Michael Barbaro

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.

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.