President Trump campaigned on a platform of climate denial and a promise to reverse federal policies aimed at protecting the planet. But even experts have been stunned at the magnitude of the environmental protections he has unraveled and the speed with which his administration has acted.
As Maxine Joselow and I report, the swift and meticulous dismantling of climate rules we are now seeing did not happen by chance. It was set in motion by a cadre of conservative lawyers who served in the first Trump administration and spent years honing arguments to block government regulations of climate pollution.
We told the stories of four key players. Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, both high-profile allies of Trump, drafted executive orders. Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, two conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate policies, collected what they called an “arsenal of information” to undermine the scientific and legal consensus that the planet is dangerously warming and the United States must take action.
Both independently and in tandem, the four activists spent the Biden administration years charting roadmaps that a future Republican president could use to undermine established climate science and legally support the repeal of environmental rules. Those plans included Project 2025, a set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term.
A key climate rule
Their biggest victory is around the corner. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to overturn what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific determination that climate change threatens public health and welfare. By doing so, the federal government will effectively be relinquishing its authority to regulate the emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.
Even more consequentially, reversing the endangerment finding could make it harder for a future administration to reverse course and curb emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other chemicals from automobile tailpipes and factory or power plant smokestacks.
Vought, Clark, Gunasekara and Brightbill were not the only ones who pushed to repeal the endangerment finding. But documents obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group, and reviewed by The New York Times, together with interviews with more than a dozen people show the four activists were the key strategists who sought to ensure that if Trump were re-elected, he could move rapidly and with minimal interference from civil servants.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” Myron Ebell, a prominent critic of climate science, told us.
Funding the fight
Gunasekara and Brightbill sought $2 million to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. The duo also planned to solicit white papers from scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change, according to a funding pitch for the project. The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Clark has been fighting climate protections since 2005, when as a Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration he argued that the E.P.A. lacked the power to regulate greenhouse gases. He served as an assistant attorney general focusing on environmental deregulation during Trump’s first term.
During the Biden administration Clark found a professional home with Vought, also a former Trump official. Vought had launched a think tanks, the Center for Renewing America, to keep the MAGA movement alive, and Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap climate policies enacted by President Joseph R. Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Business groups initially fought the endangerment finding. But after years of lost legal challenges and public pressure to address climate change, most gave up. By 2017, when Trump first took office, hundreds of American companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, told me it was the “pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax” who kept up the fight. And when Trump won the presidential race in 2024, they knew they’d have a willing partner in the White House.
“They had the experience of being in Trump 1.0, seeing what they wanted to do, then got organized during the Biden years,” Chatterjee said, adding that they “used their time in the wild to plan, and also identify people who can execute the plan.”
Now, Chatterjee said, “This is their moment.”
Related: The E.P.A. Is Barreling Toward a Supreme Court Climate Showdown.
Journey to Antarctica
Antarctica’s best ocean explorers have whiskers and love to lounge
Ji-Yeon Cheon and a fellow behavioral ecologist, Hyunjae Chung, have spent the past few weeks tagging Weddell seals on patches of frozen sea around Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier.
As the seals dive, swim and feed over the coming months, pocket-size devices glued to their heads will log their movements and the properties of the water around them, and transmit the information by satellite when they surface.
The two doctoral candidates at Seoul National University are hoping to better understand how the warming ocean is affecting the animals’ diving and foraging behavior. The same warm water that is eroding Thwaites from below also brings up iron and other nutrients from the seafloor, helping nourish fish and other creatures that seals like to eat. Similar changes might also be underway in the ecosystems beneath melting icebergs around the glacier
“In the Amundsen Sea, especially near the Thwaites Glacier, there is fast environmental change,” Cheon said. Weddell seals are not considered a threatened species right now, but scientists still have more to learn about how the animals are responding to new conditions today and in the future, she said.
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- Congress have quietly used a funding law to try to rein in Trump on spending.
- Lutnick. at a Senate hearing, acknowledges traveling to Epstein’s island.
- A federal agency has stripped a chapter on global warming from a manual for judges.
Antarctica’s seals have no natural predators on the ice, so they are not typically inclined to fear incursions by blowpipe-wielding ecologists. Still, tagging is risky work for scientist and seal alike. — Raymond Zhong
Follow our journey to Antarctica here.
One last thing
How California is pushing to save mountain lions
For a mountain lion, the kindest intervention for a broken leg is often euthanasia. But the cub known as P-121 was getting a second chance.
Found in a roadside ditch in the Simi Valley near Los Angeles, he was one of scores of California mountain lions struck by vehicles each year. At only about five months old, he should have spent another year with his mother. But she was nowhere to be seen.
An X-ray brought good news: the break in his hind leg was clean. He would undergo surgery and remain at a wildlife rehabilitation facility for several months, until his limb mended and he was old enough to fend for himself. If all went well, he would return to the wild.
The story of P-121, who arrived at the San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center on Thanksgiving Day in 2023, offers a searing glimpse into the challenges facing the animals.
Between 2018 and 2023 alone, California added 550 miles of lanes to state highways. Populations of mountain lions in the central coast and south are so beleaguered that this week, the state is expected to declare them threatened under its endangered species law.
At the same time, one huge, concrete-and-steel fix is set to come late this year: the largest wildlife crossing of its kind in the world, a $114 million endeavor to save lions around Los Angeles. — Catrin Einhorn
More climate news from around the web:
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Reuters reports on a landmark report which finds that biodiversity loss is emerging as a systemic risk to the global economy and financial stability.
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Inside Climate News reports that initial data from a satellite shows that methane emissions from oil and gas basins across the world are far higher than official counts.
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Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
The post The Conservative Activists Behind One of Trump’s Biggest Climate Moves appeared first on New York Times.
