Image by Marcin Jozwiak.

“Trump’s EPA to repeal core of greenhouse gas rules,” was the Reuters headline this week as Lee Zeldin, chosen by Donald Trump to be administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, announced what Reuters said “will rescind the long-standing finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, as well as tailpipe emission standards for vehicles, removing the legal foundation of greenhouse gas regulations across industries.”

“Zeldin announced the agency’s plan to rescind the ‘endangerment finding’ at a truck factory in Indiana, alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and called it the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” reported Reuters.

The move was anticipated.

As an article in the March issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, the largest environmental organization in the U.S., related: “The Trump administration has announced its first step toward trying to revoke one of the most consequential legal standards in the United States for acting on planet-heating fossil fuel emissions. Sixteen years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency issued its landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that greenhouse gases heating up the planet threaten public health and welfare. Two years earlier, the Supreme Court paved the way for that finding with a determination that the EPA has the authority to limit the emissions of those gases through federal regulation.”

“Now,” it continued, “the EPA, under Donald Trump, is trying to undo its own authority to take that action.”

Zeldin “is ready to lead” a “far more radical retreat on climate change” than made during Trump’s first term as president, it said.

Zeldin had just announced, the piece noted, that the EPA “will undertake a ‘formal reconsideration’ of its 2009 endangerment finding, which underpins the agency’s legal obligation to regulate carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The EPA also announced that it intends to undo all of its prior rules that flow from that finding, including limits on emissions from automobiles and power plants alongside scores of other rules pertaining to air and water pollution.”

Zeldin had declared in his announcement: “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

”Climate advocates reacted with outrage,” the piece by Dana Drugmand went on. It quoted Joanne Spalding, legal director at the Sierra Club, saying: “Instead of protecting communities reeling from the havoc caused by climate disasters, Trump and Zeldin seek to shatter the foundation that undergirds our climate safeguards. Sierra Club has been expecting and preparing for this unlawful action, and we will use every legal means available to challenge it.”

The move to repeal the “endangerment finding” was a focus of a late February New Yorker magazine article by Bill McKibben, a leader in challenging climate change. He wrote “the reversal of the long-standing federal position” as Zeldin “recommended….would be truly and deeply disgraceful—not just climate denial but basic-science denial…true ‘1984’ stuff…equivalent of ‘War is peace’ and ‘Freedom is slavery.’” It would be “an explicit repudiation” of the understanding of “the role of carbon in our atmosphere.”

Further, McKibben wrote, the move is “entirely predictable” as Trump “has said that climate change is a ‘hoax’ and a ‘scam.’ So Zeldin could have been in little doubt about what he was supposed to do.”

What has been anticipated has happened—and is happening.

As a journalist based on eastern Long Island, living in a Congressional district represented by Zeldin, a resident of a community named Shirley for the real estate man who developed it after........

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