The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track global extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Overturning the EPA’s Endangerment Finding on CO2
Dear Diary. I got very miffed when I saw this article yesterday from the New York Times, but knowing the goals from the Trump administration, I’m not surprised. Back in 2009 Obama’s EPA determined that our carbon dioxide pollution was a health hazard, which was known as the ‘Endangerment Finding.’ Through it the EPA began regulating CO2 being emitted from power plants and transportation and began to curtail emissions. Now Trump is bringing us back to pre 2009 regulations. “More consequentially, reversing the endangerment finding could make it harder for a future administration to reverse course and curb emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other chemicals from automobile tailpipes and factory or power plant smokestacks,” according to the Times.
It’s hard not to get depressed about where our environment is headed looking at what our top leadership is doing. There are four powerful men who are behind Trump’s climate policies, which are also the subject of this New York Times article:
The Conservative Activists Behind One of Trump’s Biggest Climate Moves – The New York Times
The Conservative Activists Behind One of Trump’s Biggest Climate Moves
Four Trump allies have been a driving force behind the administration’s efforts to rollback a key climate regulation.
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is one of four officials who devoted years to charting roadmaps to undo climate and environmental regulations. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
Feb. 10, 2026
President Trump campaigned on a platform of climate denial and a promise to reverse federal policies aimed at protecting the planet. But even experts have been stunned at the magnitude of the environmental protections he has unraveled and the speed with which his administration has acted.
As Maxine Joselow and I report, the swift and meticulous dismantling of climate rules we are now seeing did not happen by chance. It was set in motion by a cadre of conservative lawyers who served in the first Trump administration and spent years honing arguments to block government regulations of climate pollution.
We told the stories of four key players. Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, both high-profile allies of Trump, drafted executive orders. Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, two conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate policies, collected what they called an “arsenal of information” to undermine the scientific and legal consensus that the planet is dangerously warming and the United States must take action.
Both independently and in tandem, the four activists spent the Biden administration years charting roadmaps that a future Republican president could use to undermine established climate science and legally support the repeal of environmental rules. Those plans included Project 2025, a set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term.
A key climate rule
Their biggest victory is around the corner. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to overturn what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific determination that climate change threatens public health and welfare. By doing so, the federal government will effectively be relinquishing its authority to regulate the emissions that are dangerously warming the planet.
Even more consequentially, reversing the endangerment finding could make it harder for a future administration to reverse course and curb emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other chemicals from automobile tailpipes and factory or power plant smokestacks.
Vought, Clark, Gunasekara and Brightbill were not the only ones who pushed to repeal the endangerment finding. But documents obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group, and reviewed by The New York Times, together with interviews with more than a dozen people show the four activists were the key strategists who sought to ensure that if Trump were re-elected, he could move rapidly and with minimal interference from civil servants.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” Myron Ebell, a prominent critic of climate science, told us.
Funding the fight
Gunasekara and Brightbill sought $2 million to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. The duo also planned to solicit white papers from scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change, according to a funding pitch for the project. The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Clark has been fighting climate protections since 2005, when as a Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration he argued that the E.P.A. lacked the power to regulate greenhouse gases. He served as an assistant attorney general focusing on environmental deregulation during Trump’s first term.
During the Biden administration Clark found a professional home with Vought, also a former Trump official. Vought had launched a think tanks, the Center for Renewing America, to keep the MAGA movement alive, and Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap climate policies enacted by President Joseph R. Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Business groups initially fought the endangerment finding. But after years of lost legal challenges and public pressure to address climate change, most gave up. By 2017, when Trump first took office, hundreds of American companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, told me it was the “pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax” who kept up the fight. And when Trump won the presidential race in 2024, they knew they’d have a willing partner in the White House.
“They had the experience of being in Trump 1.0, seeing what they wanted to do, then got organized during the Biden years,” Chatterjee said, adding that they “used their time in the wild to plan, and also identify people who can execute the plan.”
Now, Chatterjee said, “This is their moment.”
Related: The E.P.A. Is Barreling Toward a Supreme Court Climate
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)