Earth Protect Blog

By Lisa Friedman

The New York Times

During a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for a 2024 Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming.

The move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed Project 2025 that Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank organizing the effort, has called a “battle plan” for the first 180 days of a future Republican presidency.

The climate and energy provisions would be among the most severe swings away from current federal policies.

The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.

The New York Times asked the leading Republican presidential candidates whether they support the Project 2025 strategy, but none of the campaigns responded.

Still, several of the architects are veterans of the Trump administration, and their recommendations match positions held by former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.

The $22 million project also includes personnel lists and a transition strategy in the event a Republican wins the 2024 election. The nearly 1,000-page plan, which would reshape the executive branch to place more power into the president’s hands, outlines changes for nearly every agency across the government.

The Heritage Foundation worked on the plan with dozens of conservative groups ranging from the Heartland Institute, which has denied climate science, to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says “climate change does not endanger the survival of civilization or the habitability of the planet.”

Dans said the Heritage Foundation delivered the blueprint to every Republican presidential hopeful. Although polls have found that young Republicans are worried about global warming, Dans said the feedback he has received confirms the blueprint reflects where the majority of party leaders stand. “We have gotten very good reception from this,” he said. “This is a plotting of points of where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

There is a pronounced partisan split in the country when it comes to climate change, surveys have shown. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month found that although 56% of respondents called climate change a major threat — including a majority of independents and nearly 90% of Democrats — about 70% of Republicans said global warming was either a minor threat or no threat at all.

Asked what the country should do to combat climate change, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s energy and climate center, said that Americans should use more natural gas.

Natural gas produces half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal when burned. But gas facilities frequently leak methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term and has emerged as a growing concern among climate scientists.

The blueprint said the next Republican president would help repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that is offering $370 billion for wind, solar, nuclear, green hydrogen and electric vehicle technology, with most of the new investments taking place in Republican-led states.

The plan calls for shuttering a Department of Energy office that has $400 billion in loan authority to help emerging green technologies. It would make it more difficult for solar, wind and other renewable power to be added to the grid. Climate change would no longer be considered an issue worthy of discussion on the National Security Council, and allied nations would be encouraged to buy and use more fossil fuels rather than renewable energy.

The blueprint throws open the door to drilling inside the pristine Arctic wilderness, promises legal protections for energy companies that kill birds while extracting oil and gas, and declares the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on public lands.

It also would restart a quest for something climate denialists have long considered their holy grail: reversal of a 2009 scientific finding at the Environmental Protection Agency that says carbon dioxide emissions are a danger to public health.

Erasing that finding, conservatives have long believed, essentially would strip the federal government of the right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from most sources

In interviews, Dans and three of the top authors of the report agreed that the climate is changing. But they insisted that scientists are debating the extent to which human activity is responsible.

The plan calls on the government to stop trying to make automobiles more fuel-efficient and to block states from adopting California’s stringent automobile pollution standards.