How Project 2025 will impact US climate policy – ​​Mother Jones

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When the delegation arrived As the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week formally nominated former President Donald Trump as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate, a right-wing policy think tank hosted a day-long event nearby. The convention’s main sponsor, the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has influenced Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, rallied supporters to promote Project 2025, a 900-plus page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.

Dozens of conservative groups have donated to Project 2025, which recommends reforms that would affect every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Department of the Interior to the Federal Reserve. While the plan has attracted a lot of attention for its proposed crackdown on human rights and individual freedoms, the proposed plan would also undermine the country’s broad environmental and climate policy network, reshaping the future of U.S. fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.

Under President Joe Biden’s leadership, most of the federal government’s vast departments, agencies, and commissions have belatedly begun the difficult task of integrating climate change into their operations and procedures. Two summers ago, President Biden also signed the Defeat Inflation Act, the largest climate change spending bill in U.S. history, which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent below 2005 levels.

Project 2025 seeks to reverse much of the progress made by cutting funding to government programs across the board, weakening federal oversight and policymaking, repealing laws passed during President Biden’s first term, and laying off career officials. The project’s proposed policy changes, which include executive orders that President Trump could implement alone, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and legislation that would require Congressional approval, would make it extremely difficult for the United States to meet the climate goals it committed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“This is really horrible,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the League of Environmental Voters, an environmental group. “This is a real plan by people who were in government to see how to systematically take over the government, take away rights and freedoms, dismantle government and make it serve private industry.”

Trump has sought to distance himself from the plan, saying “some of the things they’re saying are totally ridiculous and disgusting,” he wrote on social media last week.

But at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration have donated to Project 2025, and policy experts and environmentalists worry that Project 2025 could have an influence on shaping Republican policy if Trump is reelected in November. Some of the blueprint’s recommendations are reflected in the official party platform for the Republican National Convention, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has said he is “good friends” with Trump’s new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. So far, Heritage’s roadmap has done a good job of shaping the president’s agenda, with 64% of the policy recommendations the foundation made in 2016 being implemented or considered during Trump’s first year in office. Heritage declined to comment on the matter.

Roughly speaking, Project 2025 proposals seek to shrink the size of the federal government and give more power to the states. The document calls for “unlocking all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, cutting federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and relaxing environmental permitting regulations and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s being planned here is a project that will ensure the fossil fuel agenda, both literally and figuratively,” said Craig Segall, vice president of Evergreen Action, a climate-oriented political advocacy group.

Within the Department of Energy, the division dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for home appliances would be eliminated. The environmental monitoring capabilities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be significantly limited or eliminated, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, or conducting climate change research.

In addition to these larger reforms, Project 2025 advocates for the repeal of smaller, lesser-known federal programs and statutes that protect public health and environmental justice. Project 2025 recommends the elimination of “hazard determinations,” a legal mechanism under the Clean Air Act that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from industries like automobiles and power plants. It also recommends eliminating government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damages that occur for every ton of carbon emitted. And it seeks to prevent government agencies from assessing the “multiplier effects” of policies, such as improved air quality, or the cascading positive health impacts.

“When we think about who is hit hardest by pollution, whether it’s traditional air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution or climate change, it’s often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Klitas, policy director of the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group. “Weakening these kinds of protections will disproportionately impact exactly these communities.”

Other proposals would wreak havoc on the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 proposes abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service it houses, replacing them with private companies. The blueprint says the National Hurricane Center should remain intact, and the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without bias intended to favor one side or the other in the climate debate.”

But the National Hurricane Center, like other private weather services, gets much of its data from the National Weather Service, and removing public weather data could deny Americans access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s outrageous,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. “This solution doesn’t solve any problems. It’s a solution in search of a problem.”

The document also advocates moving the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees federal disaster response, from the Department of Homeland Security for more than two decades to the Department of Interior or Department of Transportation. “All of the agencies within the Department of Interior are federal land management agencies that own large swaths of land and manage those resources on behalf of the federal government,” Moore said. “Why put FEMA there? I don’t understand why that’s the starting point.”

The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and transferring flood insurance to private insurers, an idea that ignores the fact that the federal program was originally established because private insurers decided it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-vulnerable homes, long before climate change began to wreak havoc on insurance markets.

While most of Project 2025’s climate proposals have alarming implications, it does propose some policies that climate experts say are worth considering. Its authors call for shifting the costs of natural disasters from the federal government to state governments. That’s not a bad thing to discuss, Moore noted. “I think there are people at FEMA who feel the same way,” he said.

The federal government currently pays at least 75 percent of disaster recovery costs nationwide, paving the way for development and rebuilding in at-risk areas. “It discourages state and local governments from making smart decisions about where to build their homes because they know the federal government will foot the bill for any mistakes they make,” Moore said.

Kiran Robinson, a senior adviser at Conserve America, who has worked with Republicans in Washington, D.C., to shape emissions policy, was encouraged by the authors’ call to end what she called “unfair bias against the nuclear industry.” Nuclear energy is a reliable source of carbon-free energy, but it has been plagued by safety and public health concerns, as well as stiff opposition from some environmental activists. “We know it’s a critical technology for decarbonization,” Robinson said, noting growing bipartisan interest in the energy source among members of Congress.

An analysis by the UK-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would increase US emissions by 400 billion tonnes by 2030 – equivalent to the emissions of the European Union and Japan combined.

Above all, Evergreen Action’s Segal worries about Project 2025’s impact on the federal workforce. Much of the workings of the administrative state are kept in the minds of career employees who pass on the knowledge to the next cadre of federal employees. When this institutional knowledge is suppressed by the budget cuts and hostile management of Trump’s first term, the government loses vital information that helps it operate. It will “disperse” personnel, he says, disrupting the final operation and bringing the government to a halt.

While Project 2025’s proposals are radical, Segal said their impact on civil servants would repeat a pattern that has played out for decades. “This is a common theme of Republican administrations going back to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “They destroy government, they make it very hard for government to function, and then they loudly proclaim that government can’t do anything.”