(The Lion) — The Trump EPA is ending an Obama-era rule and other regulations that “will roll back trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes.”

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin argues the cuts will help usher in a “Golden Age” in the American economy.

Zeldin made the announcement in the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, but the move had been anticipated since Trump’s inauguration.

“We’re keeping people and the environment safe while overhauling rules that stifled our full potential,” wrote Zeldin.

In a later video, he called the repeals the end of the “Green New Scam,” a play on the Democrats’ “Green New Deal,” a much-derided moniker popularized by Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

“The Green New Deal is a jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy within 10 years,” AOC once said. “It is one of the only plans put forward which is actually in line with scientific consensus and the United Nations’ IPCC Report.”

In a video posted to X, Zeldin says the EPA’s cutting of liberal environmental rules is the largest deregulatory move in American history, consisting of 31 “historic actions” that would “power the Great American Comeback.”

One of the key rules getting the axe is the Obama-era “endangerment finding” that allowed the EPA to make up almost any rule to control the lives of Americans if the agency could make the case that it endangered the lives of Americans.

The Obama finding “is the linchpin of the federal government’s policies for what the president and I call the climate hoax,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser, according to the Associated Press.

“If you pull this out, everything EPA does on climate goes away,’’ Milloy told the AP.

For example, theoretically, the endangerment finding could be cited as a vehicle by which a Democrat administration would ban gas stoves, which was actually contemplated under the Biden administration.

More specifically, the endangerment finding said “current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) – in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

The EPA went on to call the endangerment finding a “a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and other sectors.”

It also meant energy projects had to lay out estimates for what was known as the future “social costs of carbon.” Those estimates have varied from $43 a ton globally under Obama, to $3 and $5 per ton under Trump’s first term, to $190 under Biden in 2022, according to the Cato Institute.

By the convoluted logic of the social cost of carbon math, environmentalists contended that not drilling for oil and gas on federal lands would save the country $36 billion if the social cost of carbon was pegged at $100 per ton.

Under the Biden formula it was figured – falsely – that not drilling for oil and gas would add up to more than $60 billion in savings to Americans.

Radical environmental groups such as WildEarth Guardians quickly used the social cost math to block drilling for oil and gas on federal lands by suing the Biden administration. The Biden folks quickly agreed to stop all drilling until it calculated the social cost of carbon emissions made by drilling for oil and gas in the future.

“It’s the basis of all the economically damaging rules to regulate carbon dioxide,” Myron Ebell, another former Trump transition adviser told the AP about the endangerment finding, calling the repeal “a hard step, but a very big step.”

Zeldin said the administration wasn’t going to stop protecting the environment.

“This isn’t about abandoning environmental protection – it’s about achieving it through innovation and not strangulation,” Zeldin wrote in the WSJ. “By reconsidering rules that throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants, we are ensuring that American energy remains clean, affordable, and reliable.”

Additionally, Zeldin told Trump in a recent cabinet meeting he wanted to cut the EPA’s 18,000-employee workforce by 65%.