The CEI, as it was called, was libertarian and studied the growing burden of the federal government. The think tank put out a popular annual report, called “Ten Thousand Commandments,” one of the few reliable sources that tracked the steady creation of new federal rules and their costs for the private sector. Ebell earned a name for himself as a leading intellectual opponent not just of the EPA, but of any regulations that might constrain carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels. He was a key voice in Washington to cast doubt on the reality of human-created climate change and what he called “global warming alarmism” a new religion. He said in 2012 that the consensus around climate change was a political consensus, not a scientific consensus.
By 2016, Ebell had acknowledged that human activity was causing climate change, but he told the Climatewire news service that holding this belief didn’t mean that climate change was “a serious problem or that the policies to address it will actually do anything or that you are willing to pay the costs of those policies.”
Needless to say, this put Ebell directly at odds with the career staff at the EPA. After Congress failed to pass the cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions quietly moved into the EPA headquarters. The same team of people who had toiled with Jonathan Phillips in the basement of the Longworth Building—namely, Joel Beauvais, Michael Goo, and Shannon Kenny—moved straight to the EPA to continue the effort there. The team quickly realized that the EPA’s authority to do anything was limited. Only Congress could pass the type of sweeping legislation that could significantly curtail carbon emissions. But this limitation was counterbalanced by good news. The fracking boom had replaced coal-fired power plants with natural gas–fired power plants, reducing America’s carbon emissions. The economics of cheap natural gas essentially doomed coal as a major energy source. But the EPA team, including Beauvais and Goo, took a “rear-guard action” to ensure that coal wouldn’t make a comeback and boost carbon emissions again. This rear-guard action took the form of an EPA rule called the Clean Power Plan, which required states to meet targets for cutting back carbon emissions for power plants. The rule aimed to cut emissions by about one-third by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels. The Clean Power Plan was only part of the EPA’s effort to limit carbon emissions. On an upper floor of the agency’s headquarters was the home office of the Climate Change Division, a sprawling office of cubicles where the agency collected data on greenhouse gas emissions that were a vital tool in controlling them.
When Myron Ebell finally arrived at the EPA, he was greeted by two senior EPA officials who sat down with him to discuss how the Trump team might lead the EPA. The officials were Matt Fritz and Shannon Kenny, who were tasked with helping the transition. Ebell was an unremarkable-looking man, with the manner of a soft-spoken college professor. He wore round-framed, deeply unstylish eyeglasses with conservative suits and neckties. He was almost overly polite, even courtly, like an English gentleman who would never say anything to offend. This didn’t mean that his charm won over the EPA officials. The career officials developed a nickname for him—“Creepy Grandpa”—that reflected both their disdain and mistrust.
It appeared, at least in the eyes of EPA officials, that the disdain ran both ways. As the weeks wore on and Ebell interacted with more EPA employees, he remained strenuously cordial, but they perceived that he was almost gleeful about what was to come. “He was always very polite, but he has this sort of sadistic grin,” one employee recalled. “He wants to be sure that you know he knows he’s fucking you over.”
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When Donald Trump arrived in Washington, he had no connections and no political network from which to draw the hundreds of people he needed to staff positions across different government agencies. Charles Koch, by contrast, had spent forty years building political networks in Washington. He had cultivated experts and operatives through years of employing them at think tanks, lobbying offices, and funded university chairs. When Donald Trump went out to hire people, he almost necessarily hired people who were sympathetic to Charles Koch’s point of view, if not directly beholden to Charles Koch’s largesse.
This influence was apparent in the beachhead team that arrived at the EPA. The team wasn’t selected by Koch, but it was stacked