The Secret Plan to End U.S. Climate Regulations

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. With a single monumental action expected today, the Trump administration will eliminate its own legal authority to fight climate change. My colleague, Lisa Friedman, has spent the past few weeks piecing together the inside story of how a small group of activists turned that once improbable goal into reality. It's Thursday, February 12. Lisa, welcome back to The Daily. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So over the summer, Lisa, you broke the story that the Trump administration was planning to roll back the legal basis for the entire government's ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Just remind us what that legal basis was and why its elimination would be so consequential. Sure. It's called the endangerment finding, and you can think of it like the spine of America's ability to regulate climate pollutants. Congress never explicitly told the EPA that it could regulate planet warming emissions. But in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark ruling, it's called Massachusetts versus EPA, that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the law. And because EPA is required to set limits, required to regulate damaging pollutants, the court told the agency, you need to determine whether these greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, others, whether they endanger health and welfare. Mhmm. Two years later, the EPA, citing a massive body of scientific evidence, came out with what is now called the endangerment finding, that six greenhouse gases do pose a danger to public health and the environment. And therefore should be regulated. And therefore should be regulated. So if you think of the endangerment finding as the spine, that is what has allowed for regulations on carbon emissions from automobiles, from power plant smokestacks, methane from oil and gas well leaks. And if you repeal the endangerment finding as the Trump administration is about to do, then there is no basis. There is no legal basis or scientific basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in The United States. The government essentially gives up its authority. 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 …