The Trump Regime Just Came One Step Closer to Killing Your Children
Project 2025's stated aim to kill all efforts to fight climate change have come to fruition
“We are pretty close to total victory.”
These are the words of Myron Ebell, who has been launching attacks against climate change for thirty years and led Trump’s 2016 transition team on Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A) policy.
Today, the victory of climate denialists is at hand.
Trump limped his goiter-infested body out of his lair long enough to announce that he’s ending the E.P.A’s most fundamental scientific framework that governs the fight against climate change, the endangerment clause.
The endangerment clause isn’t a fancy legal expression. It’s a simple scientific premise stating that greenhouse gases are dangerous enough to threaten human life, and that the E.P.A has statutory authority over leading the fight against their effects.
Trump, the same scientific expert who suggested that people should inject disinfectants into their blood system to fight COVID, today said, no, greenhouse gases are not dangerous, and the E.P.A is no longer going to regulate them.1 He’s called climate change a hoax since 2016.
The effects of greenhouse gases on climate change have been a widely accepted fact among scientists since at least the Nixon era. It was Nixon, in fact, who created the E.P.A.
Gavin Newsom, who saw today coming, immediately released this statement:
“If this reckless decision survives legal challenges, it will lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts, and greater threats to communities nationwide.”
Most of my readers don’t need to be convinced about the drastic effects of climate change, but if you do, a simple web search should reinforce the dangerous phase our children and grandchildren are about to enter.
It’s not just our kids. Many of us have already faced deadly wildfires and their smoke, more violent hurricanes, devastating tornadoes and floods, heat waves that cook eggs on cars. Our kids will face much worse. As the linked article (via the footnote above) points out, the effects come in surprising ways, such as the spread of disease:
Last year, 4,947 travelers from the United States contracted dengue, a mosquito-borne disease prevalent in tropical and subtropical climates, while abroad, a 30 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Don’t bother looking for this CDC quote. It’s probably been removed by another madman, RFK Jr.
Climate change has also led to other weird stuff, like a nearly mindless president obsessing over Greenland and its emerging rare earth mining opportunities.
This change didn’t happen overnight
Those of us who tried to warn everyone about Project 2025 are not surprised by today’s latest methane emission from Trump’s mouth. But many of us are also intimately familiar with a Republican playbook that features the long game.
This playbook has followed a patient, steady pattern of slowly, deliberately, and persistently clawing away at all kinds of progress ever since Reagan entered the scene and delivered a blow against the liberal order that liberals have never recovered from:
Abortion rights: After a relentless thirty-year attack, abortion rights and women’s bodily autonomy are now mostly dead. Republicans aren’t finished: Birth control is now being targeted.
Taxes: Tax rates on the highest tax brackets were 70% in 1979, when the highest tax bracket was $215,400, which is $930,700 in today’s dollars. Today, those rates are 37% for the highest tax bracket of $751,600.2 Worse, Republicans have successfully convinced Americans that all taxes are bad.
Welfare: Programs like SNAP (once called Food Stamps) have eroded to nearly nothing during the last thirty years. Many other welfare programs have been whittled down just as much.
Election rights: Voting rights have undergone a steady, persistent assault. They are now threatened by the resuscitated
SAVEEliminate Elections Act (my name), which is a precursor to even more drastic challenges.Civil Rights: The 1964 Civil Rights Act is fighting for its life after ongoing attacks for the past thirty years, highlighted most furiously by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that eliminated Section Five of the Act that governed federal oversight of elections in jurisdictions with a history of malfeasance. The Roberts court now appears poised to crush Section 2 of the act, a provision that prohibits gerrymandering based on racial considerations.3
Immigration: After thirty years of attacks by Republicans, more than half of all Americans, including a slim majority of Democrats, favor immigration control, which has, in turn, given us ICE and mayhem on the streets.4
Isolationism: Calls to withdraw from NATO are not new. Fringy right-wingers have been calling for it for years. Less fringy right-wing nationalists have been complaining about the UN since the Reagan era.
Racism: Once, albeit briefly, considered something of a third rail, racism is now mainstream, with an alleged U.S. president issuing memes and videos comparing a former Black president and his wife to apes. Mainstream media has, for the most part, stepped aside, after the briefest, quietest moment of protest since Truman bombed Hiroshima.
Children: Only Republicans could ruin the word “Pizza.” Sad, sick, Republicans have led a decades-long pogrom against children, of all people, featuring a level of depravity we are struggling desperately against an insurrectionist regime to learn more about.
Climate Change: Ever since Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency, oil-soaked right-wing Republicans have fought to shut it down.
This last bullet point is what this post is about, but it’s useful to consider the assault on climate change in the same context as the broader approach Republicans have taken over the years in their assault on American progress and morals. On everything. On our health. On our well-being. On the planet.
During the Biden administration, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, two Project 2025 authors, took point on the attack against climate change solutions. They worked closely with Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, two other proponents for burning the Earth. Gunasekara wrote the Heritage Foundation’s chapter in their manifesto for destroying the nation, Project 2025, which I’ve written about before in some detail:
A Progress Report on the Destruction of America
As I write this, the regime occupying the White House in violation of the 14th Amendment (Section 3) is one-third of the way through the implementation of Project 2025, aka Mandate for Christo-nationalism.
Brightbill has been an anti-earth activist for years, specializing in taking on the Obama administration with legal challenges every time the administration made the most modest attempts to enact climate change policy. Brightbill is now a general counsel in the Energy Department.
Clark has been at it since 2005, when he argued that the Clean Air Act of 1970 didn’t include provisions for the E.P.A to regulate greenhouse gases, even though Project 2025 acknowledges that amendments made in 1990 to the original act, in fact, do provide such provisions:5
“The subsequent Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 played a significant role in the expansion of EPA’s responsi-bilities and legal authority with the agency then being tasked with the development of new regulatory mechanisms that included, among other things, cap-and-trade programs for the control of sulfur dioxide and technological standards for nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, a vastly expanded hazardous air pollutant program, a federal operating permit program, and new regulations gov-erning phaseout of the production of ozone-depleting substances in conjunction with U.S. ratification of the Montreal Protocol in 1988.”
In Massachusetts v. E.P.A, the Supreme Court in 2007 told Clark to stick to building forest fires and rejected his argument, thus allowing the E.P.A. to invoke what it called the aforementioned “endangerment” clause that declared greenhouse gases a threat to the world’s climate, and to act accordingly.
Clark has held a grudge against that decision since 2007, and as part of the Trump regime, is now in a position to do something more effective than try to talk the Supreme Court into defeating the E.P.A. He simply advised the goiter-in-chief to remove any effort on the part of the E.P.A. to fight climate change or greenhouse gases.
Clark has previously used bizarre phrasing during his decades-long obsession against Mother Earth, such as calling efforts to rein in the effects of climate change a “Leninist plot.”6
Vought, Gunasekara, Clark, and Brightbill have taken advantage of our many distractions to lead a phalanx of climate destroyers who have seized control of the E.P.A. and Energy Department, just like Steve Bannon and Project 2025 promised during the election.
In case you forgot or never heard about it, Bannon told voters that if Trump won election, Republicans would fill the bureaucracy with anarchists and destroy the “administrative state.”7
In July 2025, the Administrator of the E.P.A., Lee Zeldin, who defended Trump in Congress during Trump’s first impeachment hearings,8 announced that the endangerment clause would be removed from consideration by the E.P.A. in all regulatory matters.
When Zeldin announced the catastrophic decision, he crowed, “The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”9
Today, the man with the chimpanzee brain who calls others apes made it official.
The courts lose access to climate research
The attacks from Republicans come from every angle you can think of, and many more you haven’t thought of.
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know:
“The Federal Judicial Center is the research and education agency of the judicial branch of the U.S. government.”10
Those are the words of a little-known research agency used by federal judges to help them resolve complex issues.
This federal agency provides a one-stop shopping spot for federal judges, including Supreme Court judges, to research topics relevant to cases they are deciding. You might think that federal judges decide cases based solely on lawyerly stuff provided during a case by plaintiffs and defendants.
Nope.
They also do their own research. That’s where the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) comes in.
The FJC provides online access to a wide variety of scholarly and peer-reviewed resources. It also publishes print editions of reference guides such as the 1,682-page Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.11 The FJC is overseen by its chairman, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
This year, according to ProPublica, all of the content about climate change has been gutted from the reference guide.12
The reference guide typically covers topics with first, an introduction to the topic, then a peek into possible biases and/or areas of potential controversy, and then, usually, a discussion of case law. For example, its discussion of AI opens with a high-level intro into computer science:
The ninety pages devoted to climate change that had been in the previous edition are now gone, thanks to lobbying efforts by members of the Federalist Society and attorneys general of red states like Texas.
My readers may recall the Federalist Society:
The removal of climate change info from the FJC may not seem like a big deal, but many federal courts throughout the United States rely on the FJC for basic research into the scientific and legal aspects of climate change. Its removal is just one of the silent attack vectors by Republicans you don’t hear about.
Part of the problem is that Republicans began their attack on climate change policy forty years ago, just like they have on everything else that’s important to you.
This all from a political party that tried to claim a monopoly on something called family values from the 1980s until the predator’s election, when they had to abandon the concept for obvious reasons.
They’ve stated loudly, through their embrace of a madman and serial pedophile whose name has appeared at least a million times in the Trump-Epstein Files, that they have no interest in family values.
But their actions have demonstrated this moral toxicity for the past forty years. Consistently. Repeatedly. With uncompromising determination and a willingness to play a long game that Democrats, progressives, and liberals can’t comprehend.
Thanks for reading!
Notes
Somehow, I managed to miss this, which I blame less on myself than on the fact that the regime pounds us every day with salvos from their bitter world.
Heather Cox Richardson:13
In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him “the undisputed champion of beautiful, clean coal.” At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to buy billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried “the Radical Left’s war on the industry.” Anna Betts of The Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will spend $175 million to “modernize, retrofit, and extend” the life of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky.
No comment necessary.
Footnotes
🎁 Ruminato Gift Link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html 🎁
Tax Foundation. “Historical Federal Individual Income Tax Rates & Brackets, 1862-2021,” August 15, 2025. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/.
Brennan Center for Justice. “Shelby County v. Holder,” June 21, 2023. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/shelby-county-v-holder.
The good news is that Stephen Miller and his cohort of right-wing goons have managed to destroy support for immigration control in less than a year:
News, PBS. “Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Say ICE Has Gone Too Far in Immigration Crackdown.” PBS News, February 5, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-nearly-two-thirds-of-americans-say-ice-has-gone-too-far-in-immigration-crackdown.
Heritage Foundation. Project 2025, A Mandate for Change, p. 419
Common Cause. “‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State’ Means We Lose,” February 24, 2017. https://www.commoncause.org/articles/deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state-means-we-lose/.
The first rumblings out of Bannon’s mouth about turning the U.S. into an anarchy state appeared during the predator-in-chief’s first term. After the first term ended, Bannon promised that they had learned their lesson and would not retain any normal people the second time around, a promise the regime has kept.
Tomain, Joseph P. “The Twin Demons of the Trump-Bannon Assault on Democracy.” University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications, 2017. https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/334/.
Wikipedia.org. “Lee Zeldin - Wikipedia,” 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Zeldin.
Joselow, Maxine, and Lisa Friedman. “E.P.A. Plans to Revoke the Legal Basis for Tackling Climate Change.” The New York Times, July 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/climate/epa-endangerment-finding-repeal-proposal.html.
Fjc.gov. “Federal Judicial Center |,” 2026. https://www.fjc.gov/.
Fjc.gov. “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition | Federal Judicial Center,” 2025. https://www.fjc.gov/content/396456/reference-manual-scientific-evidence-fourth-edition. One of the editors includes Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Elena Kagan, so either Justice Kagan didn’t notice the omission, or had an interesting, and ultimately futile, conversation with Roberts. The full list of editors:
Elena Kagan, David H. Kaye, Daniel L. Rubinfeld, Shari Seidman Diamond, Mark A. Allen, Joseph V. Rodricks, Michael D. Green, Bernard D. Goldstein, Mary Sue Henifin, John B. Wong, Lawrence O. Gostin, Oscar A. Cabrera, Paul S. Appelbaum, Leisa L. Richter, Daniel J. Capra, Michael Weisberg, Anastasia Thanukos, Valena E. Beety, Jane Campbell Moriarty, Andrea Roth, Thomas D. Albright, Brandon Garrett, Hal S. Stern, David Card, Matthew Kugler, James N. Druckman, Carlos Brain, Filipe Lacerda, Nancy S. Marder, Steven Gold, Jonathan Chevrier, Brenda Eskenazi, David L. Eaton, Nita Farahany, Kirk Heilbrun, David DeMatteo, Chaouki T. Abdallah, Bert Black, Edl Schamiloglu, Brian N. Levine, Joanne Pasquarelli, Clay Shields, James Baker, Laurie Hobart
Alex.Bandoni@propublica.org. “Under GOP Pressure, Federal Agency Pulls Climate Change Chapter from Official Manual for U.S. Judges.” ProPublica, February 10, 2026. https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-judicial-center-climate-change-republican-pressure
Hi Charles. Really good commentary. I just wanted to comment on how the ‘family values’ trend started with Reagan. Nancy, his Vice President, who later became President, was so family oriented when she turned her back on people who were dealing with HIV and AIDS. The fact that she turned her back on her good friend, a really decent man, Rock Hudson, (I’m sure you remember him) reminds me of how populations of vulnerable people became so shunned and marginalized, and remain so to this day.
Her ‘just say no to drugs’ campaign made my head want to explode. Just fuck off with that!! And essentially victim blaming those who became addicted. They just didn’t fit in with family values society. Think of all the money they saved by not providing services to these populations.
Some good anti-pollution lawyers can win this case which is surely to be filed by states who continue to adhere to science. And just because you reject the science your own scientists have endorsed does not change the mission of the agency. You still have to enforce the law; if you don't you will be sued. I am thinking the best candidates are the states. SCOTUS has a history of kicking out plaintiffs whose "standing to sue" is not clear cut. California looks like the best candidate along with the other states out West and then some East Coast states, Illinois, and a few others. No other country in the world is as bad as the U.S. on the isuse right now. The United States is like a terroristic presence on earth. Under this administration, everything it does is anti-human.