In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States. But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter. Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives. The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show. Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009. That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.

In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution. Unlike the swings in federal policy that have become routine when administrations change hands, getting rid of the endangerment finding could hamstring any future administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. “We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades. Mr. Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark, Mr. Brightbill and Ms. Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump administration has largely followed. “No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said. Funding an ‘Arsenal’ When the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding under President Barack Obama, conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle it. But as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow, many corporations withdrew from the battle. By 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office, hundreds of U.S. companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change. Editors’ Picks Sullen and Sunburned: The Tradition of Castaways at the Movies The Elusive Beef Cut Some Chefs Can’t Resist A Reprieve for Veterans Applying for V.A. Mortgages Even Mr. Trump’s top advisers at the time rejected the most extreme demands of those who wanted to challenge the science. Days before Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, his E.P.A. denied a petition from Mr. Ebell’s group to reconsider the endangerment finding. “There just wasn’t an appetite among any of the institutional crowd,” said Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House on energy issues during Mr. Trump’s first term. Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years. One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, the set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Mr. Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Justice Department’s environment division during the first Trump administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/climate/endangerment-finding.html