Earth & Environment
September 15, 2024: Project 2025, Climate, and the Imperative of Voting
Posted on September 25, 2024 at 12:00 AM
by Jean Stewart, Chair, Environmental Task Force
Making our voices heard through our votes for candidates who are climate champions—up and down the ballot—is more crucial than ever this year. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” which has been much in the news lately, is a nearly 900-page compendium of policy proposals reflecting radical right-wing ideology, and much of it is likely supported by Republican candidates in this fall’s elections. Those candidates include Donald Trump, despite his public attempts to distance himself from the document.
For those of us concerned about the climate crisis and ongoing pollution of our air, water, and soil, the environmental policies in Project 2025 should be a potent driver to vote for every pro-environment candidate on the ballot, whether national, state, or local. As we know, fossil fuels release carbon dioxide and methane, potent greenhouse gases that are making the planet warmer and warmer. Sea levels rise, extreme weather becomes more commonplace, and a range of impacts from wildfires, flooding, drought, and extreme and prolonged heat waves made worse by increasing humidity become more likely and more severe.
In the July 2024 “Grist” newsletter, Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted the disparate impacts of these outcomes. “When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air, water, and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color.”
In several places in its nearly 900 pages, Project 2025 advocates for more investment in oil, methane gas, and coal to make the U.S. “energy independent” and for cutting funding for renewable sources of energy. It calls for eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. Grist reports that under Project 2025, offices “within the Department of Energy dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research.”
Under Project 2025, agencies would be prevented from collecting data and reporting on the adverse health effects of climate change; provisions of the Clean Air Act and the Clean
Water Act would be significantly weakened; and many of the functions of the EPA would be weakened or eliminated. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be eliminated, including a key component, the National Weather Service. Weather forecasting would be privatized—a proposal floated during the Reagan administration but never enacted due to strong opposition. In fact, Project 2025 advocates replacing scientists and other subject-matter experts employed by environmental agencies with political appointees, and it would devolve many programs to state and local agencies that may lack expertise or concern for evidence of environmental harms.
When Trump claims he has nothing to do with Project 2025, bear in mind his promises to oil company giants to free them from all regulations and other restrictions if they donate a billion dollars to his campaign. If elected, he would most certainly follow the policy proposals of his cronies—including 140 of his former staffers—embodied in Project 2025, and so would MAGA Republican elected officials in states, counties, and towns nationwide.
Vote as if your life depends on it. It does, and so do the lives of people across our country and across our planet.