President Trump campaigned on climate denial and a promise to reverse federal policies to protect the planet. But even experts have been stunned by the extent of the environmental abuses he has uncovered and the speed with which his government has acted.
As Maxine Joselow and I report, the rapid and careful dismantling of climate rules we are now witnessing is no accident. It was launched by a cadre of conservative lawyers who served in the first Trump administration and spent years honing arguments to block government regulations on climate pollution.
We told the stories of four key players. Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, both prominent Trump allies, drafted executive orders. Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, two conservative lawyers with extensive experience fighting climate policy, assembled what they called an “arsenal of information” to undermine the scientific and legal consensus that the planet is warming dangerously and the United States must take action.
Both independently and together, the four activists have spent the years of the Biden administration laying out roadmaps that a future Republican president could use to undermine established climate science and legally support the repeal of environmental regulations. Those plans included Project 2025, a set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term.
An important climate rule
Your greatest victory is just around the corner. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected this week to rescind the so-called “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding that climate change threatens public health and welfare. This would effectively mean the federal government giving up its authority to regulate emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.
Even more consequential, if the hazard determination is reversed, it could make it harder for a future government to reverse course and curb emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other chemicals from car tailpipes and factory or power plant smokestacks.
Vought, Clark, Gunasekara and Brightbill weren’t the only ones pushing for the endangerment finding to be overturned. But documents obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group, and reviewed by The New York Times, as well as interviews with more than a dozen people, show that the four activists were key strategists seeking to ensure that if Trump were re-elected, he could move quickly and with minimal interference from officials.
“We are on the verge of total victory,” Myron Ebell, a prominent critic of climate science, told us.
Fund the fight
Gunasekara and Brightbill requested $2 million to prepare regulatory documents that a future government could use to abandon the jeopardy determination. According to a funding request for the project, the duo also planned to solicit white papers from scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change. The Heritage Foundation ultimately agreed to fund some of that work, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Clark has been fighting for climate protection since 2005, when, as a Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, he argued that the EPA lacked the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. During Trump’s first term, he served as deputy attorney general and focused on environmental deregulation.
During the Biden administration, Clark, also a former Trump official, found a professional home at Vought. Vought had launched a think tank, the Center for Renewing America, to keep the MAGA movement alive, and Clark was drafting executive orders that would allow a future president to quickly repeal climate policies enacted by President Joseph R. Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Business groups initially fought against the risk assessment. But after years of losing legal challenges and public pressure to address climate change, most gave up. By the time Trump took office in 2017, 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 “purely ideological activists who believe climate change is a hoax” who are continuing the fight. And when Trump won the presidential race in 2024, they knew they would have a willing partner in the White House.
“They had the experience of being in Trump 1.0, seeing what they wanted to do, and then organizing during the Biden years,” Chatterjee said, adding that they “used their time in the wilderness to plan and also identify people who could execute the plan.”
As the seals dive, swim and feed in the coming months, pocket-sized devices taped to their heads will record their movements and the characteristics of the water around them, transmitting the information via satellite as they surface.
The two doctoral students from Seoul National University want to better understand how warming oceans affect animals’ diving and foraging behavior. The same warm water that erodes Thwaites from below also brings iron and other nutrients up from the seafloor, helping to feed fish and other creatures that seals like to eat. Similar changes could also occur in the ecosystems beneath melting icebergs around the glacier
“Rapid environmental changes are occurring in the Amundsen Sea, particularly near the Thwaites Glacier,” Cheon said. Weddell seals are not currently considered a threatened species, but scientists still need to learn more about how the animals respond to new conditions now and in the future, she said.
Updated
Antarctica’s seals have no natural predators on the ice and are therefore usually not afraid of incursions from blowgun-wielding ecologists. Still, tagging is risky work for scientists and seals alike. —Raymond Zhong
One last thing
How California is committed to saving mountain lions
For a mountain lion, euthanasia is often the kindest intervention for a broken leg. But the cub, named P-121, was given a second chance.
Found in a ditch in Simi Valley near Los Angeles, he was one of dozens 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 fracture in his back leg was clean. He had to undergo surgery and remain in a wildlife rehabilitation facility for several months until his limb healed and he was old enough to care for himself. If all went well, he would return to the wild.
The story of P-121, which arrived at the San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center on Thanksgiving Day 2023, provides a powerful glimpse into the challenges the animals face.
Between 2018 and 2023 alone, California added 550 miles of lanes to state highways. Mountain lion populations on the Central Coast and South are so beleaguered that the state is expected to list them as threatened under its Endangered Species Act this week.
At the same time, a major concrete-and-steel solution is coming later this year: the world’s largest wildlife crossing of its kind, a $114 million project to save lions around Los Angeles. — Catrin Einhorn
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