The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced this week that it is reversing the endangerment finding — the long-standing federal policy that greenhouse gases pose a clear and present danger to public health. It’s a gut punch. Some are calling it a “total victory” for climate deniers, as this headline states: “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.”

The EPA has been engaged in the wholescale dismantling of environmental regulations piece-by-piece for a year. The reversal of the endangerment finding means that the federal government has no regulatory interest in – indeed, has no authority to – regulate greenhouse gases, which are produced by the burning of oil, gas, and coal by cars, power plants, and industries. That’s about as close to a “total victory” as climate deniers can get.

The deniers may have “won” in the federal regulatory environment. But there is nothing “victorious” when the fruits of messianic ideology irreparably harm the American people, our natural environment, and the earth itself. The “victory” makes us less healthy . . . less competitive . . . less economically secure . . . less equitable and just.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider victory to be undermining society’s ability to limit and adjust to climate-driven disturbances . . . or jeopardizing our water supplies, transportation networks, buildings and other infrastructures from severe climate-related stresses . . . . or invidiously and disproportionately impairing the future life conditions of low-income communities . . . and on and on. You know the litany of horribles.

The macro message of the victory of denialism obscures the micro realities of effective climate mitigation and adaptation at play in every corner of America.

Whether in the form of state statutory and regulatory limitations on emissions . . . or local implementation of climate mitigation and adaptation plans, building performance standards, and energy benchmark ordinances . . . or the climate-is-everything-and-everyone approach community-based organizations and residents are taking, ensuring that climate considerations are woven into issues of housing, health, transit, or civil rights . . . the decentralization – or defederalization – of climate action is a potent long-term antidote to the myopia of the current administration.

Winston Churchill once quipped, “For myself, I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” But optimism is actually more than simply abhorring the cynical and cruel shadow emanating from our nation’s capital. Because at ground level there is a unique and wondrous mosaic of aspirations, ideas, skills, and assets capable of maintaining an upward trajectory of efforts to confront and combat climate change. That is the truth that really matters.

I don’t have to recapitulate previous EPAs’ regulatory findings, the near-unanimity of climate scientists on the causes and effects of climate change, the crystalline reports and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the day-to-day experiences of people living with unprecedented incidents of severe heat, pervasive drought, supercharged storms, rises in sea levels, and on and on. There is no serious debate: greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate, and those changes represent an existential threat in countless dimensions.

Disseminating a false narrative that serves as the foundation for compliant policy is not only the handiwork of people with an ideological axe to grind and limited intellectual appetite and/or capacity for rigorous empirical analysis, but also reflects the complete political capture of this administration by private sector actors whose financial self-interest is inseparable from being able to continue producing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions at rates that threaten the planet.

Some credit is due, I suppose. The Heritage Foundation has been pounding this nail for a very long time. The efforts over three decades of Russell Vought, Jeffrey Clark, and Mandy Gunasekara (who, a decade ago, handed Senator Inhofe the snowball he used on the Senate floor to demonstrate that climate change was a myth) to discredit and dismantle climate initiatives were formative to Project 2025. And this illustrious group fashioned and honed a narrative strategy over many years to discredit not just the message of climate change, but also the messengers – “climate alarmists” (Vought), “Leninists” (Clark), “junk scientists” (Gunasekara). They not only planned the work, but worked the plan.

But giving credit doesn’t equate to acceptance or capitulation. We and our partners will do neither. Climate change does indeed threaten the national interest, regardless of the political charade emerging from Washington. We will continue to use all our tools to ensure that we avoid the unmanageable consequences of climate change and manage those consequences that are unavoidable. The Office of Management and Budget and EPA may choose to fiddle while California forests burn and Miami streets flood, but those of us living with the consequences will follow a different path.