EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announcing the plan to repeal the endangerment finding on July 29, 2025 at a truck plant in Indiana. Credit: EPA
DeSmog has been tracking the efforts of fossil fuel trade associations, policymakers, and industry backed-groups out to demolish U.S. climate policy for years.
In late July, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a trucking facility in Indiana that the Trump administration would be moving to rescind the “endangerment finding,” an agency declaration which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations.
Zeldin was joined at the press conference by U.S. Energy Secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright, as well as Republican policymakers and representatives of auto groups including the American Trucking Associations (ATA).
This was just a small sampling of a powerful anti-climate coalition that for over a decade has attempted to overturn the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific determination from the EPA that for the first time recognized carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” that are “harmful” and therefore must be regulated.
It’s a finding that helps provide the legal justification for EPA regulations on greenhouse gases from power plants, methane pollution from oil and gas operations, and limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Now, the Trump administration will be seeking public comments and moving to officially repeal the finding by sometime next year.
DeSmog has been tracking and building databases on the anti-endangerment coalition for years. Below is our guide to the top fossil fuel groups, conservative policymakers, and climate deniers leading the effort to demolish the bedrock of American climate policy.
American Petroleum Institute
When the EPA first issued the endangerment finding in 2009, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the main lobby group for U.S. oil and gas producers, was immediately opposed. “[It] poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family,” the institute’s then-president Jack Gerardclaimed.
API joined with other fossil fuel and industrial lobby organizations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, to wage an unsuccessful legal challenge against the finding. It recently applauded Zeldin’s announcement of rescinding endangerment and rolling back auto emissions regulations, arguing that the Trump administration is “protecting the freedom of all Americans to decide what they drive.”
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Another early business opponent of the endangerment finding was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobby group representing millions of businesses whose membership has included oil and gas majors, fossil fuel utilities, and coal companies. Like API, it helped lead an unsuccessful legal action against the finding.
The Chamber of Commerce has a long record of climate obstruction, including being a member of an infamous climate denial organization known as the Global Climate Coalition. Yet its leadership is now trying to distance itself from Zeldin’s proposed repeal of endangerment, telling Reuters that, “While we did not call for this proposal, we are reviewing it and will consult with members so we can provide constructive feedback to the agency.”
Project 2025
The radical plan for dismantling the U.S. government published by the Heritage Foundation contains specific proposals for the EPA, calling for “a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding.” One of the contributors to the EPA chapter is Aaron Szabo, now an assistant administrator at the agency.
Szabo was an advisor to a pro-Trump think tank known as the America First Policy Institute. He was also a former lobbyist “who pushed the interests of major polluters like members of the American Petroleum Institute,” according to Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who spoke against Szabo at his EPA confirmation hearing.
One of Project 2025’s top architects, Russ Vought, now leads the White House Office of Management and Budget. He has also called for the repeal of the endangerment finding. “It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding,” he said in an EPA press release in March.
Trump’s Climate Working Group
The EPA has justified its repeal of the endangerment finding — which states unequivocally that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the climate — by citing a recent Department of Energy report written by five prominent climate crisis deniers.
This so-called “Climate Working Group” includes Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer, all of whom have worked for years to publicly downplay the urgency of the climate crisis or deny that it exists. They argue in their report that carbon dioxide is good for humankind because it boosts “agricultural productivity,” an assessment that isn’t shared by actual climate scientists warning of dire threats to the global food supply from higher global temperatures.
Heartland Institute
One of the longest-running U.S. climate denial groups, the Heartland Institute was a partner of Project 2025, and for years has advocated against the endangerment finding. It applauded Zeldin’s announcement, saying in a statement that “President Trump is doing the right thing for the economy, the environment, and the American people.”
The Heartland Institute has a major UK ally in Nigel Farage, head of the right-wing political party Reform UK, who last year helped launch a European branch of the denial group. At the Jordan Peterson conference known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) earlier this year, Farage invoked a frequent climate denier talking point about endangerment, claiming that it’s “absolutely nuts” that carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant.
Koch Network
Climate denial groups that have received funding from foundations linked to the oil and gas billionaires Charles and David Koch are some of the most stalwart opponents of the EPA’s greenhouse gas finding. They include the CO2 Coalition, whose co-founder William Happer was on the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration, as well as the American Energy Alliance and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Koch-backed groups have achieved key U.S. Supreme Court victories that have paved way to undo the endangerment finding, including the case West Virginia vs. EPA, which weakened the agency’s ability to address climate change.
Zeldin cited that legal precedent explicitly in his announcement on Tuesday, saying, “would you want the administrator of the EPA to be ignoring the Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia vs. EPA?” He also cited the court’s rejection of the Chevron Deference — a long-standing doctrine giving federal agencies power to interpret the law where vague — which was the result of legal efforts backed in part by Charles Koch.
Critics argue this powerful anti-climate coalition ultimately serves the interest of companies profiting from polluting and warming our atmosphere. Senator Whitehouse said in a statement that “the Trump Administration’s repeal [of the endangerment finding] has the fossil fuel industry’s oily fingerprints all over it.” He added that “Trump chose his fossil fuel megadonors over the American people.”
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As more communities sue oil majors following climate disasters, a collection of evidence reveals the industry’s efforts to deny the link between extreme weather and climate change.
Illustration by Tess Abbot
This story was originally published by ExxonKnews.
When Bucks County, Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit last week against major oil and gas companies for climate damages, Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia pointed to “unprecedented weather events here in Bucks County that have repeatedly put residents and first responders in harm’s way, damaged public and private property and placed undue strain on our infrastructure.” The county argues oil companies’ “campaigns to deceive and mislead the public about the damaging nature of their fossil fuel products” delayed climate action for decades, robbing communities of precious time to mitigate the climate-driven disasters they now face.
One of those disasters occurred last year, when a rainstorm in Bucks County caused deadly flash flooding that swallowed vehicles and killed 7 people, including two children. Scientists said the deluge and its aftermath — not the county’s first “100-year flood” in recent years — are a harbinger of the intense and dangerous rainstorms that a warming climate is making more likely.
As the science connecting climate change to more frequent and severe weather events becomes clearer, there is mounting evidence that members of the fossil fuel industry coordinated to downplay that link — evidence that could be valuable to lawsuits seeking accountability.
Bucks County is just one in a growing list of communities taking legal action against fossil fuel companies in the wake of deadly extreme weather events. Multnomah County, Oregon sued oil, gas, and coal majors after a 2021 heat dome that killed nearly 70 people. On the 10 year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, New Jersey’s attorney general took Exxon, Chevron, and other oil giants to court, citing the billions of dollars in damage and deaths the hurricane caused in the state. In the first-ever racketeering lawsuit against Big Oil companies, Puerto Rico municipalities are seeking to recover costs incurred by Hurricane Maria.
Fossil fuel majors, these cases argue, should help communities pay for the costs of adapting to and recovering from climate disasters given the industry’s early research into — and subsequent denial of — their products’ harm. “We’re already seeing the human and financial tolls of climate change beginning to mount,” said Commissioner Ellis Marseglia. “If the oil companies’ own data is to be believed, the trend will continue.”
It’s a trend that the fossil fuel industry worked to obscure for decades.A collection of evidence just published to ClimateFiles.com reveals the extent to which oil companies and their trade associations sought to deny and downplay the relationship between climate change and extreme weather.
Nicky Sundt, a climate expert and former communications director for the U.S. Global Change Research Program during the George W. Bush administration, said she tried to publicly communicate the science behind that link, but was “stymied over and over again” by industry interests inside and outside the White House — an experience she has discussed with The Guardian andPBS Frontline.
“By interfering with the communications of climate science to the public, [the fossil fuel industry] knew that the public was less likely to become agitated and do something about it,” Sundt said. “The consequence was to slow efforts to reduce our emissions, and to leave us more unprepared for the impacts of climate change. The longer you wait, the more expensive it is to deal with all of these issues, and they’ve eaten up incredibly important time we needed.”
“A new norm”
In 1997, fossil fuel interests successfully convinced prominent United States officials to oppose U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol — an international climate agreement that would have limited greenhouse gas emissions decades ago.
A year later, the American Petroleum Institute (API) — the largest oil and gas trade association in the U.S. — bluntly outlined a plan to keep drumming up opposition to the Kyoto Protocol as negotiations continued. According to a newly uncovered February 1998 internal strategy proposal reviewed by ExxonKnews, API would “develop and implement a campaign-style ‘rapid response’ team… to respond to op-eds that make exaggerated claims about climate science… and to media events staged by government officials and/or environmental organizations seeking to tie extreme weather events to possible human impacts on global climate.”
Long before that campaign began, internal industry memos and promotional materials show, major oil companies knew about the role that climate change would play in intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts, heatwaves, precipitation patterns, and other extreme weather events.
One 1979 memo distributed to Exxon management, about a report conducted by Steve Knisley of Exxon’s Research and Engineering Department, accurately predicted the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by 2010 and referenced the “ecological consequences of increased CO2 levels.” Those consequences were listed in detail, including global temperature increases, water shortages in the U.S. southwest, increased rainfall, and “violent storms.”
In a 1991 film production by Shell, called “Climate of Concern,” a narrator warns that “if the weather machine were to be wound up to such new levels of energy, no country would remain unaffected,” and that “what is now considered abnormal weather could become a new norm.”
Another film produced that year by BP, called “This Earth – What Makes Weather?”, alludes to the ways climate change would increase the frequency and damage caused by extreme weather events like storms, flooding, and drought. “From warmer seas, more water would evaporate — making storms and the havoc they cause more frequent,” the narrator predicts. “Catastrophic floods could become commonplace and low-lying countries like Bangladesh would be defenseless against them.”
But around the same time, the industry began to worry about how public understanding of those phenomena could affect their core business. A 1989 presentation by Duane LeVine, a senior executive at Exxon, expressed concern that an extreme heat and drought event the year before had “drawn much attention to the potential problems and we’re starting to hear the inevitable call for action. Exactly what happens now is not clear… but this critical event has energized the greenhouse effort and raised public concern over PEG [potential enhanced greenhouse].”
Under the cover of trade associations and front groups, through PR campaigns and funded academic research, the industry developed a strategy to undermine the link between climate change and weather-related disasters — and discredit those who sought to communicate that science to the public.
A Campaign to Turn the Tide
One ad from a PR campaign by the “Information Council on the Environment,” funded by fossil fuel and electric utility interests. Minnesota is now suing ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute for climate fraud.
One key player was the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) — an international industry lobbying group that was instrumental in early efforts to deny climate change and generate opposition to policy action to reduce emissions. In 1994, the GCC hired weather forecasting service AccuWeather Inc. to produce a report minimizing the impact of global warming on extreme weather, which the GCC would cite in a pamphlet distributed at the United Nations climate convention the following year.
“No convincing, observational evidence exists that hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme temperature and precipitation events are on the rise because of the recent slight increase in the Earth’s surface temperature,” the report states.
A report that AccuWeather produced minimizing the impact of global warming on extreme weather in 1994.
In response to ExxonKnews’ requests for comment on the report, a spokesperson for AccuWeather said that “AccuWeather and the other leading consulting meteorologists involved had been engaged to produce an analysis based upon the available data at that time. There was much debate and uncertainty in the scientific community over the causes and effects of global warming during that time period, and a new generation of computer modeling studies was just beginning to emerge that would create an important shift in scientific judgment.”
“As an organization rooted in science, AccuWeather’s view on global warming and extreme weather has evolved over the past three decades, as has the view of many other scientific organizations,” they said, noting that data now shows a “marked increase in billion-dollar disasters due to extreme weather events.” Today, the spokesperson added, AccuWeather has signed the “Global Climate Science-Media Action Pledge”, and is committed to communicating the impacts of climate change on extreme weather to the public.
The GCC also hired academics to further their cause. Internal meeting notes from July 1997 show that the GCC commissioned a research paper from Robert E. Davis, a University of Virginia climatologist, explicitly denying the climate and extreme weather connection.
Excerpt from Global Climate Coalition meeting notes in 1997.
“A belief commonly held is that global warming will produce more extreme weather,” the published paper read. “While this thinking serves as convenient fuel for sensationalist headlines linking what only a decade ago would have been viewed as the normal vagaries of weather to some approaching climatic apocalypse, it is not based on sound science.”
From a folder handed out by the GCC at the UN climate negotiations in 1999.
In 1999, in the wake of Hurricane Floyd, Frank Maisano, then a spokesman for the GCC, faxed a memo to “Communicators Interested in Global Climate Issues.” “As millions of people flee Hurricane Floyd, many climate activists have again suggested — despite the facts — that hurricanes and global warming are connected,” the memo stated.
In response to questions about the memo and the GCC’s positions, Maisano told ExxonKnews that “Any fair review of the debate over any link between climate and severe weather has always been the subject of significant discussion between the experts themselves, especially with regard to hurricanes.”
“Importantly,” Maisano said, “GCC’s main focus at the time was on the economic impacts, sovereignty and effectiveness of any policy proposed to address climate change.”
Maisano now runs a strategic communications practice for Bracewell LLP, whose separate law practice provides services for oil and gas companies including Eni (currently being sued for climate deception in Italy) and Phillips 66 (which is a defendant in many U.S. climate lawsuits, including those filed by Bucks County and the state of New Jersey). Since 2005, the group has also advocated for renewables, Maisano said.
The industry’s campaign stretched on for years. In 2006, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, the DCI Group — a lobbying and campaign contractor with ties to Exxon — produced and sent VHS tapes of videos designed to look like a national news broadcast to Gulf of Mexico area news stations. The tape featured Dr. William Gray, a (now deceased) hurricane scientist at Colorado State University and climate change denier, stating that in the past 20 years, scientists had seen “no significant change in the frequency and intensity of major hurricanes around the globe…. This is the way nature sometimes works.” (Scientists have since concluded that climate-driven warming contributed to the increased rainfall and severity of storm surge during Hurricane Katrina, which killed nearly 2,000 people.)
According to Sundt, after Hurricane Katrina hit, the communications arm of the U.S. Global Change Research department proposed hosting a session on the implications for preparing for climate change on the Gulf Coast. “We had a well developed proposal, and it was just killed [by the White House] without explanation,” she said.
“A more resilient world”
Today, the steady growth of attribution science — or research investigating the role of climate change in altering or intensifying extreme weather events — has put a dent in Big Oil’s designs. The field of study has developed to even be able to tie the emissions of specific corporate actors to climate-worsened disasters — opening up more possibilities for those companies to be held liable for climate damages in court.
One such study, from researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the University of California, Merced, found that nearly 40% of all forests burned in the Western U.S. and Canada since 1986 can be tied to emissions from just 88 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement manufacturers. That research was cited in Multnomah County’s lawsuit against oil and gas majors for climate damages last year.
Delta Merner, lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate litigation hub and a co-author of the study, pointed out that many of the same companies that fought regulation of climate-warming emissions adapted their own fossil fuel infrastructure to account for rising seas, warming temperatures, and worsening storms decades ago.
“As you look through the oil industry’s own reactions to their knowledge about climate change, they were able to build better infrastructure to be resilient,” Merner said. “We would have a more resilient world, we would not be facing the realities of climate change that we’re seeing today if it wasn’t for the lies the industry propped up for so long.”
At least one oil major anticipated legal action decades ago. In a planning scenario from 1998, Shell made an eerie prediction: “In 2010, a series of violent storms causes extensive damage to the eastern coast of the U.S. … Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the US government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done.”
Shell was ahead of its time. Between the increased frequency, severity, and costs of extreme weather events, the advancing science connecting them to polluters, and mounting legal theories, Merner said she expects more communities to file suit. Even as she sees the industry’s deception evolving in content and sophistication — like companies trying to shift the blame for emissions onto consumers to avoid responsibility — Merner believes attribution research is evolving faster.
“It’s a testament to the power of science that climate litigation has been able to withstand an additional onslaught of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry and is now a key part in the fight for climate justice,” she said.
Note: Additional individuals mentioned here were asked to provide comment. The piece will be updated if they respond.
CLARIFICATION 4/3/24:This story has been updated to clarify the difference between Bracewell LLP’s strategic communication practice and its law practice.
