Criminals Hate Regulations-- Who'da Thunk?

 

You know who hates rules and regulations? Criminals-- and not just the Mafia. It includes the exploitative class and the conservative political parties that represent that class' interests. It's why I've never voted for a Republican. And it's why I've never identified as a Republican... despite knowing how corrupt and worthless the Democratic Party has become over the course of my lifetime, especially since Bill Clinton helped usher in a take-over by the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in 1992.

But even most of the worst of the conservaDems tend to back at least some regulatory protections for workers and the environment. Republicans don't. Many of them will drown in an anti-Trump tsunami in two weeks but they were willing to make that bargain with the devil in order to wreck the American regulatory infrastructure and to pack the courts with the kinds of right-wing zealots who will uphold that for the aforementioned exploitative class.

Last week, The NY Times published a look at the GOP wrecking ball by Eric Lipton. Don't forget, he morons who attend Trump rallies may love chanting "lock her up"-- whether about Hillary, Kamala or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer-- but those with the money and power behind the GOP are more concerned with allowing their criminal proclivities to run rampant without government interference than with the theatrics of Trumpism. Lipton clearly laid out how desperate the handmaidens of America's criminal class are "scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges... In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis. Some cases, like a new rule to allow railroads to move highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains, have led to warnings of public safety threats.

Every administration pushes to complete as much of its agenda as possible when a president’s term is coming to an end, seeking not just to secure its own legacy but also to tie the hands of any successor who tries to undo its work.

But as Mr. Trump completes four years marked by an extensive deregulatory push, the administration’s accelerated effort to put a further stamp on federal rules is drawing questions even from some former top officials who served under Republican presidents.

...If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump’s tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration.

But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making.

...The Environmental Protection Agency, which since the start of the Trump administration has been moving at a high speed to rewrite federal regulations, is expected to complete work in the weeks that remain in Mr. Trump’s term on two of the nation’s most important air pollution rules: standards that regulate particulates and ozone that is formed based on emissions from power plants, car exhaust and other sources.

These two pollutants are blamed for bronchitis, asthma, lung cancer and other ailments, causing an estimated 7,140 premature deaths a year in the United States, according to one recent study. The agency is proposing to keep these standards at their current levels, provoking protests from certain health experts and environmentalists who argue that the agency is obligated to lower the limits after new evidence emerged about the harm the pollutants cause.

Scott Pruitt, who served as the E.P.A. administrator in the first 17 months of Mr. Trump’s tenure, set as a goal before he left office to get these new standards adopted by December 2020, even though the agency had previously expected they would not be finished until 2022.

The agency also is rushing to complete a series of regulations that will almost certainly make it harder for future administrations to tighten air pollution and other environmental standards, including a limit on how science is used in rule making and a change to the way costs and benefits are evaluated to justify new rules.

Mr. Trump has played a direct role in pushing to accelerate some regulations. Among them is a provision finished this summer, nicknamed “bomb trains” by its critics, that allows railroads to move highly flammable loads of liquefied natural gas on freight trains. Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year directing the Transportation Department to enact the rule within 13 months-- even before it had been formally proposed.

The change was backed by the railroad and natural gas industry, which has donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, after construction of pipelines had been blocked or slowed after protests by environmentalists.

But the proposal provoked an intense backlash from a diverse array of prominent public safety officials. Among them were groups representing thousands of mayors, firefighters and fire marshals nationwide and even the federal government’s own National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates fatal transportation accidents.

The gas is stored in 30,000-gallon rail tanks at minus 260 degrees to keep it compressed. But if accidentally released during an accident, it would rapidly expand by nearly 600 times as the temperature rises and cause what is known as a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion” that if ignited could not be quickly extinguished, potentially resulting in widespread injury or death if it occurs in a populated area, the firefighters warned.

“It is nearly certain any accident involving a train consisting of multiple rail cars loaded with L.N.G. will place vast numbers of the public at risk while fully depleting all local emergency response forces,” Harold A. Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, wrote in a letter opposing the proposal.

The Transportation Department still adopted the rule and rejected proposed speed limits for the trains, generating a petition for a court review by 14 states and the District of Columbia.

“Studies on how to safely transport liquefied natural gas by rail are still ongoing, and this administration has rushed to implement a rule that will needlessly endanger people’s lives and threaten our environment,” Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, said.

Even while the challenge is underway, the Transportation Department has moved to enact another rule easing safety standards, in this case removing a requirement intended to limit the number of hours truck drivers are allowed behind the wheel and to mandate rest periods.

Certain drivers who carry agricultural products would now be exempt from this federal mandate in a standard that would again be adopted as an “interim final rule,” meaning it would be put in place before any public comment is accepted, under the plan announced by the agency.

“Fatigued truck drivers remain a stubbornly high cause of fatal highway accidents,” said James Goodwin, a lawyer at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit group that tracks regulatory actions. “The law permits agencies to take short cuts when there are extraordinary circumstances that call for them. That is not present here.”

Earlier today, progressive state Rep. Jon Hoadley, a congressional candidate who appears to be beating Trump lackey Fred Upton, told us that Upton "continues to tout his supposed victories for the Great Lakes while also enabling corporate polluters to contaminate them along with our groundwater. As Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, he held one of the most powerful positions in Congress and due to his inaction or enacted obstacles, at one point he was deemed 'the worst threat to planet Earth on Earth.' Michiganders need a leader who will actually fight to protect our precious natural resources and hold polluters accountable."

Beth Doglio is in a hot D vs D contest in Washington. Beth is the environmentalist and workers' champion in the race and her opponent, Marilyn Strickland, is an establishment Dem who was president of the Chamber of Commerce and supported... well all the kinds of anti-environment and anti-worker policies conservative and the Chamber support. Not quite as bad as a Republican of course, but... close. Beth told me that "We have to draw a line in the sand when it comes to large new fossil fuel infrastructure that locks in emission for decades to come. I was standing firm leading the fight to stop the seven coal export terminals dead in their tracks, while my opponent openly supported a proposal to site the largest methanol plant in the world in urban Tacoma before it was vetted. Residents of Pierce County rejected it." Both of these women have track records. Beth's is golden; Stickland's is... a lump of coal.

Julie Oliver is rewriting the political history of Texas with her amazing run in a gerrymandered R+11 congressional seat. This morning she told me that her opponent, "Roger Williams consistently toes the party line that he favors limited governmental regulation, unless it benefits his own business, one of the most protected industries by regulation in the state of Texas-- automobile dealerships. But unless Williams or his donors are the beneficiaries of regulations, he fights hard to ensure laws and regulations lose their potency or are eliminated altogether. Williams filed what has to be the shortest bill introduced in Congress, 'This bill terminates the EPA effective 12/31/2018.' He doesn't care that his constituents in Johnson County are fighting for clean water or that his constituents in Burnet County are fighting for clean air; Williams is a loot-the-coffers kind of Republican who is using his position of public trust to enrich himself and his donors. Last week, the Houston Chronicle reported that Williams used his position on the Financial Services Committee to strongarm banks into meetings with his wealthy donors, while ignoring the pleas for help from constituents who have been laid off due to the pandemic."

Adam Christensen, a progressive running against a crumbling GOP power structure in north-central Florida, is aiming at replacing Trump lickspittle Ted Yoho. Earlier he told us that "The Trump administration has constantly attempted to deregulate guidelines that save people’s lives. They actively attempt to deregulate safety standards for railways, pollutants and more. Representative Ted Yoho and my opponent Kat Cammack want to continue these deregulations to help their wealthy donors even if they result in harm and even death to our people. Pollutants are causing Americans to develop dangerous diseases such as asthma and lung cancer. Americans are dying because Republicans like the current administration, Mr. Yoho and Ms. Cammack refuse to stand up for our planet and our people. They will only stand up for power, greed, their donors and their wealth. They are standing by and allowing phosphate mines to sue Union into oblivion. It’s time we stand up and fight people and greed like this. I know that when we win we will stand up and fight for our planet, our people and our future."

There's Never Been A More Fetid Swamp In Washington Like The One Trump Has Set Out To Create

NPR's Fresh Air has a fascinating piece on Wednesday that sought to shone some light on how the Trump Regime is accomplishing quite a bit while everyone is paying attention to the clown tripping all over himself in the center ring. The guest was NY Times journalist Eric Lipton and he's been reporting on how the Trump Regime has brought in lobbyists to help destroy the regulations that have protected the public from the very industries that those lobbyists were working for-- and no doubt will again. The whole show in worth listening to and it's embedded above.

Lipton began by explaining how the Trumpists quickly changed the rules governing lobbyists in government. "[T]he Obama administration explicitly banned lobbyists from going to work in agencies that they had in the prior two years lobbied. And Trump removed that explicit restriction and has allowed quite a number of lobbyists to come into agencies to regulate the same sectors that they just a few months ago had been trying to influence... Trump eliminated the prohibition on lobbyists coming in, but he kept the two-year ban in participating in the same matter. And so then the question becomes, well, how are they enforcing this two-year ban because there are now dozens of lobbyists and lawyers who represented private industry who have been placed into the Trump administration in the same sectors that they had worked in for the private industries. But the question is, you know, how are we looking and knowing whether or not they are then working on essentially their former clients to-do lists but now with the power of the government agency that they're running?

"During the Obama administration, there was an agreement that anytime anyone was given a waiver, that waiver would be either posted on the White House website or shared with the Office of Government Ethics and made public. So we as reporters could look and see, well, this, you know, man or woman is working in the same area that they had previously been paid to represent. But we would know the conditions upon which they could do that and why they had been granted such a waiver. Then when the Trump administration started, they initially were refusing to make those waivers public despite the fact that we were asking for them. And it became the subject of a pretty intense fight. And ultimately, they made some of them public, but they don't continue to post them.

"...One of the more prominent ones is Michael Catanzaro, who was a lobbyist for Devon Energy and also for an electric utility that operates some of the largest coal-burning power plants in the United States. And so he was lobbying on things like trying to block a rule that the EPA had passed that was going to limit methane emissions from oil and gas drilling sites across the United States. Methane is many times more potent as a climate change component than CO2. And methane also-- when you release methane, you're often also releasing volatile organic chemicals, which are... you know, can be carcinogens and cause other health consequences. So the EPA was trying to regulate methane emissions. And Michael Catanzaro was working for Devon Energy to try to kill that rule. So he then goes into the White House. And he also had previously been representing the largest-- one of the largest coal-burning utilities in the United States. And he had been fighting the Clean Power Plan, which was trying to force coal-burning power plants to reduce their CO2 emissions. And so once he gets to the White House, among the things that he does is he helps write an executive order that essentially instructs the federal agencies to terminate the Clean Power Plan and the methane rule. And so he is essentially continuing the work that he'd been doing on behalf of his private-sector clients. But he's now doing it as one of the most powerful, you know, policy people in the United States. And so you wonder, how is that possible? So we were aware of Michael Catanzaro's shift. And I then went and interviewed a number of industry lobbyists who were lobbying the White House to try to get those rules repealed because they hated it. And now all of a sudden, they've got their former, you know, colleague and, you know, compatriot who is essentially helping run the show. And I said, have you talked to Michael Catanzaro since he went into the White House? And they said, yes. And I said, how is this possible? I thought there was this two-year ban on participating in a particular matter that you had represented a client on. And so we-- and then I asked the White House, well, can I see his waiver because he must have been granted a waiver. And they would not give it to me.

"After I wrote that story, the Office of Government Ethics said, you know what? This is an impossible situation. How can we have an ethics program if there - if we can't see the waivers? So the head of the Office of Government Ethics did what he called a data request, and he made a request of every federal agency. And he asked every federal agency for copies of any waivers that had been issued through April. And as a result of that request-- and there was a bit of a fight where initially the White House indicated that it may not comply with the request. But ultimately the White House complied. And there you go. On the day of the deadline, they-- the White House issues a list of waivers that had been issued, and there's Michael Catanzaro. And he was in fact-- had been granted a waiver to participate in the same matters that he had previously been paid to represent.

..."There's a guy at the Department of Transportation Security Administration. And in this case, I don't know the extent to which he has participated in the same manner. But he was working for a company that was trying to sell the Transportation Security Administration new equipment that would do security screenings. And that company had just gotten its agreement from TSA, the airport screening agency, to do kind of actual testing in its laboratory to see whether or not this equipment was worth buying and spending, you know, potentially tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to install in airports in the United States. And then the same gentleman, Chad Wolf, then became the chief of staff at TSA, which would-- you know, as the chief of staff, you're involved in issues across the agency. And you know, if you're going to be making a major change in the way that you inspect carry-on baggage to look for explosives and then potentially commit to buying, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment, you know, the chief of staff of the agency is going to be involved. So he is now the former lobbyist for the, you know-- explosive detection equipment is now the chief of staff overseeing, you know, various things at the Transportation Security Administration.

"There's a woman that is working in the Environmental Protection Agency who had worked for the chemical industry. And it was lobbying to try to limit the-- kind of the strength of a law intended to regulate toxic chemicals. Now she's at the EPA, helping establish the rules that will regulate the same chemicals and the same companies that she just previously had represented. And so I mean literally there are dozens of people who have made this shift from being the regulated to the regulators, and so-- at a pace that I have going back to George W. Bush and being in Washington and covering administrations that I have not seen before."

We asked two of the sharpest attorneys running for Congress this cycle, Dan Canon in Indiana and Sam Jammal in California. Dan's running for the 9th district seat held by a rubber stamp backbencher, Trey Hollingsworth. He told us that Trump's systemic dismantling of regulatory protections "is consistent not only with the unashamed corruption on display in this administration, but also the unchecked dismantling of the federal government we've seen over the last 7 months. The executive branch wants to make government into a private corporation, free from the fetters of ethical rules, public transparency, and the democratic process. And Congress isn't doing anything to hold these oligarchs accountable."

Sam Jammal, an Orange County candidate for a seat held by an entrenched top ally of Paul Ryan and the Trump Regime-- Ed Royce-- is concerned with the way the Trump Regime is perverting the role of the federal government on behalf of powerful special interests. "We need a government that works for us," he told us, "not one filled with individuals looking to turn around and make a quick buck or so biased towards one powerful interest. Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems we face in government that no one discusses. Its an even bigger problem now with Trump and his revolving door of special interests running our government. But this has been going on for a while. The result is that we have policy decisions focused solely on the interests of the most powerful incumbents, which hurts innovation, competition and ultimately the rest of us. Everyone-- regardless of political leanings-- should be concerned. I saw this firsthand as thousands of solar jobs were lost due to regulatory capture in state public utilities commissions.

"The best way to avoid regulatory capture and the revolving door are clear rules and oversight. First, we shouldn't make it so easy for special interest representatives-- it's not just lobbyists-- being in positions to influence policy on their former employers. There must be transparency and some waiver process in order to at least require a case be made for the hire. Additionally, there should be a longer ban on returning to lobby or participate in policy roles within the regulated industry. This will remove the profit motive to write policies to open doors for the next job. Lastly, we need congressional oversight. Congress stopped holding oversight hearings years ago, which leads to powerful interests shaping policy when there are bad actors like Trump, but also leaves our government vulnerable to only favoring the loudest voices and usual suspects since no one is paying attention."

Why Are Conservatives Willing To Watch The Planet Destruct? Fear And Cash/Cash And Fear

Over the weekend, NY Times reporters Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton traced a metamorphosis inside the upper echelons of the Republican Party. They looked at how GOP dogma went from dealing rationally with Climate Change to obstinate science denialism formerly only embraced by complete crackpots like House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith of Texas. The are good reasons why the crazy far right fringe was the first part of the GOP to embrace Trump and Trumpism. Lamar Smith, in fact, was the very first Republican in Congress top contribute money to Trump's campaign.

Start by looking at the 30 second spot from McCain's 2008 presidential campaign up top. No, that wasn't put together by Al Gore. That's a mainstream Republican's view of Climate Change less than a decade ago. Today Trumpanzee is widely viewed as an existential threat to the future of the planet. "It is difficult," they wrote, "to reconcile the Republican Party of 2008 with the party of 2017, whose leader, President Trump, has called global warming a hoax, reversed environmental policies that Mr. McCain advocated on his run for the White House, and this past week announced that he would take the nation out of the Paris climate accord, which was to bind the globe in an effort to halt the planet’s warming. The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation."

Not sure what "Democratic hubris" they're talking about but I think NY Times policy is... "both sides"-- even if it can't be backed up-- and there's no more talk of "Democratic hubris" is the article. They quote GOP strategist and Rubio campaign consultant Whit Ayres: "Most Republicans still do not regard climate change as a hoax. But the entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics. In some ways it’s become yet another of the long list of litmus test issues that determine whether or not you’re a good Republican." Maybe they meant Republican hubris.

Since Mr. McCain ran for president on climate credentials that were stronger than his opponent Barack Obama’s, the scientific evidence linking greenhouse gases from fossil fuels to the dangerous warming of the planet has grown stronger. Scientists have for the first time drawn concrete links between the planet’s warming atmosphere and changes that affect Americans’ daily lives and pocketbooks, from tidal flooding in Miami to prolonged water shortages in the Southwest to decreasing snow cover at ski resorts.

That scientific consensus was enough to pull virtually all of the major nations along. Conservative-leaning governments in Britain, France, Germany and Japan all signed on to successive climate change agreements.

Yet when Mr. Trump pulled the United States from the Paris accord, the Senate majority leader, the speaker of the House and every member of the elected Republican leadership were united in their praise.

Paul Ryan's reaction is likely to further erode his own shaky political support back in his Wisconsin congressional district. After Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Accord, Ryan said "The Paris climate agreement was simply a raw deal for America. Signed by President Obama without Senate ratification, it would have driven up the cost of energy, hitting middle-class and low-income Americans the hardest. In order to unleash the power of the American economy, our government must encourage production of American energy. I commend President Trump for fulfilling his commitment to the American people and withdrawing from this bad deal."

His likely opponent in 2018, iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce sees it differently. He told us "Ryan was once again showing that his loyalty is not to the overwhelming majority of hard working people whose very lives depend on a livable environment, but, to the highest bidders who fund his elections. By withdrawing from the Paris Accord, the U.S. now stands against the overwhelming majority of nations on the planet as well. We now stand on the same side as Nicaragua and Syria. (one of those two we reward with bombs) On the other side of the issue stands the rest of the world. Civilized nations have evolved as a result of lessons learned. We have protections in place so that the citizenry is protected by unscrupulous corporations who profit from pillaging our natural resources at the expense of our neighbors’ health. It’s bad enough to sell us out. It’s another thing entirely to hide from us in #WI01. Paul Ryan has plenty of time to jetset from fundraiser to fundraiser, but, has been absent from actually meeting with constituents for more than 600 days. Paul Ryan, after November of 2018, you will no longer need to hide. We will reward you with an extended vacation. It will be the only thing that you have 'earned' since you took office."

Follow the money

Those divisions did not happen by themselves. Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.

Government rules intended to slow climate change are “making people’s lives worse rather than better,” Charles Koch explained in a rare interview last year with Fortune, arguing that despite the costs, these efforts would make “very little difference in the future on what the temperature or the weather will be.”

Republican leadership has also been dominated by lawmakers whose constituents were genuinely threatened by policies that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, always sensitive to the coal fields in his state, rose through the ranks to become majority leader. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming also climbed into leadership, then the chairmanship of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, as a champion of his coal state.

Mr. Trump has staffed his White House and cabinet with officials who have denied, or at least questioned, the existence of global warming. And he has adopted the Koch language, almost to the word. On Thursday, as Mr. Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal, he at once claimed that the Paris accord would cost the nation millions of jobs and that it would do next to nothing for the climate.

Beyond the White House, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Science Committee, held a hearing this spring aimed at debunking climate science, calling the global scientific consensus “exaggerations, personal agendas and questionable predictions.”

A small core of Republican lawmakers-- most of whom are from swing districts and are at risk of losing their seats next year-- are taking modest steps like introducing a nonbinding resolution in the House in March urging Congress to accept the risks presented by climate change.

Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), for example, isn't on the same page as Trump on Climate Change denialism. ""With forty percent of Florida’s population at risk from sea-level rise, my state is on the front lines of climate change. South Florida residents are already beginning to feel the effects of climate change in their daily lives-- from chronic flooding to coral bleaching to threats to our freshwater supply in the Everglades.  We cannot ignore these challenges and every Member of Congress has a responsibility to our constituents and future generations to support market-based solutions, investments, and innovations that could alleviate the effects of climate change and make our nation more resilient." The only Florida Republicans who joined him in the Climate Solutions Caucus are Miami Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who's retiring next year and Brian Mast, from a purple district with a habit of ditching conservative Republicans for conservative Democrats every few years. But, as Davenport and Lipton pointed out, "in Republican political circles, speaking out on the issue, let alone pushing climate policy, is politically dangerous. So for the most part, these moderate Republicans are biding their time, until it once again becomes safe for Republicans to talk more forcefully about climate change. The question is how long that will take." For now, the Koch Brothers completely control the Climate agenda of the Republican Party. They have a pledge Republicans are forced to sign to get Koch cash: "I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue." First on board was far right extremist loon Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Conservative activists saw the [2009 cap-and-trade] legislative effort as an opportunity to transform the climate debate.

With the help of a small army of oil-industry-funded academics like Wei-Hock Soon of Harvard Smithsonian and think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they had been working to discredit academics and government climate change scientists. The lawyer and conservative activist Chris Horner, whose legal clients have included the coal industry, gathered documents through the Freedom of Information Act to try to embarrass and further undermine the climate change research.

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, worked behind the scenes to make sure Republican offices in Congress knew about Mr. Horner’s work-- although at the time, many viewed Mr. Ebell skeptically, as an extremist pushing out-of-touch views... As Congress moved toward actually passing climate change legislation, a fringe issue had become a part of the political mainstream.

“That was the turning point,” Mr. Horner said.

The House passed the cap-and-trade bill by seven votes, but it went nowhere in the Senate-- Mr. Obama’s first major legislative defeat.

Unshackled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other related rulings, which ended corporate campaign finance restrictions, Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations.

Their first target: unseating Democratic lawmakers such as Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello of Virginia, who had voted for the House cap-and-trade bill, and replacing them with Republicans who were seen as more in step with struggling Appalachia, and who pledged never to push climate change measures.

But Americans for Prosperity also wanted to send a message to Republicans.

Until 2010, some Republicans ran ads in House and Senate races showing their support for green energy.

“After that, it disappeared from Republican ads,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “Part of that was the polling, and part of it was the visceral example of what happened to their colleagues who had done that.”

What happened was clear. Republicans who asserted support for climate change legislation or the seriousness of the climate threat saw their money dry up or, worse, a primary challenger arise.

“It told Republicans that we were serious,” Mr. Phillips said, “that we would spend some serious money against them.”

By the time Election Day 2010 arrived, 165 congressional members and candidates had signed Americans for Prosperity’s “No Climate Tax” pledge.

Most were victorious.

“The midterm election was a clear rejection of policies like the cap-and-trade energy taxes that threaten our still-fragile economy,” said James Valvo, then Americans for Prosperity’s government affairs director, in a statement issued the day after the November 2010 election. Eighty-three of the 92 new members of Congress had signed the pledge.

Even for congressional veterans, that message was not missed. Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who once called climate change “a serious problem” and co-sponsored a bill to promote energy-efficient light bulbs, tacked right after the 2010 elections as he battled to be chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee against Joe Barton, a Texan who mocked human-caused climate change.

Mr. Upton deleted references to climate change from his website. “If you look, the last year was the warmest year on record, the warmest decade on record. I accept that,” he offered that fall. “I do not say that it’s man-made.”

Mr. Upton, who has received more than $2 million in campaign donations from oil and gas companies and electric utilities over the course of his career, won the chairmanship and has coasted comfortably to re-election since.

Two years later, conservative “super PACs” took aim at Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a senior Republican who publicly voiced climate concerns, backed the creation of a Midwestern cap-and-trade program and drove a Prius. After six Senate terms, Mr. Lugar lost his primary to a Tea Party challenger, Richard E. Mourdock. Although Mr. Lugar says other reasons contributed, he and his opponents say his public views on climate change played a crucial role.

“In my own campaign, there were people who felt strongly enough about my views on climate change to use it to help defeat me, and other Republicans are very sensitive to that possibility,” Mr. Lugar said in an interview. “So even if they privately believe we ought to do something about it, they’re reticent, especially with the Republican president taking the views he is now taking.”

After winning re-election in 2012, Mr. Obama understood his second-term agenda would have to rely on executive authority, not legislation that would go nowhere in the Republican-majority Congress. And climate change was the great unfinished business of his first term.

To finish it, he would deploy a rarely used provision in the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on carbon dioxide.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he declared in his 2013 State of the Union address.

The result was the Clean Power Plan, which would significantly cut planet-warming emissions by forcing the closing of hundreds of heavy-polluting coal-fired power plants.

The Koch Brothers lost their shit over it and even Republicans who had supported the climate change agenda began to defect. I haven't heard any of those Republicans so upset about Obama's executive orders going around Congress complaining about the most executive-order-addicted president in history going nuts using them now. Have you?

Starting in early 2014, the opponents of the rule-- including powerful lawyers and lobbyists representing many of America’s largest manufacturing and industrial interests-- regularly gathered in a large conference room at the national headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, overlooking the White House. They drafted a long-game legal strategy to undermine Mr. Obama’s climate regulations in a coordinated campaign that brought together 28 state attorneys general and major corporations to form an argument that they expected to eventually take to the Supreme Court.

They presented it not as an environmental fight but an economic one, against a government that was trying to vastly and illegally expand its authority.

“This is the most significant wholesale regulation of energy that the United States has ever seen, by any agency,” Roger R. Martella Jr., a former E.P.A. lawyer who then represented energy companies, said at a gathering of industry advocates, making an assertion that has not been tested.

Republican attorneys general gathered at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia in August 2015 for their annual summer retreat, with some special guests: four executives from Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies.

Murray was struggling to avoid bankruptcy-- a fate that had befallen several other coal mining companies already, given the slump in demand for their product and the rise of natural gas, solar and wind energy.

The coal industry came to discuss a new part of the campaign to reverse the country’s course on climate change. Litigation was going to be needed, the industry executives and the Republican attorneys general agreed, to block the Obama administration’s climate agenda — at least until a new president could be elected.

West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, led the session, “The Dangerous Consequences of the Clean Power Plan & Other E.P.A. Rules,” which included, according to the agenda, Scott Pruitt, then the attorney general of Oklahoma; Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general; and Geoffrey Barnes, a corporate lawyer for Murray, which had donated $250,000 to the Republican attorneys general political group.

That same day, Mr. Morrissey would step outside the hotel to announce that he and other attorneys general would sue in federal court to try to stop the Clean Power Plan, which he called “the most far-reaching energy regulation in this nation’s history, drawn up by radical bureaucrats.”

Mr. Pruitt quickly became a national point person for industry-backed groups and a magnet for millions of dollars of campaign contributions, as the fossil fuel lobby looked for a fresh face with conservative credentials and ties to the evangelical community.

“Pruitt was instrumental-- he and A.G. Morrisey,” said Thomas Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries, an adviser to Mr. Trump’s transition team and the president of a pro-fossil fuel Washington research organization, the Institute for Energy Research. “They led the charge and made it easier for other states to get involved. Some states were keeping their powder dry, but Pruitt was very out front and aggressive.”

After the litigation was filed-- by Mr. Morrissey and Mr. Pruitt, along with other attorneys general who attended the Greenbrier meeting-- Murray Energy sued in the federal court case as well, just as had been planned.

In February 2016, the Supreme Court indicated that it would side with opponents of the rule, moving by a 5-4 vote to grant a request by the attorneys general and corporate players to block the implementation of the Clean Power Plan while the case worked its way through the federal courts.

When Donald J. Trump decided to run for president, he did not appear to have a clear understanding of the nation’s climate change policies. Nor, at the start of his campaign, did he appear to have any specific plan to prioritize a huge legal push to roll those policies back.

Mr. Trump had, in 2012, said on Twitter, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” But he had also, in 2009, joined dozens of other business leaders to sign a full-page ad in the The New York Times urging Mr. Obama to push a global climate change pact being negotiated in Copenhagen, and to “strengthen and pass United States legislation” to tackle climate change.

However, it did not go unnoticed that coal country was giving his presidential campaign a wildly enthusiastic embrace, as miners came out in full force for Mr. Trump, stoking his populist message.

And the surest way for Mr. Trump to win cheers from coal crowds was to aim at an easy target: Mr. Obama’s climate rules. Hillary Clinton did not help her cause when she said last spring that her climate policies would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

In May 2016, Mr. Trump addressed one of the largest rallies of his campaign: an estimated crowd of over 10,000 in Charleston, W.Va., where the front rows were crammed with mine workers.

“I’m thinking about miners all over the country,” he said, eliciting cheers. “We’re going to put miners back to work.”

“They didn’t used to have all these rules and regulations that make it impossible to compete,” he added. “We’re going to take it all off the table.”

Then an official from the West Virginia Coal Association handed the candidate a miner’s hat.

As he put it on, giving the miners a double thumbs-up, “The place just went nuts, and he loved it,” recalled Barry Bennett, a former adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. “And the miners started showing up at everything. They were a beaten lot, and they saw him as a savior. So he started using the ‘save coal’ portions of the speech again and again.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers embraced the miners as emblematic of the candidate’s broader populist appeal.

“The coal miners were the perfect case for what he was talking about,” Mr. Bennett said, “the idea that for the government in Washington, it’s all right for these people to suffer for the greater good-- that federal power is more important than your little lives.”

Mr. Trump took on as an informal campaign adviser Robert E. Murray-- chief executive of the same coal company that had been working closely for years with the Republican attorneys general to unwind the Obama environmental legacy.

Mr. Murray, a brash and folksy populist who started working in coal mines as a teenager, is an unabashed skeptic of climate science. The coal magnate and Mr. Trump had a natural chemistry, and where Mr. Trump lacked the legal and policy background to unwind climate policy, Mr. Murray was happy to step in.

“I thank my lord, Jesus Christ, for the election of Donald Trump,” Mr. Murray said soon after his new friend won the White House.

Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Ebell, the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow who had worked for years to undermine the legitimacy of established climate science, to head the transition team at E.P.A. Mr. Ebell immediately began pushing for an agenda of gutting the Obama climate regulations and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

When it came time to translate Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to coal country into policy, Mr. Murray and others helped choose the perfect candidate: Mr. Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general.

Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Pruitt before his election, offered him the job of E.P.A. administrator-- putting him in a position to dismantle the environmental rules that he had long sought to fight in court.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump wanted to be seen delivering on the promises he had made to the miners. As controversies piled up in his young administration, he sought comfort in the approval of his base.

In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin unwinding the Clean Power Plan-- and he did so at a large public ceremony at the E.P.A., flanked by coal miners and coal executives. Mr. Murray beamed in the audience.

Meanwhile, a battle raged at the White House over whether to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, urged him to remain in, cautioning that withdrawing could be devastating to the United States’ foreign policy credentials.

Murray Energy-- despite its enormous clout with Mr. Trump and his top environmental official-- boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

By comparison, General Electric alone has 104,000 employees in the United States, and Apple has 80,000. Their chief executives openly pressed Mr. Trump to stick with Paris, as did dozens of other major corporations that have continued to support regulatory efforts to combat climate change.

But these voices did not have clout in Washington, either in Congress or at the White House, when it comes to energy policy.

Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, backed by Mr. Pruitt, told the president that pulling out of the deal would mean a promise kept to his base.

“It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-- along with many, many other locations within our great country-- before Paris, France,” Mr. Trump said in his Rose Garden speech on Thursday. “It is time to make America great again.”

Note: Trump lost Youngstown, Detroit and Pittsburgh in the election. Hillary beat him in Youngstown handily and even won surrounding Mahoning County by around 4,000 votes. Detroit wasn't even close and Wayne County rejected Trump's ugly Know Nothing approach 519,444 (66.4%) to 228,993 (29.3%), a rout. Same in Pittsburgh. The mayor reminded Trump the city voted almost 80% for Clinton. Surrounding Allegheny County-- where Trump put immense resources during the campaign-- went for Clinton 367,617 (56%) to 259,480 (39%).

n Congress, reluctance to embrace that science has had no political downsides, at least among Republicans.

“We don’t yet have an example of where someone has paid a political price being on that side of it,” said Michael Steel, who served as press secretary for the former House speaker John A. Boehner, the Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and the current House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, during his 2012 run as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential choice.

Instead, the messages of Mr. Pruitt still dominate.

“This is an historic restoration of American economic independence-- one that will benefit the working class, the working poor and working people of all stripes,” Mr. Pruitt said on Thursday, stepping to the Rose Garden lectern after Mr. Trump. “We owe no apologies to other nations for our environmental stewardship.”

American voters-- even many Republicans-- recognize that climate change is starting to affect their lives. About 70 percent think global warming is happening, and about 53 percent think it is caused by human activities, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. About 69 percent support limiting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.

But most public opinion polls find that voters rank the environment last or nearly last among the issues that they vote on. And views are divided based on party affiliation. In 2001, 46 percent of Democrats said they worried “a great deal” about climate change, compared with 29 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup tracking poll on the issue. This year, concern among Democrats has reached 66 percent. Among Republicans, it has fallen, to 18 percent.

Until people vote on the issue, Republicans will find it politically safer to question climate science and policy than to alienate moneyed groups like Americans for Prosperity.

There will be exceptions. The 2014 National Climate Assessment, a report produced by 14 federal agencies, concluded that climate change is responsible for much of the flooding now plaguing many of the Miami area’s coastal residents, soaking homes and disrupting businesses, and Representative Curbelo is talking about it.

“This is a local issue for me,” Mr. Curbelo said. “Even conservatives in my district see the impact. It’s flooding, and it’s happening now... There are members from deep-red districts who have approached me about figuring out how to become part of this effort,” Mr. Curbelo said. “I know we have the truth on our side. So I’m confident that we’ll win-- eventually.”

With reactionaries like Trump, Pruitt and Ryan willing-- eager-- to dance to the Koch brothers' tune, "eventually" may be too late. Last cycle alone, energy and natural resources companies poured $64,575,688 into congressional races-- bribes to get what they wanted. And who were the biggest recipients of this planet-killing cash? Among current House members the biggest recipients of bribes from this sector were among the crooked members of Congress who were willing to play the illegal quid pro quo game. The half dozen worst in the House:

• Paul Ryan (R-WI)- $1,149,303
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $613,100
• John Shimkus (R-IL)- $559,383
• Kevin Brady (R-TX)- $545,700
• Fred Upton (R-MI)- $507,463
• Steve Scalise (R-LA)- $498,750

You know what else-- aside from an eagerness to take Koch bribes-- these six crooks have in common? Not one of them was challenged by the DCCC last cycle.

The Swampiest Regime In History? Oh, Yes

Early Sunday morning, The Atlantic published a Ron Brownstein piece, Donald Trump's Tilt Toward Convention, going through not just the campaign promises he's reneging on but the very premises for his entire presidency. "Trump’s march to the GOP nomination last spring," he wrote, "demonstrated there’s a substantial audience within the party’s rank and file-- particularly among older and blue-collar Republicans-- for the nationalist movement’s insular themes of resistance to trade, immigration, and foreign alliances, and embrace of government spending that benefits economically strained workers and retirees. But Trump’s tumultuous first months in office have shown with equal clarity that such an agenda has extremely little institutional support inside the GOP beyond a constellation of sympathetic media outlets (like Breitbart News) and talk-radio and cable-television hosts (such as Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity). Lacking many champions in Congress, think tanks, conservative interest groups, or the business community, many of the movement’s most distinctive ideas-- say, confronting China over trade or protecting the mostly white older population from budget cuts-- have been rapidly losing ground to more conventional GOP interests and priorities."

Both GOP wings agree on several fronts, from reducing federal regulation to cutting taxes to advancing conservative social priorities, like expanding gun-owners’ rights. But where the two camps diverge, Trump in recent weeks has consistently tilted away from his nationalist campaign rhetoric and toward more conventional GOP positions on a stunning list of issues. As Wehner put it, Trump in just weeks has hurtled “from Bannon-esque, apocalyptic, racial nationalism to Goldman Sachs, conventional, elite liberalism with nothing in between.”

...The key to party change will be Trump’s success in mobilizing the grassroots elements of the GOP coalition open to a nationalist message, argued J. Hogan Gidley, a longtime GOP communications strategist. Gidley advised the presidential campaigns of both Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who pioneered many of the blue-collar conservative themes that Trump championed. He also advised the pro-Trump political action committee founded by Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the conservative megadonors close to Bannon.

Gidley acknowledged there is little institutional backing inside the GOP for the views all of those figures have touted. Asked where the Trump administration’s nationalists could turn for support beyond supportive media voices like Hannity, Ingraham, or Ann Coulter, Gidley said: “I don’t know that they have anywhere to turn.”

But, he argued, Trump can topple that power structure. “That’s what he was elected to do, to shake things up,” Gidley said. “I think he is going to make deals with Republicans, with the [House] Freedom Caucus, with Democrats when he has to. Donald Trump, because he commands the bully pulpit of the White House, can reshape much of the Republican Party.”

But many others question whether Trump has the skill, tenacity, or even the interest to engage in the sort of sustained struggle to redirect his party that Bill Clinton undertook. Wehner cautioned that even Trump’s turn back to more conventional conservative thinking in recent weeks probably isn’t the last bend in the road.

“What he will end up doing is what he thinks will be in the best interest of Donald Trump,” Wehner said. “During the campaign, he believed the best interest of Donald Trump was to inflame some of the darker impulses of America and say things that are outrageous and fan conspiracy theories. Now I suspect he is seeing the Bannon approach isn’t working and will lead to a failed presidency, and he’s thinking about jettisoning that. I really think he’s ideologically rootless and could end up anywhere.”

Eric Lipton, writing for the NY Times had already written over the weekend of exactly where all the DC factions come together-- in the swamp, the place Trump, by nature and nurture, is most comfortable anyway. Did anyone ever doubt that Trump was destined to sit atop the most corrupt and ethics-free administration in American history? (OK, OK, I know about Harding and am reminded about Andrew Jackson's "spoils system" every time I see a picture of Trump's newly decorated Oval Office... but you get the point.) "Trump," wrote Lipton, "is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck." The potential conflicts arising are virtually endless. "In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules."

One such case involves Michael Catanzaro, who serves as the top White House energy adviser. Until late last year, he was working as a lobbyist for major industry clients such as Devon Energy of Oklahoma, an oil and gas company, and Talen Energy of Pennsylvania, a coal-burning electric utility, as they fought Obama-era environmental regulations, including the landmark Clean Power Plan. Now, he is handling some of the same matters on behalf of the federal government.

Another case involves Chad Wolf, who spent the past several years lobbying to secure funding for the Transportation Security Administration to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new carry-on luggage screening device. He is now chief of staff at that agency-- at the same time as the device is being tested and evaluated for possible purchase by agency staff.

There are other examples. At the Labor Department, two officials joined the agency from the K Street lobbying corridor, leaving behind jobs where they fought some of the Obama administration’s signature labor rules, including a policy requiring financial advisers to act in a client’s best interest when providing retirement advice.

This revolving door of lobbyists and government officials is not new in Washington. Both parties make a habit of it.

But the Trump administration is more vulnerable to conflicts than the prior administration, particularly after the president eliminated an ethics provision that prohibits lobbyists from joining agencies they lobbied in the prior two years. The White House also announced on Friday that it would keep its visitors’ logs secret, discontinuing the release of information on corporate executives, lobbyists and others who enter the complex, often to try to influence federal policy. The changes have drawn intense criticism from government ethics advocates across the city.

Mr. Trump’s appointees are also far wealthier and have more complex financial holdings and private-sector ties than officials hired at the start of the Obama administration, according to an Office of Government Ethics analysis that the White House has made public. This creates a greater chance that they might have conflicts related to investments or former clients, which could force them to sell off assets, recuse themselves or seek a waiver.

...[I]n several cases, officials in the Trump administration now hold the exact jobs they targeted as lobbyists or lawyers in the past two years.

Trump White House officials had over 300 recent corporate clients and employers, including Apple, the giant hedge fund Citadel and the insurance titan Anthem, according to a Times analysis of financial disclosures. (The White House has released disclosures for only about half of its roughly 180 current senior political employees.) And there are more than 40 former lobbyists in the White House and the broader federal government... Trump also made it easier for former lobbyists in the government to get waivers that would let them take up matters that could benefit former clients.

...The lobbyist loophole in Mr. Trump’s executive order may have allowed the Labor Department to hire Geoffrey Burr as a special assistant. The department is familiar ground to Mr. Burr, who was a lobbyist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, which pressed the agency on its overtime pay rule, wage requirements for government contracts and an additional half-dozen or so other regulations. Under Mr. Obama’s ethics order, Mr. Burr would probably not have been able to join the Labor Department.

Such potential conflicts are showing up across the federal government.

Executives at Analogic Corp. had tried to sell its carry-on baggage security equipment to the T.S.A. with Mr. Wolf’s help when he was a lobbyist. They were pressing the agency to conduct formal tests of its computed tomography devices, known as CT scans, which are already used broadly in the medical field and on checked baggage. The company now wants the T.S.A. to use them in the nation’s 2,400 airport checkpoint security lanes, a move that could be worth at least $500 million in equipment sales.

The tests are underway, and at one point during an interview with The Times, company executives said they had reached out to Mr. Wolf to discuss the matter after he joined the T.S.A., listing his name among a series of agency officials they had recently contacted. But when asked again about Mr. Wolf, they would not give details from the conversation, at one point contradicting themselves and saying they had not spoken with him. Then one of them, Mark Laustra, a vice president at Analogic who leads the company’s efforts to sell the screening devices, said, “Our interaction with Chad since he joined T.S.A. has been next to nothing.”

Mr. Wolf’s Twitter account on Friday still identified him as a lobbyist and displayed posts from last year urging the T.S.A. to buy the devices. “Positive developments from TSA on upgrading checkpoint scanners,” a post from July said. “CT tech is the future.”

A T.S.A. spokesman agreed to arrange an interview with Mr. Wolf-- who worked at the agency during the Bush administration before becoming a lobbyist-- but canceled it when told about the topic in detail.

“I’m afraid Mr. Wolf isn’t going to have any available time in his schedule today,” said Mike England, the spokesman, who then declined several follow-up requests over a one-week period. He later added, in a statement, that Mr. Wolf’s “duties have not required a waiver” of the ethics standards Mr. Trump adopted in January, although Mr. England would not discuss the matter further.

The Department of Health and Human Services has become another source of potential conflicts.

Lance Leggitt, who serves as chief of staff to Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, worked last year as a lobbyist for 10 different health care companies, including United States Medical Supply and Advanced Infusion Services. He focused largely on lobbying the agency related to Medicare billing rules, as well as rules for health care supplier accreditations, lobbying disclosure reports show. All these issues are routinely handled by the agency he helps oversee.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, received more than $350,000 in payments in 2014 and 2015 from nearly a dozen different pharmaceutical companies, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, whose two approved drugs are seen as breakthrough treatments for cystic fibrosis. (They carry list prices of more than $250,000 a year.) Dr. Gottlieb, who has never been registered as a lobbyist but has served as the director of eight pharmaceutical companies and one laboratory company, wrote in a letter that he was prepared to recuse himself as necessary to avoid any conflicts.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for a comment.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said the sheer number of potential conflicts-- which will require recusals, necessitate waivers or result in violations of the ethics rule-- is disturbing, particularly given the secretive approach the administration is taking on the issue.

“This is not a matter of just checking a box-- this is about protecting the integrity of the operation of federal government,” Ms. Brian said. “But our worst fears are coming true: We know people coming in who have conflicts, and we cannot see what restrictions they are under, if any.”

The result, she predicted, might serve no one particularly well. Even if the rules are enforced, so many senior officials will be required to recuse themselves that “they will have a hard time getting their job done.”