Transcript of The Secret Plan to End U.S. Climate Regulations

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. With a single monumental action expected today, the Trump administration will eliminate its own legal authority to fight climate change. My colleague, Lisa Friedmann, has spent the past few weeks piecing together the inside story of how a small group of activists turned that once improbable goal into reality. It's Thursday, February 12th. Lisa, welcome back to The Daily.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So Over the summer, Lisa, you broke the story that the Trump administration was planning to roll back the legal basis for the entire government's ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. Just remind us what that legal basis was and why its elimination would be so consequential.

Sure. It's called the Endangerment Finding, and you can think of it like the spine of America's ability to regulate climate pollutants. Congress never explicitly told the EPA that it could regulate planet warming emissions. But in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark ruling, it's called Massachusetts versus EPA, that greenhouse gasses qualify as pollutants under the law. Because EPA is required to set limits, required to regulate damaging pollutants, the court told the agency, You need to determine whether these greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide, methane, others, whether they endanger health and welfare. Two years later, the EPA, citing a massive body of scientific evidence, came out with what is now called the Endangerment Finding, that six greenhouse gasses do pose a danger to public health and the environment.

Therefore, should be regulated.

Therefore, should be regulated. If you think of the Endangerment Finding as the spine, that is what has allowed for regulations on carbon emissions from automobiles, from power plant smokestacks, methane from oil and gas well leaks. If you repeal the endangerement finding, as the Trump administration is about to do, then there is no basis, there is no legal basis or scientific basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The government essentially gives its authority. Not to mix metaphors, but when the endangerement finding goes away, all of these regulations that stem from it fall like a house of cards.

Right. During our first conversation, when you first explained all this to our listeners, Lisa, you had told me that the efforts to eliminate the endagement finding and to fundamentally defang the legal framework behind how we regulate greenhouse gasses, all of that had unfolded behind closed doors. It was very hard to understand how it had happened and who was involved in it. But now, all these months later, you have reporting on what exactly that behind-the-scenes effort looked like, and notably, who was doing this behind-the-scenes work. Tell us about what you found.

It was pretty stunning see how quickly and comprehensively the Trump administration moved to reverse the endangerement finding. As soon as President Trump got into office, it was one of the early moves in January 2025 to tell the EPA to make a ruling on whether to reconsider this finding. What our reporting showed was this wasn't just an accident. This wasn't just years of persistence coming to fruition. That happens sometimes in Washington. This was made possible by a very small group of highly trained, conservative lawyers who had spent years working in secret to prepare for the moment when a Republican President could obliterate the government's ability to regulate climate change.

Who are these people, these conservative lawyers you're talking about?

It really starts with two people, Mandi Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill. The Green New Deal is not a serious proposal. It reads like Karl Marx's Christmas List and is a Soviet-style central planning document calling for a government takeover of the agricultural, transportation, housing, and health care sectors. Gunasekara has a very long history fighting climate policies, not climate change, climate policies. She used to work for Senator Jim Inhoff, who wrote a book called The Greatest Hoax, The Global Warming Conspiracy.

In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I asked the chair, You know what this is? It's a snowball.

He one day threw a snowball on the Senate floor in February to prove that climate change was not a thing.

That's just from outside here. It's very, very cold out, very unseasonal. Here, Mr. President, catch this.

Gunasekra, is the aid who handed him that snowball. That's one of the things she's pretty well known for in Washington. She enters the first Trump administration, where she is instrumental in pushing for the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which President Trump eventually did. During the Biden administration, she argued strenuously against policies that he put in place to reduce emissions from automobiles and power plants and the rest. From day one, he's held true to that promise to, quote, shut down fossil fuel. He and the Democrats have taken over 100 actions aimed at making it harder for oil and gas to be developed and delivered to market. We She's essentially making the argument that policies to address climate change are more harmful than climate change itself. It's not climate change that farmers nor Americans should be worried about. It's the policies being pushed in the name of climate change that stand do far much more damage. Her partner in trying to repeal the endangerement finding was an attorney named Jonathan Brightbill.

Before the Supreme Court will be the question of what limits exist in Clean Air Act Section 111 D1.

He had served in the Justice Department under the first Trump administration. Everyone we have talked to has described him as a very sharp legal mind who really knows his way around the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. The hinge issue can really succinctly be stated as follows.

Does EPA have the authority to determine the emissions rate based on what's achievable by what EPA thinks is the best system of emissions reduction, period?

And has made the argument in court that Democratic administrations have really overreached in their efforts to impose regulations to address climate change. He was essentially dealing with the downstream effects of the Endangerment Finding.

It makes your head swim to try and parse through the various clauses and instructions that are contained there.

Because of the Endangerment Finding, EPA has been dealing with a whiplash of regulations. They have been created in Democratic administrations, erased in Republican administrations, and fought in courts the entire time. Withdrawing the Endangerment Finding eliminates this situation entirely. That's what Gunasekara and Brightbell plotted to do.

How do they actually go about doing that?

In the summer of 2022, Gunasekara and Brightbell start seeking funding for a big new project. They want to create a secret operation to kill the endangerement finding. They pitched conservative organizations. They asked for about $2 million for the ability to work on scientific studies and research from scientists who disagree with the mainstream science. They would start laying out the legal case for repealing the engagement finding. All of these things were things that could be used by a next Republican President, they hoped, Donald Trump, on day one. They did eventually receive funding from a conservative organization, the The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation would go on to lead Project 2025, the blueprint for the next Republican President. And Mandy Gunasekra wrote the EPA chapter for Project 2025.

So these two lawyers, Gunasekra and Bright Bill, they are ensuring that this cause of rolling back environmental regulations, of going after the endangerman finding, that it gets taken up by a major conservative think tank in heritage with a ton of influence in Republican politics.

Exactly right. Then in tandem, we have two other lawyers, much more high-profile figures, who are working in their own right to bring down the engagement finding.

Who is that?

Russ Vot and Jeff Clark. Much better known. Much better known figures. Russell Vote, as we know, during the Biden years, starts starts a think tank of his own, the Center for Renewing America, where they were keeping the MAGA movement alive. Jeff Clark has been in the fight against the Endangment Finding for decades.

Epa, it seems to me, is too big. It's bloated on stimulus money, and it seems hell-bent on expansion.

Before there ever was an endangerement finding, he went to court to argue that the EPA doesn't have and shouldn't have the legal authority to address greenhouse gasses. It doesn't matter to EPA if it's absurd, if its regulations are going to lead to absurd consequences that inflict massive harm on the national economy. He loses that. That, from everything we have been told, is really a motivated writing factor for years with Jeff Clark, what he sees as righting or wrong.

Of course, the other thing Jeff Clark is known for, and I think a lot of our listeners will remember this, is that at the end of the first Trump term, he emerges from deep within the justice Department as an ally of President Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election, so much so that Trump briefly considers making him the acting attorney general. That so scares people at the Department of Justice that many of them threaten to quit. If it happens, President backs down. But Clark becomes known as a major election denier.

That's right. By late 2022, 2023, Jeff Clark and Russ Vot are ensconced in a row house in Capitol Hill that Vot had complained was infested with pigeons and drafting executive orders for a new president to use to eliminate climate protections. Then at the same time, Gunasekra and Bright Bill are collecting what they have called an arsenal of information to support the repeal of the endangerement finding. Sure enough, President Trump wins the presidency, three out of four of the people that we're talking about here, Bright Bill, Clark, and Vot, go back into the administration and are able to hand the President a very clear roadmap for the biggest climate deregulation in American history. That's what's being followed right now.

We'll be right back. Lisa, once a bunch of these advocates of repealing the endangerement finding end up inside the White House and in a position to actually repeal it, what's the technical What's the legal case that they make to try to do that?

Remember I told you that the Obama administration wrote the Endangerment Finding because the Supreme Court said, In order to regulate these gasses, You need to determine that these are harmful to human health and the environment. Now this administration, the Trump administration, is looking at that finding and they're saying, The science that you used is something we don't agree with, and they're saying the legal rationale is problematic.

Start with the science. Why do they dispute the science, and is it compelling?

They have made the case that the predictions that were made about the impacts of climate change back in 2009 were too pessimistic. Their evidence to support that claim is a report that five handpicked climate contrarians wrote in secret for the Department of Energy last year. It was designed to support the repeal of the Endangerment Finding, and no surprise to anyone, the conclusion was that climate change threats have been overblown.

Interesting.

What multitudes of scientists have told us are two things. Yeah, the planet is better off than what was predicted in 2009 because the international community has acted, not enough, not fast enough, but has done work towards reducing emissions. But what's also true is that every bit of emissions that enters the atmosphere leads to more warming, which leads to more health impacts and all of the things that we know continue to endanger human health and the environment. Scientists say that that research is even more ironclad today than it was in 2009. Then there's the Trump administration's legal arguments for repealing the Endangerment Finding. There's a couple. Take a step back, the Endangerment Finding, that flowed from Allah, the 1970 Clean Air Act. This EPA is arguing that the Clean Air Act only allows EPA to regulate what it calls local and regional pollutants, things like soot from industrial sources, factories, power plants, stuff that's really bad when you breathe it in. Greenhouse gas emissions don't work that way. Carbon dioxide, methane, all these gasses, they disperse into the atmosphere, they trap heat, they linger from decades to centuries, and alter the climate. So this EPA is making the argument that it just does not have the legal authority to deal with those kinds of, let's call them global, pollutants.

Interesting. Their argument is that the Endangerment Finding misunderstands the Clean Air Act, and thinks that you can regulate greenhouse gasses that, by definition, are not local. They end up in the sky. They end up far from their original source, and therefore, the Endangerment Finding is not legally sound.

Exactly.

Do lawyers agree with that argument?

They're mixed. I mean, there are some conservative lawyers who think that the EPA has a really good case to make. Environmental attorneys that we've spoken to You have said that the George W Bush administration made similar arguments to defend its decision not to issue an endangerement finding and lost. But there's another argument that's linked. Since 2009, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against environmental regulations that require big transformational changes to industry and the economy. The Trump administration saying, based on that new legal landscape and the fact that so many of the regulations that have stemmed from the endangerement finding require, in their view, sweeping technology, economic changes, They're arguing that the source, the endangerement finding, should be overturned.

Fascinating. If so many regulations that flow from the endangerement finding eventually get struck down by the Supreme Court, then the fruit of those regulations, the finding itself, should itself be seen as illegal.

Unless Congress explicitly gives the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which after decades, they have never done.

And this Congress is very unlikely to ever give it that power.

Definitely not.

Okay, so now that we understand the Trump administration's arguments here, just explain how How they're going to turn those arguments into the end of the Endangerment Finding. What do we expect the administration to do to end the finding?

What we expect is on Thursday, the administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, who has said that he plans to drive a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion, his words, will announce the end of the Endangerment Finding. But it's not the end of the story.

Meaning?

Environmental groups, states, are going to immediately sue. This will be played out in the courts over the next several years.

What do we expect will happen in the courts and just how high up in the courts is this likely to go?

Well, that's the thing. We know what the group that we've been talking about, the folks who laid out this roadmap, hope to see, and that is that this case gets before the Supreme Court. If that happens, there is a lot of hope in the conservative that the landmark climate change case, Massachusetts versus EPA, could be overturned or significantly weakened.

Their hope is that the endangerman finding ends up before the Supreme Court in such a way that a conservative majority of the Supreme Court would overturn the original Supreme Court ruling that allows the endangerman finding to have ever come into existence.

You hit the nail on the head. If that happens, A future president would not be able to reinstate regulations addressing greenhouse gas emissions unless and until Congress explicitly said, Go do that.

Let's presume for just a moment, Lisa, that our legal system does allow the endangerment finding to go away. I want to talk about the repercussions of that on the environment, on industry, and let's just start with the impact on industry that now operates under these regulations that I presume suddenly would start to go away.

Well, one thing that industry would get is the certainty that it has said it always wants. It would know that it would not face what has been a decade and a half of whiplash. Democrats come in and start to regulate power plants and automobiles and the rest, and then a Republican administration comes in and removes or weakens them. There would be a new playing field, and it would not include regulatory restrictions. The question is, will this lead to industries polluting more? We don't know. I mean, it is certainly possible that because companies have already put billions of dollars into clean technology, whether it's for EVs or pollution controls in power plants, that they will continue to do so. There's also public pressure, and companies very much care about how they are seen and whether they are stepping up to a challenge like climate change. But the reality is left completely unshackled as this EPA is about to do, we don't really know how industry will react.

Well, given that uncertainty, what would the elimination of the endangerman finding mean for the environment and for climate change, writ large? Is that suddenly now pretty much in the hands of industry?

It's such a hard question to answer. I mean, yes, and part of the reason why is that the Trump administration has already pretty effectively restricted some of the things that states can do to address climate change on their own.

What?

California is the only state in the country that can set more stringent environmental regulations than the federal government. It needs a waiver to do that. California tried to set even stricter automobile emissions rules. They had a plan to eliminate the sales of combustion engine vehicles in the next decade or so. But the Trump administration and Congress rescinded that waiver. I can't see California getting another waiver, at least during the next three years. So that really ties the hands of not just California, but other like-minded states that might want to do something very ambitious on automobiles.

So in the absence of major new state regulation and a federal government that doesn't want to regulate most of these greenhouse emissions at all, what do scientists say that the world starts to look like?

Scientists are worried. The United States is the largest historic emitter of climate change. It's the second largest just annual emitter of carbon pollution and greenhouse gasses. If the US is not doing its part, a lot of countries could start to wonder, why should they? The most important is China. That's the big fear that a lot have related to me. If the United States is successful in not just failing to reduce its own emissions, but convincing other countries that they don't need to either, scientists feel that could have a really dangerous domino effect for the planet.

Where do those dominoes eventually fall?

I mean, they fall in more severe rising temperatures and more droughts and hotter droughts, more frequent and severe wildfires, rising sea levels from melting glaciers that are threatening coastal communities. These kinds of changes also directly damage human health. Scientists tell us they damage food security, water supplies. They lead to an increase in vector-borne diseases, Lyme disease, Dengue. There's a whole sweeping landscape of impacts that scientists are warning will get worse if emissions continue to go up.

I feel like what's quite remarkable about the story that you've told here is how quickly this country's relationship to greenhouse gasses, the idea that they create climate change and that this is something to be addressed by the government, how quickly, really just in a decade and a half, that's changed. If you go back to the mid-early 2000s when the Endangerment Finding was written, it seemed like much of the business and even political world was starting to become aligned in this sense that there was a problem and that something could be done about it.

Hi, I'm Nancy Pelosi, lifelong Democrat and Speaker of the House.

I'm Newt Gingrich, lifelong Republican, and I used to be speaker. I'm sure you remember the famous ad where Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich were sitting on a couch together in front of the Capitol?

We don't always see eye to eye, do we, Newt?

No, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change. There wasn't always going to be ever, of course, agreement about what to do about it. Businesses weren't thrilled about some of the costs entailed in changing their conduct. But a lot of people got on board with the idea that something needed to be done. And yet, as you've explained here, a very persistent group of ideologically aligned climate change skeptics kept at it through Republican and Democratic presidencies and have succeeded in making their view, which isn't necessarily the nation's view, become the government's official policy. And that's something to behold.

It really is. One of the things that became clear as we were reporting this story out is that this group of conservative lawyers, their views on climate change were not in the mainstream, even of their own party. But they were persistent, and they did an enormous amount of planning, and that persistence paid off in the form of President Trump, who we all know his views on climate change calls it a hoax, calls it a scam. When President Trump was elected, these two forces joined, and they were ready to get this anticlimate agenda done. Later today, when the endangerement finding is repealed, it will be, in the words of one climate contrarian, total victory for their cause.

Well, Lisa, thank you very much.

Thanks so much.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, the mystery surrounding the federal government's decision to abruptly the airspace around El Paso, Texas, originally for 10 days, appeared to be solved. The Times reports that the closure was announced after officials from US Customs and Border Protection decided to try out a new anti-drone laser technology in order to shoot at what they believed was a drone from Mexican drug cartels. But the border protection officials failed to give officials from the Federal Aviation Administration enough time to assess the risks of the new technology on commercial planes. That prompted the FAA to shut down the airspace before quickly reversing their own decision. And... How many of Epstein's co-conspirators have you indicted? How many perpetrators are you even investigating?

First, you showed I find it- How many have you indicted?

Excuse me.

I'm going to answer the question.

I answer my question.

No, I'm going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question.

During a combative hearing on Wednesday, Democratic members of Congress sharply criticized attorney general Pam Bondi for her department's handling of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and her repeated efforts to prosecute enemies of the President. You've turned the People's Department of Justice into Trump's instrument of revenge.

Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time. He tells you to go after James Comey, LaTisha James, Lisa Thun.

Bondi forcefully defended her actions, frequently interrupted lawmakers, and at times, insulted them, as she did to Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, when he instructed Bondi to stop filibustering in response to questions from Democrats.

I told you that, attorney general, before you started.

You don't tell me anything.

I did tell you because we saw what you did in the Senate.

You're a lawyer? Not even a lawyer. You're not even a lawyer. The video will be in order. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Michael Simon Johnson, and Anna Foley. It was edited by Maria Byrne and Devon Taylor. Contains music by Alishiba Itup, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

That's it for the Daily.

I'm Michael Alaro. See you tomorrow.