Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation

Comments

• Old_Joe

  February 11 edited February 11

  Here's some heavily abridged excerpts from Mark's New York Times report. I recommend checking out the entire report, which is very detailed.
  
  Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation
  
  A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.

  In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history. But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
  
  Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives. The other two collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming.
  
  The overwhelming majority of scientists around the world agree that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet and supercharging storms, droughts, heat waves and sea level rise, directly contradicting the four conservatives.
  
  Their efforts are now paying off: 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 greenhouse gases threaten 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. “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.
  
  “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.
  
  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 Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.”
  
  In 2022, under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding.
  
  Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult. He is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School.
  
  At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed. With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
  
  A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
  
  Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out. “It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
  
  “This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

  
  Comment:   No, we decline to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work: citizens and taxpayers have no right to question anything or anyone in our administration.
  
  I'm wondering if it will even be possible to ever mitigate this attack on science and reality.
• Crash

  February 11

  Maybe not in our lifetimes? The American public of the political Right is demonstrably susceptible to that thing called "Stoopid." Their confirmation bias is lately being reinforced. Like a concrete reinforced bunker.
• rforno

  February 12

  Boy I hope these jackasses have large expensive beachfront properties.....