Michael Barbaro

It really starts with two people, Mandy 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 healthcare sectors.

Gunasekara has a very long history fighting climate policies, not climate change, climate policies.

She used to work for Senator Jim Inhofe, who wrote a book called The Greatest Hoax, The Global Warming Conspiracy.

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

Gunasekara is the aide who handed him that snowball, and that's one of the things she's pretty well known for in Washington.

Huh.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.

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 to do far much more damage.

Her partner in trying to repeal the endangerment finding was an attorney named Jonathan Brightbill.

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, the Clean Water Act.

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.