By Dana Drugmand
May 30, 2024
Rally in the Bronx. | Photo by Yuki Iwamura/AP
Conservative policy-plotters and backers of former President Donald Trump have assembled a sweeping battle plan to dismantle federal agencies and public health standards, including vital environmental protections. Should Trump retake the White House, his political allies are prepared to take a sledgehammer to US climate and environmental policies. While Trump wines and dines with oil and gas executives, a proposed policy agenda put forth by dozens of right-wing organizations threatens to squander the narrow time window we have for climate action and actively fan the flames of a world on fire, climate scientists and advocates warn.
This agenda serves as a fitting backdrop to recent revelations that Trump has promised, in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions, to save the fossil fuel industry billions of dollars with regulatory rollbacks. Industry lobbyists are already drafting ready-to-sign executive orders to help Trump implement that pledge. In response to these revelations, several high-ranking Democrats in Congress have launched investigations into what they say is a troubling quid pro quo.
A scientist’s warning: “Game over for climate progress”
Far-right policy advisers and think tank staffers, working under the Project 2025 presidential transition project, are organizing nothing less than a dismantling of the administrative state. Project 2025 is essentially a death sentence for federal climate and environmental protections. Everything from rules to curb hazardous air pollutants to programs that help make cleaner and more energy-efficient purchases affordable would be on the chopping block. Agencies like the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could be gutted. Peer-reviewed science would be sidelined, and polluters’ economic interests would be prioritized in government decision-making. The federal government would focus on authorizing fossil fuel production and projects while eliminating funding and programs supporting renewables like wind and solar.
According to the Project 2025 website, the goal is to be prepared to execute this agenda “on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Trump, the expected GOP nominee, has promised to expand oil and gas drilling on his first day in office, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “other than day one” with immediate priorities including shutting down the southern border and “drilling, drilling, drilling.”
Should the Project 2025 policy agenda actually be implemented, “it would be game over for climate progress in the US, turning the reins of our government over to the polluters,” said Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “And in the absence of American leadership, global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and avoid catastrophic warming will likely fail.”
Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 includes a comprehensive conservative policy agenda, a playbook for the first 180 days of an incoming Republican presidential administration, and personnel recruitment and training. The $22 million initiative involves over 100 right-wing organizations, many with track records of disseminating climate disinformation and with documented ties to big corporate donors and industrial polluters like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries.
The policy agenda offers no strategies for reining in the carbon pollution causing planetary heating. Project 2025 and Heritage Foundation did not respond to Sierra’s inquiries. But Heritage’s Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told The New York Times that one of its aims is to “investigate whether the dimensions of climate change exist.” In terms of the role of fossil fuels in driving climate breakdown, he told the Times: “I think the science is still out on that quite frankly.”
That is simply not true. Mann told Sierra these comments should raise alarm bells. “It underscores the threat posed to our planet by a political party that actively promotes anti-science and would sell out the entire planet for the short-term profit of the polluters and plutocrats that now rule their party.”
And the science is crystal clear that the planet is in deep peril.
Earth is facing an ecological and climate emergency with life on the planet “under siege,” scientists warn. Last year was the hottest yet on record, and global average temperatures breached the 2.7°F (1.5°C) mark over that period. In the United States, a record-breaking 28 extreme weather disasters exceeding $1 billion in damage devastated communities from Maui, Hawai’i, to Montpelier, Vermont. In the Southwest, Phoenix sweltered through its deadliest summer on record as heat killed more than 600 residents. Ocean temperatures off the southern coast of Florida reached hot tub levels, and coral reefs across the globe are currently experiencing another mass bleaching event. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, current climatic changes—driven primarily by heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuel use—are “unprecedented” in human history, and the effects are “worsening across every region of the United States.”
Time is rapidly running out to reverse course. “We’ve got this very narrow window between now and 2030 to meet US climate goals and to help contribute to global efforts to curtail the worst impacts of climate change,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This is a very decisive decade for climate action.”
Here’s a closer look at some of what Project 2025 has planned for climate and energy policies and environmental protection.
Far-right policy agenda
Project 2025 proponents say they want to end President Biden’s “war on fossil fuels” and to “restore America’s energy dominance” by going all in on dirty, carbon-based energy. (In fact, US oil and gas production has reached record highs during the Biden administration, to the dismay of climate advocates.) At the Department of the Interior, the plan involves prioritizing hydrocarbon production and maximizing onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, including expansion of the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would be directed to favor fossil gas and oil and would be prohibited from considering greenhouse gas emissions in authorizing gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas export facilities.
The plan also proposes eliminating multiple clean energy programs and offices within the Department of Energy like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the DOE Loan Program, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and DOE’s Clean Energy Corps. Billions of dollars supporting clean energy technologies and infrastructure upgrades—including investments benefiting Republican-controlled states—could be at risk as Project 2025 recommends the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, both signed into law by President Biden. The Environmental Protection Agency would be significantly downsized, with the plan recommending an immediate executive order that requires “reconsideration of the agency’s structure” including freezing existing regulations, eliminating employees, stopping all grants to community groups, and slashing the agency’s budget.
Other recommendations include ending the allowance for states to adopt California’s tailpipe emissions rules for vehicles and ending the International Civil Aviation Organization’s standards for airplane emissions. PFAS chemicals’ designation as hazardous under CERCLA would be revisited. The EPA’s use of the social cost of carbon would halt. Using funds for peer-review science not authorized by Congress would be stopped, and Inflation Reduction Act grants supporting environmental science activities would be revoked. A high priority recommendation is to try to scrap the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which requires the publication of the National Climate Assessments.
The agenda further says that NOAA should be “broken up and downsized,” claiming it has become “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, according to the agenda, should be stripped and its climate change research “disbanded.”
At the US Agency of International Development, Project 2025’s agenda proposes axing its climate policies and programs, and suggests the agency cease funding and collaborating with “progressive foundations,” NGOs, and other institutions that advocate for climate action. And at the US Department of Agriculture, Project 2025 recommends the agency refocus its mission on efficient food production, reject prioritization of climate or environmental considerations in its work, and repeal or reform dietary guidelines so that they ignore climate or environmental issues.
This agenda aligns with Trump’s vision of maximizing deregulation and supporting fossil fuel “dominance.” According to the Trump campaign website, a second Trump administration will expedite federal drilling permits, speed up approvals for fracked gas pipelines, and open up “vast stores” of oil and gas for extraction on public lands. The campaign promises to rescind every energy and climate-related regulation that the Biden administration instituted, including rules to reduce auto emissions and improve vehicle fuel economy, energy-efficiency standards for lightbulbs and appliances, and power plant regulations. Trump further aims to provide tax breaks for oil, gas, and coal producers while axing “insane wind subsidies.” Trump will also once again remove the United States from the Paris Agreement.
“The cost of this would be in human lives”
Climate advocates say these policy proposals and plans are a recipe for disaster.
“What President Trump represents is antithetical to our mission to achieve a livable planet and climate justice for communities across the United States and around the world,” Zanagee Artis, a 24-year-old climate activist and cofounder of the youth-led climate justice organization Zero Hour, told Sierra.
Another youth climate organizer, 18-year-old Adah Crandall of Sunrise Movement, called Project 2025 “extremely dangerous.” She said, “Effectively it would roll back everything that Biden has done on climate and everything that our movement has worked so hard to win.”
Holly Burke, communications director for Evergreen Action, noted that the climate science indicates urgent action is needed. “We need to be accelerating action right now, not moving backward,” she said. Going down the path proposed by Trump and Project 2025 “would just lock in so much harm for so many people,” she added. “It would be obviously a disaster for the climate, obviously a disaster for our economy, obviously a disaster for America’s reputation on the world stage, but most concerning of all is what it would mean for Americans who are in the line of fire when it comes to climate impacts—people living in coastal areas, people living in floodplains, communities on the fence-line of polluting facilities that would be less regulated under a future Trump administration. The cost of this would be in human lives.”
Consequences for American democracy
Several climate advocates told Sierra they are deeply concerned about how a second Trump presidency might erode American democracy, from cracking down on peaceful protests to weaponizing the Department of Justice for partisan gain and furthering the conservative capture of the courts.
“We are still at risk of losing so much—our rights to protest, our ability to organize,” Artis said.
“If we end up with another four years of a Republican presidency in November, that would be detrimental for American democracy,” said Crandall.
“My biggest worries, apart from IRA repeal, involve the potential for long-term institutional damage,” Daniel Farber, law professor and faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, told Sierra. “Project 2025 includes a plan to get rid of all the most expert and experienced civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. I also worry about the federal courts. Trump has already appointed nearly a third of all federal appeals judges, so we could end a second term with his picks being half or more of the appeals judges.”
Mann likewise warned there could be grave consequences for democracy under a Trump 2.0 scenario. “This goes well beyond the nominal impacts on climate policy,” he said. “It would threaten the end of democratic governance in the US, and there is no path to climate progress in the US that doesn’t go through a functioning democracy.”
Paid for by the Sierra Club Voter Education Fund, which seeks to raise key environmental issues in the discussions around elections and encourage the public to find out more about candidates’ positions on key environmental issues.
Dana Drugmand is a freelance environmental journalist covering topics such as climate accountability and climate change lawsuits, greenwashing and false climate solutions, plastics and petrochemicals, and environmental law and justice. In addition to Sierra, her writing has appeared in DeSmog, The New Lede, YES! Magazine, New Internationalist, Common Dreams, Truthout, and Earth Island Journal, among other outlets.
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