The U.S. president’s hour-long tirade at the United Nations this week, which observers immediately dubbed the stupidest speech in U.N. history and the dumbest climate speech of all time, left little doubt that this administration is choking us in a fossil-fuel fog of misinformation. Every obvious, self-serving lie the oil industry has told over the last several decades is now heralded as official doctrine—science and evidence be damned.

In the past months we’ve seen nauseatingly many examples of federal officials doing dirty work for the oil and gas industries—and using fossil fuels’ deceptive tactics and playbook.

One of the latest and most egregious examples: this summer, the EPA announced plans to rescind its 2009 finding that excess CO2 in the atmosphere endangers human health, and thus ought to be regulated. Making that change would be disastrous for the climate and for human health (but great for fossil fuel companies), because it would weaken the legal rationale for the federal regulation of carbon emissions—an essential tool in fighting climate change. 

Indeed, the EPA indicated that its goal is to “repeal all resulting greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles and engines.” If the EPA follows through, it would also pose an immediate threat to states’ ability to regulate tailpipe emissions. The current administration has already challenged California’s authority to impose emissions standards on cars and trucks.

States that have enacted their own carbon-reduction policies, like Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act and Climate Commitment Act, will be somewhat protected from the EPA’s reckless deregulation, although Oregon Governor Tina Kotek warned that the EPA proposal “puts Oregon’s climate plan at risk… and makes communities, especially those near highways and high-traffic commercial routes, even more vulnerable to air pollution.” Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality submitted detailed comments to the EPA opposing the plan, aslongside many others.

The EPA’s justifications for proposing this action turning its back on its own scientific conclusions have been thin. In May, Administrator Lee Zeldin boasted that he would be “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion;” and this summer, the agency eagerly embraced a controversial report commissioned by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, downplaying the risks of climate change.

One-sided and riddled with basic errors, the report was quickly rebutted by an ad-hoc group of scientists who pointed out that its five authors were all well-known climate contrarians; the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the legality of a government department issuing such a clearly biased study. In September, the nation’s top scientific review body issued a detailed review of the Dept. of Energy study, rejecting its profoundly unscientific conclusions, and submitted their findings to the EPA.

Would it matter? The EPA received more than 347,000 public comments during the comment period on its proposal. Anticipating that EPA leadership will likely ignore vast public opposition, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse announced an investigation into improper fossil fuel industry influence over the proceeding.

Beyond the EPA’s efforts to rescind the so-called “endangerment finding,” the administration is waging war on the very idea that public policy ought to be informed by science and data. Another EPA proposal would allow big polluters—oil and gas companies, coal power plants, heavy industry—to simply stop reporting on their emissions. The EPA has been collecting that data since 2010, and it provides crucial information for tracking and troubleshooting the effects of pollution. The agency has also reportedly ordered some of its scientists to stop publishing research until subjected to review by political appointees.

The president’s boldly mendacious attacks on clean energy at the United Nations this week may have been the clearest sign yet that this administration cares more about its fealty to the fossil fuel industry than it does about energy affordability, or US “energy dominance,” or anything else. Shouting at windmills was somehow charming for Don Quixote; it’s a bad look, and deeply embarrassing, for the American head of state.

Meanwhile, scientists are pushing back against the administration’s rejection of climate science and open inquiry. The government-hosted website climate.gov had served as a major clearinghouse for climate science until Trump officials took it offline. Now climate scientists are collaborating to maintain a similarly data-rich site as climate.us.