Harmful pollutants have an ally in Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, who on Wednesday delivered yet another impassioned diatribe in defense of toxic emissions.

I previously wrote about Zeldin’s bizarre defense of cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” and his absurd claim that they have been unfairly maligned. And on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s EPA chief doubled back on his literally toxic musings in a rant on Fox Business in which he said that carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas widely known to be present in fuel emissions that are the driving forces of climate change — has merely gotten a bad rap from past Democratic administrations. He said this in defense of his push to rescind and ignore studies from the Obama administration that warned of the impact that carbon dioxide emissions have on climate change.

“They’ll say that carbon dioxide endangers public health, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and they’ll never talk about anything that is good or important about it,” Zeldin said.

That’s simply not true, as you can tell from this elementary video released by the EPA during the Obama administration explaining that some greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are necessary for sustaining a healthy environment but that — crucially — humans burning fossil fuels that create carbon dioxide are driving climate change and its resultant environmental catastrophes.

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Zeldin went on to falsely suggest there’s no scientific evidence showing carbon dioxide emissions contribute to negative public health outcomes — another demonstrable falsehood, one that is even contradicted by the department he now leads.

In times like this, it’s helpful to remember that Trump essentially vowed during his 2024 presidential bid to give Big Oil executives — key culprits behind the world’s climate woes — whatever they wanted politically in exchange for their financial support. I imagine performances like Zeldin’s on Wednesday are what he had in mind: shamelessly willful climate ignorance from the administration in service of a pro-pollution agenda.