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greenhouse gas emissions
Scrapping the Endangerment Finding: Payback for the Billionaire Climate Criminals
Who's responsible for rolling back the endangerment finding? We believe it is time to name names so future generations—and future climate justice tribunals—will know who is responsible for incinerating our futures.
Mar 24, 2026
The February rollback of the "endangerment finding"—which provides the legal basis for regulating climate change—was many years in the works. It's the ultimate payback for a politically engaged fossil fuel industry and the climate criminals who use their wealth, power, and position to block efforts to help us transition to a post-oil, gas, and coal era.
Who's responsible for rolling back the endangerment finding? We believe it is time to name names so future generations—and future climate justice tribunals—will know who is responsible for incinerating our futures. Researchers at the Climate Accountability Research Project have tracked several of the key individuals working to undermine climate protection for the last two years
On February 12, 2026, Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced the rescission of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, repealing regulations for GHG emissions of motor vehicles. According to The New York Times, a small group of fossil fuel-funded right-wing operatives have pushed to roll back government regulation of greenhouse gases for the past 16 years and have finally succeeded. Myron Ebell, a leading climate denier and fellow at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, stated that “no amount of public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy.”
So who the heck are “Russ and Jeff, and John and Mandy?” Russell Vought, Jeffrey Clark, Mandy Gunasekara, and Jonathan Brightbill are well-known operatives within right-wing circles. For example, Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the US Office of Management and Budget, and Jeffrey B. Clark, former acting administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, are veterans from the first Trump administration.
Rolling back the endangerment finding will have devastating and irreversible consequences to the planet.
Clark has been fighting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases since 2005. In 2022, Vought was vice president of the Heritage Foundation and managed Project 2025, the blueprint for many Trump initiatives. Vought hired Clark to draft executive orders for a future Republican president to easily reverse President Joe Biden’s climate initiatives. In 2023, Clark described climate change regulation as part of a plot to “‘meta control’ Americans.” Following the 2024 election, Vought and Clark were both asked to serve in Trump’s second administration where they were able to push for the repeal of the endangerment finding.
The “Mandy and Jonathan” are lesser known right-wing operatives. Mandy Gunasekara is an environmental attorney, former chief of staff for the EPA during the first Trump administration, and author of the Project 2025 report chapter on reforming the EPA. Gunasekara fought against policies from the Biden administration regarding emission reduction and self-identified as the “chief architect” behind Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The Climate Accountability Research Project identified Gunasekara as a Climate Criminal in 2024 because of her historical role in rolling back greenhouse gas regulations.
In 2015, Gunasekara infamously handed the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) a snowball to use as a prop on the Senate floor as “proof” that climate change wasn’t a real threat. Gunasekara was serving as an aide to Sen. Inhofe, who was considered to be one of Congress’ most outspoken climate skeptics at the time. Gunasekara was also a former visiting fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, where she helped draft a policy agenda that “unleashes American energy production, and reduces barriers to economic freedom.”
Following Gunasekara’s resignation from the EPA in 2019, she founded the Energy45 Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization “to promote the Trump energy agenda” and inform the public on the "environmental and economic gains made under the Trump administration.” The sources of funding for this organization have remained anonymous, and the organization has even been dubbed as a “dark money group” by Open Secrets.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, which featured Gunasekara’s 32-page chapter “Mandate for Leadership,” outlining a conservative agenda to move the EPA away from its focus on climate change. Key policy proposals outlined in her chapter include resetting scientific advisory boards, scaling back greenhouse gas regulation programs, and updating the 2009 endangerment finding. Gunasekara’s chapter also included the “Day One Executive Order,” which included a list of immediate actions to be taken on the first day of President Trump’s second term, with orders like “stop all grants to advocacy groups and review which potential federal investments will lead to tangible environmental improvements” and “revise guidance documents that control regulations such as the social cost of carbon.”
Jonathan Brightbill is currently the general counsel of the US Department of Energy. Brightbill argued against Obama-era climate policies while serving in the Justice Department in the first Trump administration.
In 2022, Gunasekara and Brightbill began their secret campaign to end the endangerment finding, in which they secured $2 million in funding from right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation. The funding allowed Gunasekara and Brightbill to draft regulatory documents that would simplify the abandonment of the endangerment finding. Over the years, the two collected an “arsenal of information” to dispute the scientific evidence of climate change. The evidence collected along with their detailed plans of attack helped the Trump administration end the endangerment finding.
Rolling back the endangerment finding will have devastating and irreversible consequences to the planet. There will come a day, maybe sooner than we think, when climate criminals like “Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy” will be held to account.
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As Another Oil-Fueled War Erupts, Study Reveals Planet Heating at Unprecedented Rate
The findings mean global temperatures are on track to surpass 1.5°C above preindustrial levels before 2030.
Mar 06, 2026
Nearly a week into President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran that is likely to increase climate-warming emissions, new research has found that the pace of human-caused global heating has accelerated over the past 10 years.
The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters on Friday, concluded that global heating had nearly doubled from a rate of less than 0.2°C a decade from 1970-2015 to 0.35°C between 2015-25. This would put global temperatures on track to surpass 1.5°C above preindustrial levels before 2030.
"Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been," study authors Stefan Rahmstorf and G. Foster wrote.
Scientists had long suspected that global warming was speeding up, given that the past three years were the three hottest on record. Yet previous studies had not been able to find statistically significant evidence of acceleration. The new study removed the natural variability from solar variations, volcanic eruptions, and El Niño from the data, which revealed a statistically significant speedup.
“How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero."
It follows a study from 2025 that found a smaller increase of 0.27°C per decade from 2015-24.
“Either way, this represents a significant increase in the rate of warming,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and a co-author on the earlier study, told The Guardian. “[This] should be worrying as the world hurtles toward crossing 1.5°C later this decade.”
Whatever the rate of increase, the solution, from a scientific perspective, is clear.
“How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero,” Rahmstorf, a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientist, told The Guardian.
Yet the findings come at a time when emissions look set only to increase, as the US launches an oil-fueled war on Iran that risks drawing other major military powers into a greater conflict.
"The outbreak of any war is bad news for the climate, just as the election of politicians hostile to climate action is," Mark Hertsgaard, Covering Climate Now executive director and co-founder, and Giles Trendle, former managing director of Al Jazeera English, wrote in a newsletter on Thursday. "The climate implications of this new war are not the center of attention at the moment, but they are essential context for understanding what’s at stake. At a time when civilization is hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown, to overlook the climate consequences of three of the deadliest militaries on Earth going to war would be journalistic malpractice."
War itself increases greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that Russia's invasion of Ukraine emitted as much in its first two years as the annual emissions of the Netherlands, while Israel's genocide in Gaza emitted as much in its first four months as each of the 135 lowest-emitting nations in a year.
The Conflict and Environment Observatory observed 120 incidents of environmental harm during the first three days of the Iran conflict, and noted that attacks on oil and gas infrastructure had global implications:
There are also consequences for the global environment through changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Attacks on oil and gas sites will release methane, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, but the curtailment of production—as has occurred with Qatari LNG [liquefied natural gas], oil production in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Israeli offshore gas—does not necessarily reduce emissions. Instead energy price signals can lead to short term substitution, as well as more complex downstream energy supply changes over longer timeframes.
Fossil fuels are also required to power the machinery that makes war possible.
"What’s beyond dispute is that this war could not be fought without oil," Hertsgaard and Trendle wrote. "The aircraft carriers, jet planes, and the myriad support systems they require gobble immense quantities of fossil fuels. Which helps explain why the US Department of Defense is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases globally."
There is also the speculation that control of fossil fuels is one motivation for the war itself, given that Iran has the world's third-largest reserve of oil. While Trump has not included oil in his incoherent word salad of war aims, as he did when he kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, climate advocate Bill McKibben pointed out that members of US oil industry have said that they would rather develop Iran's oil than Venezuela's, as its industry is more "structurally sound."
"Europe, Asia, and other regions whose energy costs skyrocket because of this reckless escalation by the Trump administration are reminded, yet again, that fossil fuels are volatile, insecure, and expensive."
"The military attacks on Iran are not about peace and democracy, but rather about sowing fear, bloodshed, and despair as the US attempts to further destabilize the region and secure access to profitable natural resources that it wants to control," the Climate Justice Alliance said in a statement. "This is not surprising given recent foreign policy actions taken by the Trump administration in Venezuela and Cuba, and our ongoing history of engaging in coups, occupations, and endless wars to control resource-rich countries, especially for oil and gas."
Yet, at the same time, the war is already offering an object lesson in the dangers of relying on fossil fuels—for everyone except fossil fuel CEOs. The war could disrupt markets such that profits soar for Big Oil and liquefied natural gas companies while ordinary people suddenly find themselves struggling to pay gas or heating bills.
"Iran is in the middle of one of the world’s most important energy corridors," Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International research director, told Common Dreams. "Roughly 20% of global petroleum flows through the Strait of Hormuz, so when military escalation disrupts that route, global energy markets are immediately impacted."
Stockman continued: "That instability means higher energy bills for people around the world while communities in the region suffer the devastation of war. Europe, Asia, and other regions whose energy costs skyrocket because of this reckless escalation by the Trump administration are reminded, yet again, that fossil fuels are volatile, insecure, and expensive. The only question is whether governments will heed that signal and make a fair fossil fuel phase out a priority.”
Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Tzeporah Berman made a similar point on social media: "Drones hitting Saudi oil fields, Qatar halting LNG production, Iran putting a squeeze on the Strait of Hormuz, and US attack on Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminals—all of it should be a wake-up call that fossil fuel phaseout is a national and energy security priority."
Yet Berman noted that the energy landscape is different today than it has been during previous periods of war.
"Unlike previous oil wars renewable energy is now available at scale," Berman continued. "It's distributed, diversified, and resilient. Most importantly, solar panels don’t blow up and once they are in place you don’t need ships to constantly feed them to make energy. The sun is looking like a pretty stable energy source right about now."
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Warnings of 'Permanent' Damage to People and Planet as Trump EPA Set to Repeal Key Climate Rule
One critic blasted the impending move as "an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok."
Feb 10, 2026
In what experts warn would be the most sweeping rollback of US climate policy ever, the Trump administration is expected this week to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency's "endangerment finding," the Obama-era rule empowering climate regulation over the past 15 years.
The endangerment finding determined that six greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—caused by burning fossil fuels are a single air pollutant that threatens public health and welfare, rather than treating each gas individually, for regulatory purposes.
The 2009 finding has served as the legal foundation for EPA climate rules, including limits on power plant emissions and automobile fuel economy standards under the Clean Air Act.
The new rule would end the regulatory requirement to measure and report vehicle emissions, certify the results, and comply with limits. It would also repeal compliance programs and credit provisions.
“This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a Monday interview with the Wall Street Journal.
However, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned Tuesday on the upper chamber floor that "this week, the Trump administration is set to take one of its most nakedly corrupt steps since Donald Trump returned to office, and that’s saying a lot: a wholesale reversal of essentially all greenhouse gas regulations."
"Trump is making a radical move that will send shockwaves across the economy—uncertainty for manufacturers, states, regulators everywhere. And it flies in the face, of course, of basic science," Schumer said. "Let's be very clear what this announcement represents: It is a corrupt giveaway to Big Oil, plain and simple."
"Big Oil has worked tirelessly for decades to undermine rules that protect against emissions, and now that they have their guy in the White House, they are taking their biggest swing yet," the senator added. "Remember, in the spring of 2024, Donald Trump invited top oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and told them, if you raise me a billion dollars to get me elected, I will cut regulations so you can make more money. That devil’s bargain is now coming true."
Trump is trying to repeal the "endangerment finding" -- the scientific investigation that led EPA to conclude that climate change is dangerous to humans.It's scientifically unjustifiable of course, but they're going to have to justify it to a court. That should be fun to watch.
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— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) February 10, 2026 at 9:22 AM
Big Oil spent over $445 million to elect Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle.
Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement Tuesday that “Zeldin took a chainsaw to the endangerment finding, undoing this long-standing, science-based finding on bogus grounds at the expense of our health.”
“Ramming through this unlawful, destructive action at the behest of polluters is an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok,” Goldman added.
More than 1,000 scientists and other experts have implored EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to not repeal the endangerment finding. In a statement last year, the Environmental Protection Network warned that repealing the finding would result in “tens of thousands of additional premature deaths due to pollution exposure” over the next several decades and spark “accelerated climate destabilization with greater risks of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and disease spread.”
While Trump administration officials told the Journal that the new rules would not apply to regulation of emissions from power plants and oil and gas facilities, some said that repealing the endangerment finding could set the stage for additional rollbacks favoring such polluters.
UCS noted Tuesday that the Trump administration “relied heavily on shoddy science in a report developed by a ‘Climate Working Group,’ composed of five skeptics well outside the scientific mainstream in its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding."
“The report, which was commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, which found that the report ‘misrepresents the state of climate science by cherry-picking evidence, exaggerating uncertainties, and ignoring decades of peer-reviewed research,’” UCS continued.
On January 30, Judge William Young of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, ruled that the DOE violated the law when Energy Secretary Chris Wright—the former CEO of a fracking company who denies there is a climate emergency—handpicked the five researchers for the dubious report.
Republicans have been working toward killing the endangerment finding for years. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a right-wing overhaul of the federal government, explicitly mentions the rule as ripe for repeal. Project 2025’s policy lead, Russell Vought, now directs Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
OMB Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Jeffrey Clark—a purveyor of the “Big Lie” that Democrats stole the 2020 election—has also been working hard at dismantling federal climate regulations, which he once likened to a “Leninistic” plot to control the US economy.
“Instead of rising to the challenge with necessary policies to protect people’s well-being, the Trump administration has shamefully abandoned EPA’s mission and caved to the whims of deep-pocketed special interests,” Goldman said. “Sacrificing people’s health, safety, and futures for polluters’ profits is unconscionable. We all deserve better and this attack against the public interest and the best available science will be challenged.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann called the campaign to repeal the endangerment finding “a reminder that, while some of the damage that Trump [and the] GOP are doing might seem temporary, the damage they’re doing to the planet is permanent.”
Or, as Cardiff University ecologist Aaron Thierry put it, “You can repeal an endangerment finding. You can’t repeal the endangerment.”
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