Sean Rameswaram

Summer's around the corner.

Heat waves are going to be freaking us out.

It's as good a time as any to check in on climate change here at Today Explained from Vox.

So let's start with the EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency was signed into existence by a Republican, Richard Nixon.

Can you believe?

This was way back in 1970 when it was okay for the right to care about the planet.

After a massive oil spill off the California coast, there was a ton of movement around environmental stewardship in this country.

We had our first Earth Day, the Clean Air Act passed with only one person in all of Congress voting no, and that same Congress, along with Tricky Dick, created the EPA.

56 years later, in this Anthropocene era of ours, another Republican administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the EPA, all while we civilians contend with the effects of human-caused climate change.

That story is coming up on the show today.

Elizabeth Colbert is into environment.

We asked her on Today Explained because she recently wrote a big old doozy for The New Yorker called Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin?

It opened with a story.

several dozen, we're not sure exactly how many at this point, employees of the EPA signed a letter addressed to the administrator, Lee Zeldin, objecting to much of what he was doing, objecting to what they saw as the overly partisan nature of his leadership, objecting to his plans to eliminate the EPA scientific division.

And they, according to people I spoke to, sort of didn't expect much to come of this letter.

But in fact, what did occur was when they presented it to him, there ensued a sort of electronic manhunt and they searched after and everyone that they could identify, and that was about almost 150 people, they placed on administrative leave.

And several of them, very senior people, were fired.

How does Lee Zeldin become someone on Trump's radar?

He was a big, big Trump supporter during the first impeachment inquiry.