Is climate science actually a religion? The Trump administration would like you to think so.

Earlier this year, Lee Zeldin, Trump's administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced a broad attack on environmental regulations. A chief target of Zeldin’s EPA is the 16-year-old endangerment finding, based on a veritable mountain of scientific evidence that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health for current and future generations.

Although not a household term, the “endangerment finding” refers to the legal backbone of modern climate regulations under the Clean Air Act as it pertains to cars and trucks, power plants and oil and gas operations. Revoking the EPA’s authority to regulate these emissions, experts warn, will accelerate climate impacts like this summer’s extreme weather events, and worsen heat-related deaths and climate-induced spread of disease.

Recently, the agency began making good on plans to rescind the endangerment finding (a brief public comment period was extended to Sept. 22). Repealing a key piece of science-based policy normally requires amassing considerable counter-evidence — in this case, to show that greenhouse gas emissions do not cause or contribute to these dangers.

But Zeldin is sidestepping science, preferring religious language to facts. “The endangerment finding is considered the holy grail of the climate religion,” Zeldin states on the EPA’s website. “We are driving a dagger through........

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