The New York Times reports:

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.

For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels.

By repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to add up to 18 billion metric tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year.

The added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055, the group said. [Continue reading…]