Several federal officials attended an energy conference hosted by the conservative Heartland Institute. The group of climate skeptics is celebrating Trump’s environmental rollbacks and aiming for even bigger policy changes.

Zahra Hirji via BuzzFeed News At the America First Energy Conference, Heartland's president addresses the crowd over lunch.

HOUSTON — A controversial free-market think tank, after years on the political fringe, has found an audience in the Trump administration.

At an energy meeting of the Heartland Institute last week, some of the nation’s most vocal climate deniers gushed about the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of environmental and climate rules and set their sights on a far more ambitious plan: gutting the policy that allows the EPA to treat carbon as an air pollutant. The America First Energy Conference drew several federal officials. The Interior Department’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, gave a keynote over dinner; Richard Westerdale II, a senior energy adviser at the State Department, was a panelist; and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, addressed attendees in a pre-taped video. The meeting’s mostly celebratory panels focused on climate myths, fossil fuels, and the dramatic shift in environmental policy under Trump: his announcement to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the proposed repeal of pollution rules for power plants, and EPA’s overhaul of its science advisory boards. “I can assure you none of us feel like we wasted our time,” David Stevenson, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team, said on the “Reforming EPA” panel. “It’s like Christmas with all the things that have happened in the last year and all the things that are going to happen next year,” he said. Other speakers strategized a lofty goal for the rest of the Trump presidency: reversing an EPA declaration known as the “endangerment finding.” Under the Obama administration, the agency concluded that climate change poses a danger to public health. It’s the foundation of the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions as an air pollutant, and has been backed up by the Supreme Court.

To many legal experts, the endangerment finding is untouchable, or close to it. “I would be hard-pressed to guess at or articulate a theory whereby the Supreme Court would take the position that this wasn’t already decided as a final matter,” Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental Law Program and a former EPA official, told BuzzFeed News. The conference participants, too, recognized that gutting the policy would be tough. But under Trump, they see an opportunity that might not come around again, and are gearing up for a legal battle. “If you have a compliant and helpful administration, I think you can just tear it down,” said David Schnare, another panelist who served on the Trump transition team. “If you’ve got an administration that does not want to go down that road, I think it’s very much like a marathon.”

“If you have a compliant and helpful administration, I think you can just tear it down.”