I mean, we all have a right to clean air and safe drinking water, and that's what we're losing with this.

There's a thing called, I started to say, the endangerment finding, which there was applied to climate change.

It was found to endanger human health and the environment, which, I mean, if anybody just looks at what's happened with the weather recently, they'll say, yeah, something is happening here.

It's climate change is having an impact and it's costing us lives, livelihoods, businesses, the floods and droughts, the increased ferocity of the storms that we're getting.

They're having a huge economic impact.

It's Trump.

We need to do something about it.

And the good news is from about 1967, when the agency started to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and 74, let's say, the economy was booming.

I mean, we were the agency was enforcing environmental regulations and the economy was booming.

It's not an either or thing.

And we should be taking advantage of the fact that we can create a whole host of new jobs and continue to reduce our pollution.

I wonder how we could make sense of if, in fact, the rules making process and changing those policies does take, let's say, a couple of years and litigation, is involved as we expect lawsuits will come.

What does that do then to moving the ball forward?

I mean, a lot of what we hear from experts is that we need to do a whole lot more from where we're at to make a dent.

And so do we then stay stagnant.

I mean, does this not have a reverse effect in that way?

It does.

It rolls the ball backward, quite frankly.

I mean, if there's an endangerment finding, I'd find it against this administration because they're endangering all of us.

And the way that they're dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency.

I mean, it was clear in the first Trump administration that they didn't want it around, and they did a lot of cuts, cut back the budget.

They started strangling the agency and ignoring science.

This is just taking it finally to the extreme that they wanted.

And when you let loose, you know, not all businesses are bad.

Not all people are bad.

But there are those who could care less.

They want to make that bottom line.

They feel they have a responsibility to their shareholders or whatever their excuses, and they're killing people.

I mean, people are dying because of air and water pollution.

We've seen that.

We know it to be true.

If we start stopping, regulating and controlling some of these, emissions, we're going to be in a much, much worse place.

Former governor and EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, thank you so much for your time and all pleasure.

Good to be with you.