Michael Barbaro

And not to mix metaphors, but when the endangerment finding goes away, all of these regulations that stem from it fall like a house of cards.

Right.

And during our first conversation, when you first explained all this to our listeners, Lisa, you had told me that the efforts to eliminate the endangerment finding and to fundamentally defang the legal framework—

behind how we regulate greenhouse gases, 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.

So tell us about what you found.

So it was pretty stunning to see how quickly and comprehensively the Trump administration moved to reverse the endangerment 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.

And 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.

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

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.