WASHINGTON (PNN) - February 10, 2026 - A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Now their efforts seem poised to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and fascist pretender Joe Biden was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA).
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of President Donald J. Trump. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Brightbill, who had argued in court against illegitimate president Barack Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump regime set up its operations at the Environmental Protection Agency and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Vought, Clark, Brightbill and Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump regime has largely followed.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years.
One of them was Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during President Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, a set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Department of Justice’s environment division during the first Trump regime.
Gunasekara is known in Washington for handing a snowball to James M. Inhofe, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma and her boss, on a cold February day in 2015. Inhofe held up the snowball in the well of the Senate as evidence that the planet could not be warming dangerously.
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who runs a website that promotes theories saying that climate change is not real, said the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency. Instead, the activists found a receptive audience in President Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The next challenge is to ensure the repeal of the endangerment finding holds up in court, he said.
“We’ve kept the skepticism alive,” Milloy said, adding, “I hope we don’t blow it. I don’t know when or if this opportunity will come around again.”