President-elect Donald Trump is tapping Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he announced Thursday, placing a chief opponent of the Obama administration’s climate agenda in charge of implementing the nation’s environmental laws.

The 48-year-old Republican is an ardent critic of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to slash greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and has joined 26 other attorneys general in suing to block those carbon rules. Pruitt has characterized the hallmark of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda as an affront to states’ rights and violation of the Constitution.

The entire environmentalist movement is based on unearned guilt. Instead of celebrating the fossil fuel industry for how it has saved lives and made life on earth as comfortable and survivable as it now is, the environmentalist movement does just the opposite. It tells us that we should feel shame and remorse for “raping” the planet by making it more habitable for human beings. It replaces the entrepreneurial and progressive mindset of capitalism and honest science, the only way we’ll ever improve upon our existing forms of energy technology, with the command-and-control mindset of bureaucratic regulation emanating from our masters in Washington D.C. It’s a twenty-first century version of the medieval Catholic Church.

“Scott Pruitt running the EPA is like the fox guarding the henhouse,” League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski said in an e-mailed statement reacting to news of the nomination before the formal announcement.

Notice the choice of analogy. To an environmentalist, America is not a free country. It’s the equivalent of a henhouse. We are all caged animals whose energy choices are to be micromanaged by a bunch of hypocritical philosopher-kings sitting on their carbon-laden thrones in Washington DC.

Generally speaking, when the leftist media, academic and government establishment shrieks in protest over an appointment to the government, it means we have a pretty good appointment on our hands. Here’s hoping it’s true in this case.

According to the Mark Levin Show, a lot of the opposition to Pruitt stems from the fact that he dared to sue the EPA in numerous cases. And this is a problem because … ? Since when did dissension become immoral and illegal in the United States? The EPA has done billions of dollars in damage to our economy. The better solution would be to shut it down altogether. However, if we can’t have that, then appointing someone who wanted to sue the EPA is the next best thing.

By the way, we don’t need an EPA to protect the individual and property rights of citizens. We have civil and criminal courts for that. The EPA does not exist to protect property rights already upheld by state and local governments, where most such cases belong. The EPA is a form of proactive government, an activist regulatory body designed to promote and act upon highly debatable theories such as “global warming” and “climate change.” Particularly during the Obama years, that’s precisely what the EPA has become.

“For too long, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent taxpayer dollars on an out-of-control anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs, while also undermining our incredible farmers and many other businesses and industries at every turn,” Trump said at the announcement of his nominee.

I’m applauding Donald Trump loudly on this one. So too should anyone who cares about the creature comforts our advanced industrialized civilization has brought us. The EPA is at war with those comforts, and a weakened EPA is a good thing if you like being alive, healthy and comfortable.

If you don’t like fossil fuels, then to act with integrity you should divorce yourself from anything and everything brought to you by the benefits of fossil fuels. This includes, but is not limited to, the food brought to your community via trains, planes or trucks running on fossil fuels; the medicine brought to you the same way; the hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants and the home you own or rent, all heated and air conditioned with fossil fuels, and the same with your clothing and every other element of comfort the fools we install in the government demand we take for granted and evade.

It’s so easy to be an environmentalist. All you have to do is righteously roar and preach your hatred of all the things that make human life on earth rational, achievable and sustainable. Environmentalism is nothing more than the triumph of Chicken Little convincing everyone that the sky is indeed falling, and the only way to prevent this is – you guessed it — by giving money and unlimited, arbitrary power to the government.