Damage Promised by Project 2025

Guest Opinion

By Cathye Williams | Aug. 3, 2024

Let’s start with the premise that not every Republican is anti-environment. Nor is every Republican in office working to thwart a clean energy transition, just as not every Democrat has impeccable environmental credentials. It’s well known that oil and gas interests lobby on both sides of the aisle and donate to blue, red, and everything in between.

It appears, however, that the influence of these lobbyists lands differently with Republicans nowadays. Whatever their good intentions for the planet, Republicans who do not pledge allegiance to Donald Trump and his dark, “drill, baby, drill” vision for America are likely to lose the support of their party and the money needed to run successful campaigns for office.

Bipartisanship, once a hallmark of strong, lasting legislation, succumbed to the bitter political acrimony that has been building since the Reagan era in the 1980s, but which reached new heights during the Trump administration. Trump filled that bipartisan void with a stream of damaging executive actions and packed the Supreme Court with justices who would go on to severely limit the power of the executive branch to regulate polluters, hobbling any future administration’s efforts to solve our pollution and climate problems (New York Times, June 2024).

Regardless, the Biden/Harris administration, responding to a broad range of constituents and advisors, continues to reverse or roll back Trump’s damaging policies. President Biden has also negotiated the most consequential economic and environmental legislation ever written to address global warming, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Infrastructure and Jobs Act. While some progressives criticized the bills for not going far enough—and being watered down by concessions to the fossil fuel industry—there is no comparison between the environmental actions of the two administrations; they are night and day.

Sadly, rather than embrace the potential for jobs, improved health outcomes, and preservation of natural resources these laws brought to their districts, Trump loyalists in federal and state governments have embraced a course to upend it all. That course is Project 2025, a “playbook” from conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation for undoing all the progress we have made and for reorganizing the federal government to put their far-right agenda into action.

If even a portion of Project 2025’s tenets come to fruition, we do not have enough time left to undo the damage. The window to keep rising global temperatures to relatively safe levels is swiftly closing.

Candidate Trump claims to “not know much” about Project 2025. Odd, because it seemed to be his script when he entertained two dozen or so of the country’s top oil and gas executives at his Mar-Lago resort recently. Asking them to fund his election campaign to the tune of $1 billion, Trump promised his guests he would reverse clean energy and electric vehicle initiatives, restore and expand drilling permits on federal lands, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Alaskan Arctic.

Additionally he vowed to fast track export permits for liquified natural gas (LNG), which is mostly methane and considered by scientists to be a “carbon bomb.” According to anonymous sources who attended the event, Trump promised the gathered execs he would get them their permits “on day one” (Washington Post, May 2024).

For someone who claims to be unfamiliar, Trump homed in on several of P2025’s proposals quite well, such as, “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of LNG exports,” “end the focus on climate change and green subsidies,” and my personal favorite, “stop the war on oil and natural gas” (“Project 2025: 180 Day Playbook,” pgs. 365, 369, 378).

Calling efforts to save us from climate change a “war” is rich, considering the “playbook” also purports that we need more nuclear warheads. Apparently the capability to destroy the world many times over isn’t enough for the folks at the Heritage Foundation.

The damage from burning fossil fuels is happening at a faster rate than predicted. It’s all around us. Several media outlets reported just last week on the startling decline of juvenile whitefish in our waters, as ice cover wanes year after year (MLive, July 2024). Farther away, the glaciers that hold millenia of methane are melting, and opening the Arctic to what? More drilling.

Even if we manage to keep Project 2025 from becoming a reality, the future is still uncertain. We need to chart a much bolder course than even President Biden was able to accomplish, and a second Trump term would be far more damaging than his first.

The fires, smoke, floods, and loss of life in impacted areas have become part of our daily news, but we must not look away. Staying informed, signing petitions, writing letters to representatives and the press, talking to our friends and neighbors, attending rallies and town halls, and most importantly voting are all ways we can avert the disaster that Project 2025 plans and continue building the transition to the clean prosperity and peace we can achieve.

Cathye Williams is a local climate activist. She writes from the northern corner of Manistee County.