The promise of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is deeply at risk, if not already shattered by current Trump administration policies. Nine months into 2026, the Vineyard has experienced a panoply of weather extremes: a long, serious drought; a double-barreled blizzard in February; exceedingly high temperatures and floods on the Fourth of July weekend; smelly and eye-watering smoke from Canadian wildfires in July and August; rip tides leading to a father’s death trying to save his sons in August. And now the Island faces the height of the hurricane season as we move into September and October.
Worldwide, things have not been better. Devastating cyclones in Hawaii, wildfires in
Nevada and southwestern France, extreme temperatures in Europe that killed an estimated
35,000 people over four heatwaves, and disastrous floods in Nepal leaving, at this writing, more than 1,000 killed, and 3,916 missing. According to the Guardian, “The World Health Organization said in May that heat-related mortality in its European region had increased by more than 30 percent over the past 20 years, and was on course to climb significantly as a result of the climate crisis and population aging.”
This condition has produced the new normal. Most Americans attribute these extremities to climate change: According to the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, “Extreme climate events are mounting for Americans throughout the country. About three-quarters of Americans say they experienced unusually hot days this year. About 40 percent experienced severe storms, 35 percent experienced flooding, 32 percent experienced droughts and water shortages, and nearly a quarter experienced a wildfire.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Harken back to New Year’s Day 1970, when President Richard Nixon declared that the U.S. must “pay its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.” By the middle of that year, he proclaimed his intention to ask Congress to create the EPA. On its website, the agency lays out its goals, none of which it seeks to achieve anymore.
Here are just the first four: The “EPA works to ensure that Americans have clean air, land, and water; national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information; federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively, and as Congress intended; environmental stewardship is integral to U.S. policies concerning natural resources, human health, economic growth, energy, transportation, agriculture, industry, and international trade, and these factors are similarly considered in establishing environmental policy.”
Yet, under Lee Zeldin, a politician and lawyer who currently serves as the current EPA
administrator, the agency has failed to advance any of these goals. For New Yorker science writer Elizabeth Kolbert, as Trump administration’s polluter in chief, Zeldin has “rescinded regulations, cut or eliminated departments, and terminated the jobs of many scientists.” Trump, she says, calls him “our secret weapon.” In short, despite the charge Congress gave to the EPA, Zeldin sides with the polluters, and we are living with the dire consequences.
For President Trump as far back as 2012, the idea that climate change is occurring is a “hoax … created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” His goal is to bolster the fossil fuel industry at the expense of alternative sources of energy, such
as solar and wind. In February this year, the New York Times reported that he deleted the longstanding scientific finding that climate change is a threat to human health and the environment by terminating “the federal government’s authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.”
A New York Times report stated that the EPA would no longer limit the production of carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists have long found to be superchargers of “heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather.” And the construction of expensive, huge energy-drawing data centers to power artificial intelligence and other uses are also impactful. According to Penn State University, “One of these [centers] can use the same amount of electricity daily that a small or medium-size city, around 80,000 houses, would use daily.”
So this is the predicament that we on the Island now find ourselves in. The EPA no
longer lives up to its own promise. The Environmental Defense Fund predicts an additional 58,000 premature deaths because of the elimination of these regulations to control pollution. This leaves the burden on each of us to do whatever we can to control climate change as best we can. We can install solar in our homes, or purchase hybrid or electric vehicles. We can use less water and conserve more land for future generations.
We could also purchase energy-saving appliances for our homes. On the other hand, they may be hard to find: The New York Times reports that last May, the Trump administration repealed 47 energy regulations that governed “energy and water conservation standards for a long list of electric and gas appliances.”
Jack Fruchtman, who lives in Aquinnah, is a longtime conservationist.
