I don’t usually write about politics, and especially not elections. But this year is different.

The stakes are super high.

If Trump wins, his administration will enact an initiative called Project 2025. Written by the Heritage Foundation, is the far-right’s 900-page policy playbook (their words, not mine) for the next Republican president. If you’re not familiar, I encourage you to learn about it.¹ It changes many things, from the basic structure of our government to demolishing the Department of Education, to mass deportations and the reduction of human rights. Many in the Republican Party take it very seriously.

Today I want to tell you how Project 2025 will harm us, the environment, and the climate crisis. It will halt all progress on the climate crisis and worsen, especially since the U.S. is one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

Simply put, Project 2025 “seeks to gut the country’s 250-year-old system of checks and balances in order to implement extreme policies that would increase global temperatures and undercut developing countries’ efforts to remain resilient in the face of climate impacts.”²

It saddens me to write this article and I’ve avoided it for a long time.

But with the election upon us and the polls so closely tied, I think people should know the risks.

“Simply put, Project 2025 would be game over for climate progress.” -Sierra Club³

Project 2025 Will Negatively Impact the Environment

“An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030 — the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections⁴

Project 2025 tells us exactly what the far-right intends to do. They’re not even trying to hide it – they’ve published it! You can download the book for free and read it yourself.

But protecting the environment, endangered species, and climate change are not part of their agenda. They intend to roll back many environment-related laws and policies. Here are the highlights of Project 2025’s goals regarding the environment, courtesy of the Sierra Club:

• “Eliminating or rolling back safeguards that protect Americans’ access to clean air, clean drinking water, and protected public lands.
• Handing our public lands over to oil and gas companies to drill whenever and wherever they want, including in some of our most precious and pristine public lands, while leaving us to deal with the pollution and toxic waste they leave behind.  
• Halting all government action to reach our climate goals, putting Americans and the U.S. economy at further risk of more extreme weather and a faster-warming planet.
• Privatizing the National Weather Service and preventing it from forecasting extreme weather events and providing research on the advancing climate crisis.”⁵

In short, “The document calls for ‘unleashing all of America’s energy resources’ by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants.”⁶

Project 2025 intends to let the oil and gas corporations take the lead, because of greed. The authors of Project 2025 erroneously wrote, “Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids.” This is nowhere close to the truth. No one wants to ban these fuels. We want to reduce our reliance on them. Project 2025 advises that “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth.”⁷ But we know that there are many other sources of economic growth.

“[Project 2025] would effectively abandon America’s critical leadership role in addressing the climate crisis.” -Center for American Progress⁸

Moreover, Project 2025 recommends withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement. Trump already withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement during his first term.

“If enacted, the policies proposed in Project 2025 would seriously jeopardize the world’s ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change associated with breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise limit set out in the Paris Agreement.” -Center for American Progress⁹

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Project 2025 intends to reduce the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They will mandate that states handle their own environmental issues. The playbook indicates that the federal EPA can provide some expertise, a few resources, and be supportive under the guise that the people living in states should make decisions about where they live. “EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government. This will require significant restructuring and streamlining of the agency.”¹⁰ However, the states have never had the resources to manage environmental problems, often created by wealthy corporations. This is why the EPA was established in the first place.

“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.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections¹¹

Furthermore, when regulating the dumping of chemicals or agricultural runoff into a river, a state downstream would have no authority over what an upstream state discharges. This could result in the upstream state inadvertently polluting the water for those downstream. State-level regulation alone is insufficient to protect people from environmental pollution and toxic chemicals.

What this is really about is profit from energy, whether dirty or clean. The government wants to profit, and ensure its corporate affiliates profit to the fullest extent from energy production. The language in Project 2025, such as that “bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes,” is just ridiculous.¹²

Project 2025 specifically calls out the Obama and Biden Administrations for pursuing renewable energy. Renewable anything, is a no-brainer. Of course we should be looking at renewable energy. But the authors use inflammatory language to describe their version of recent history: “The Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables. This approach has also been applied to pesticides and chemicals as the Biden Administration pushes the ‘greening’ of agriculture and manufacturing among other industrial activities.”¹³

There is no assault on the energy sector. Those administrations are trying to reduce our sole reliance on fossil fuels, not ban them. We lack the infrastructure needed to eliminate their total use anyway. And the ‘greening’ of pesticides and chemicals is weak among all administrations – we are exposed to toxic chemicals in everything. We certainly don’t need more chemical exposure!

The absurd language in Project 2025 persists: “Although the U.S. environmental story is very positive, there has been a return to fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change. Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”¹⁴ Again, the science about the changing climate is clear and climate change is not a perception. There is a ninety-seven percent consensus among scientists across the world. And no side or administration is trying to scare Americans.

“In effect, the Biden EPA has once again presented a false choice to the American people: that they have to choose between a healthy environment and a strong, growing economy.”¹⁵ This is false. This is not anything close to what the Biden Administration, or any other administration, has ever indicated. Not once.

“[Project 2025] would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections¹¹

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) mission is “to better understand our natural world and help protect its precious resources extends beyond national borders to monitor global weather and climate, and work with partners around the world.” The organization states that “From daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration and supporting marine commerce, NOAA’s products and services support economic vitality and affect more than one-third of America’s gross domestic product.”¹⁷ This is an important agency!

But Project 2025 does not agree: “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”¹⁸

NOAA consists of six main offices:

• The National Weather Service (NWS)
• The National Ocean Service (NOS)
• The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)
• The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS)
• The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
• The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps

According to Project 2025: “Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”¹⁹

Climate change alarm industry? The only alarm is that the climate is changing. And we have to figure out how we humans can adapt and survive the changes. Or we won’t.

Political Appointees, Not Federal Employees

Further, Project 2025 intends to “Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention
must be paid to appointments in this area.”²⁰ This refers to the fact that Project 2025 plans to change all federal workers to ‘political appointees’ that align with the conservative right only. They will not appoint anyone who does not align with their beliefs, regardless of education or expertise. This means that no one who believes in environmentalism or climate change will be working for the federal government. That is beyond disturbing.

The National Weather Service

The National Weather Service (NWS) is super important. They provide the very data that provides us with weather predictions and tracks major storms, tornados, hurricanes, flooding, wind, etc. This organization is how we all get our weather data (weekly forecasts) and major announcements (i.e., hurricane warnings).

From Project 2025: “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”²¹ There is no debate; the science is clear. And, the NWS is not politically aligned.

So Project 2025 wants to change the NWS: “Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather.”²² The authors cited a study that Accuweather was the most accurate than competitors and implied they are better than NWS – but the National Weather Service was not one of the listed competitors. This is because Accuweather and other weather outlets get their data from the NWS.

The fact is that “NWS forecasts, warnings, and data and products form a national information database and infrastructure used by other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public, and the global community.”²³ This is a free service the government provides. Every news and weather station gets their data from the National Weather Service and translates it to us.

If you’ve ever received a flood, tornado, or hurricane warning, that is the National Weather Service.

If you have a weather radio, that is the National Weather Service.

But Project 2025 wants the NWS to fully commercialize its forecasting operations. They believe private companies, like Accuweather, will pay for it. They want the government to sell this information. So it’s really about money and greed.

“[Project 2025] appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be ‘presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.’ But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts.” -Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections²⁴

What’s worse, Project 2025 plans to eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program and have flood insurance sold by private insurers. “That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes — long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market.”²⁵ So if you live in a flood zone, you must vote against Trump and Project 2025. Or you’ll likely not be able to afford flood insurance or a new home.

Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research

Project 2025 would seek to downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). OAR, also called NOAA Research, “enables better forecasts, earlier warnings for natural disasters, and a greater understanding of the Earth.”²⁶ The Project 2025 authors wrote, “OAR provides theoretical science, as opposed to the applied science of the National Hurricane Center. OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. OAR is a large network of research laboratories, an undersea research center, and several joint research institutes with universities. These operations should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.” We must vote climate deniers out. It is not alarmism nor is it theoretical. We can see climate change every day with our own eyes.

30×30 and America the Beautiful

Under Executive Order 14008, President Biden issued a call to action to conserve, connect, and restore at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030 for the sake of our economy, our health, and our well-being. America the Beautiful is “a decade-long challenge to pursue a locally led and voluntary, nationwide effort to conserve, connect, and restore the lands, waters, and wildlife upon which we all depend,” with eight key principles that help the environment, people, and the economy.²⁷

Project 2025 calls for withdrawing both initiatives. “The 30×30 Executive Order and the American the Beautiful Initiative are being used to advance an agenda to close vast areas of the ocean to commercial activities, including fishing, while rapidly advancing offshore wind energy development to the detriment of fisheries and other existing ocean-based industries.”²⁸ These initiatives would provide for more Marine Protected Areas. We’ve overfished many parts of the ocean, and other activities such as deepsea mining and oil drilling have harmed marine life. If we kill off all of the fish, we aren’t going to have any left.

“Don’t boo. Vote.” -Barack Obama

Endangered Species Act (ESA)

The Trump Administration passed two regulations that limited the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The first one made it easier “to remove a species from the endangered list” and weakened protections for threatened species. Regulators were also “allowed to conduct economic assessments — for instance, estimating lost revenue from a prohibition on logging in a critical habitat — when deciding whether a species warrants protection.”²⁹ It also made it more difficult for regulators to factor in climate change.

The second Trump Administration regulation limited the definition of ‘critical habitat’ for imperiled species and required regulators not to designate areas as critical habitat if there would be greater economic benefit from developing them.³⁰ AP News wrote that this “forced the agency to disprove ‘speculative claims of economic harm made by industries such as mining, logging, and oil and gas’ as they sought to extract resources from public lands,” citing Earthjustice.org.³¹ The Biden Administration repealed both. Project 2025 calls to “rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding” the Endangered Species Act rules defining Critical Habitat and Critical Habitat Exclusions.³²

But it gets worse.

Project 2025 also wants to:

• Delist the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems.
• Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states under the ESA.
• Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10(j) of the ESA by re-introducing so-called “experiment species” populations into areas that no longer qualify as habitat and lie outside the historic ranges of those species, which brings with it the full weight of the ESA in areas previously without federal government oversight.³³ This means that the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) may designate a listed species as experimental and release them in an area outside of its current range that is also geographically isolated from other populations of the species. “Treating the experimental population as threatened allows the FWS the discretion to devise management programs and special regulations for that population.”³⁴ It is unclear what Project 2025 considers “abuse” of said section, but we can assume it will pose restrictions on the Fish & Wildlife Service’s protections.
• Abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals.³⁵ Currently, the “USGS is the biological research arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior, providing unbiased science to support the conservation of public lands and their resources.”³⁶ We don’t need to take the lowest bid on any scientific research, which is the purpose of requests for proposals.
• Direct the Fish & Wildlife Service to design and implement an Endangered Species Act program that ensures independent decision-making by ending reliance on so-called species specialists who have obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas. Of course, scientists who study specific species have a vested interest in them and their survival. We wouldn’t want someone without interest to make these decisions.
• Modify Regulations Implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. These acts are currently being abused at a cost to fisheries and Native American subsistence activities around the U.S.³⁷ It is not clear what abuses Project 2025 is referring to here. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is a vital law protecting species we are at risk of losing forever.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA)

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), passed in 1918, prohibits the killing, capturing, selling, trading, and transporting of protected migratory bird species, eggs, and nests without prior authorization by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). “For decades the FWS, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, interpreted the rule to prohibit ‘incidental take’—the unintentional but predictable killing of birds, often at industrial sites. The FWS typically enforced only egregious cases of incidental take, such as when it levied a $100 million fine against BP for the deaths of an estimated one million birds in its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But the threat of prosecution gave the government leverage to urge companies to adopt often simple and inexpensive practices to prevent avian deaths, such as covering oil pits and spacing power lines far enough apart to avoid electrocuting raptors.”³⁸ This act protected birds for over one hundred years.

However, in January 2021, the Trump administration implemented a rule permitting companies and individuals to kill migratory birds, provided it was unintentional. Then the Biden administration repealed this rule in September 2021, restoring protections for the birds. Project 2025 plans to reinstate the Trump-era regulations regarding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).³⁹

Please Vote Accordingly

The risks are far above and beyond what I’ve covered here. Project 2025 is a blueprint for completely restructuring the government at almost every level, every department, and every sector. It’s a gut job affecting far more than climate change and the environment. I encourage you to read it for yourself.

I felt it important to highlight some of the proposed changes in Project 2025. Especially with the election less than two weeks away. People deserve to know the devastating effects it could have on our lives, endangered species, and the environment. I’ve only covered a few of the environmental topics in this article. But the more I read of the 900-page document, the worse it gets.

Thank you for reading – please share and subscribe. Most importantly, go vote!

Additional Resources:

Article, “What Project 2025 Would Do to the Environment – and How We Will Respond,” earthjustice.org, August 30, 2024.

Article, “Conservation Groups Say Project 2025 Would Gut Wildlife and Public Land Protections,” sierraclub.org, August 20, 2024.

Blog, “New Modeling Shows How Bad Project 2025 Would Be Compared to a Clean Energy Future,” evergreenaction.com, August 15, 2024.

Footnotes:

1. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023. Even if you only read the Foreword of this manifesto, you will find the entire basis of the conservative right’s agenda. ↩︎
2. Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
3. Article, “What is Project 2025 and why would it be devastating for the environment?” Sierra Club, accessed October 16, 2016. ↩︎
4. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
5. Article, “What is Project 2025 and why would it be devastating for the environment?” Sierra Club, accessed October 16, 2016.  ↩︎
6. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
7. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Foreword. The rhetoric gets even worse, asserting that the left would stop relying on human intelligence, which is insulting: “Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” ↩︎
8. Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
9. Article, “Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action,” Center for American Progress, August 19, 2024. ↩︎
10. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
11. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
12. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Foreword. ↩︎
13. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
14. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
15. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 13, “Environmental Protection Agency.” ↩︎
16. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
17. Page, “About our agency,” noaa.gov, updated May 2, 2024. ↩︎
18. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
19. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
20. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
21. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
22. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
23. Page, “About the NWS: Forecasts and Service,” weather.gov, accessed October 20, 2024. ↩︎
24. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
25. Article, “What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US,” by Zoya Teirstein, Yale Climate Connections, July 29, 2024. ↩︎
26. Page, “About NOAA Research,” noaa.gov, accessed October 22, 2024. ↩︎
27. Page, “America the Beautiful,” Department of the Interior, accessed October 21, 2024. ↩︎
28. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
29. Article, “U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act,” by Lisa Friedman, New York Times, August 12, 2019. ↩︎
30. Press Release, “Trump Administration Finalizes Another Rule To Gut Endangered Species Act,” EarthJustice.org, December 17, 2020. ↩︎
31. Article, “Biden administration reverses Trump endangered species rule,” by John Flesher, AP News, July 21, 2022. ↩︎
32. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
33. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
34. Fact Sheet, “What is a 10(j) Rule?,” US Fish & Wildlife Service, October 2018. ↩︎
35. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎
36. Page, “Biology,” usgs.gov, accessed October 22, 2024. ↩︎
37. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 21, “Department of Commerce.” ↩︎
38. Article, “Trump to Birds: Drop Dead,” by Andy McGlashen, audubon.org, January 5, 2021. ↩︎
39. Book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2023, Chapter 16, “Department of the Interior.” ↩︎