The hastening of ecological ruination is no longer a threat — it’s now a plan, a coming policy, a nightmare waiting to happen. Donald Trump‘s decision to nominate Scott Pruitt, a climate-change-denying animal, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, all but ensures this.

The construction of this 12.7 N.Y. Times story about Pruitt’s selection, written by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, is immaculate and horrifying. It doesn’t contain a single wasted word, and is basically a kind of projection of a death sentence. And it’s not a dream.

Remember that third-act scene in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone when Christopher Walken realizes what Martin Sheen will eventually do as President, and what…I shouldn’t complete this sentence.

Chapter and verse: “President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

“Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to ‘cancel’ the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a ‘war on coal.’

“Mr. Pruitt has been in lockstep with those views.

“’Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,’ he wrote in National Review earlier this year. ‘That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.’

“A meeting on Monday between the president-elect and former Vice President Al Gore may have given environmental activists a glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump was moderating his campaign stance. Mr. Trump told New York Times editors and reporters that he does ‘think there is some connectivity”’ between human activity and a warming planet.

“With the choice of Mr. Pruitt, that hope will have faded.”