Trump administration officially rejects climate change as something that can be addressed via regulation

Remember how he was going to end up way to the left of Hillary? Remember how it was all a big schtick? Remember how people who took what he said literally were being hysterical? I remember.

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.

And it is a knockout punch in the yearslong fight by a small group of conservative activists as well as oil, gas and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy.

“This is about as big as it gets,” President Trump said at the White House as a smiling Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency stood by. “We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding,’ a disastrous Obama-era policy,” he said.

Mr. Trump called it a “radical rule” that became “the basis for the Green New Scam,” a label the president gives to any effort to curb emissions or develop renewable energy.

Mr. Zeldin called it “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate.

At issue is what’s known as the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare.

This is the ultimate synthesis of the plutocratic imperative to destroy anything that might interfere with maximizing the shortest-term profit, with the profoundly unscientific world view of the worshipers of Confederate Jesus.

Donald Trump is the most obvious symptom of a pervasive disease.