By now, most of us who have been paying attention to the election (and how could you not !!) have heard about Project 2025. It is the well-funded comprehensive blueprint for the Trump administration crafted by the Heritage Foundation. Many of the authors are former officials who served in the first Trump administration, even while Trump denies knowing anything about it. Project 2025 is comprehensive and touches on all aspects of the federal government, but I want to hone in on its impact on the environment and climate change. Here are a few of the highlights:
Remove America from Global Leadership on Climate
One of the first things the first Trump administration did in 2016 was end America’s support for the Paris Climate Accords—the world’s landmark commitment to climate action. Although the Biden administration recommitted America to the Paris agreement when he came to office in 2021, Trump will certainly attempt to remove us again from this international commitment. Project 2025 not only calls for the withdraw from the Paris Agreement, but proposes to go even further by withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the platform for climate change negotiations, entirely. The United States has served as a party to the UNFCCC since its creation in 1992, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty under Republican President George H.W. Bush. Withdrawing from this removes us from engagement with the world on the most important issue of our time. We would essentially be abdicating leadership from the free world on climate.
Replacing Career Civil Servants
A proposal in Project 2025 is the replacement of career civil servants in favor of politically aligned appointees. The goal is to create a greater sense of loyalty to the Trump administration. It is essentially, putting Trump people into the heart of the federal bureaucracy. Loyalty, not competence would be the key attribute of government workers. This is usually done in all administrations, but only at the highest levels, and not throughout the system. Replacing career civil servants would eliminate the deep wealth of institutional knowledge they provide. It would reduce subject matter expertise they possess. And it would diminish the many human relationships the United States relies on to advance climate change solutions internationally.
Withdrawing from the World Bank
Another policy promoted in Project 2025 is the U.S. withdrawal from the World Bank. The World Bank is the world’s largest provider of climate finance in developing countries. The U.S. is the largest shareholder in the World Bank, having been the leading force in creating it in 1944. Withdrawing from the World Bank and ending U.S. contributions to it, would damage the world’s ability to help poor countries who are most impacted by climate change. But the impact would not be limited to climate change vulnerabilities. It would put at risk, the world’s ability to address poverty in these countries. The World Bank is a global effort to collaborate using public and private funds to help countries obtain loans for agriculture, industry and critical infrastructures. It is one of our soft diplomatic tools to expand our influence around the world.
Disbanding the NOAA
Another critical proposal of Project 2025 is disbanding the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here’s a quote directly from page 664 from the section The Mandate for Leadership: “The NOAA should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized or placed under the control of states and territories.”
It’s unfathomable to me that we would privatize or delegate to the various states the important, complex and expensive work of monitoring the climate. The NOAA provides key research and data on storms, weather systems, and warnings to citizens about weather-related threats. The NOAA also plays a role in understanding how human behavior affects the world’s oceans and atmosphere. It issues daily weather reports. It monitors climate, manages fisheries, restores coastal environments and supports marine commerce.
The proposal to disband the NOAA would leave federal agencies unequipped to combat climate change, not to mention deprive scientists, businesses and the public of key data.
Expand Offshore Oil and Natural Gas drilling
Most of us have heard about Trump’s energy policy summed up in the quip, “Drill baby drill.” This quip finds its policy support in Project 2025’s call for increased drilling for offshore oil and natural gas on public lands and waters. The government, Project 2025 proposes, should lease these public lands and waters to the highest bidder so these fossil fuels can be extracted from the earth. Of course, the scientific community is telling us the exact opposite. We need to leave fossil fuels in the earth and develop clean energy alternatives.
This section of Project 2025 was authored by William Pendley, a former Trump administration official. During the first Trump administration, Pendley had to recuse himself from dozens of matters before the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) while leading it. Why? Because he had previously been the president of a special interest group that called for a widespread transfer of federal public lands to private holders. To make matters worse, Pendley has referred to “climate science” as “junk science” and he has compared the existence of climate change to the existence of unicorns.
Compromise National Security
Finally, the rhetoric and trajectory of Project 2025 would compromise the national security of the U.S. Did you know that the military has labeled climate change as a national security threat? It’s not just China, Russia or Iran acting as national security threats.
The Department of Defense calls climate change a “threat multiplier.” Which means it makes all existing environmental stresses and problems even greater. For example, there’s disruption from global supply chains by extreme weather. In 2021, severe flooding in Malaysia, a major hub for semiconductor assembly and packaging, disrupted the supply chain, contributing to a global semiconductor shortage. For good or evil, we live in a global economy and as much as we would like to find and produce everything we want and need in America, that is not going to happen. In this case, flooding in Malaysia affected our ability to supply our military.
Climate change also leads to civil unrest and mass migrations. Civil unrest frequently happens on account of food and water shortages. When the environment is degraded, storms and droughts are more severe. These impacts drive migration. Much of the migration from South and Central America into the U.S. is caused by climate change. One study found that if we continue our fossil fuel use trajectory, the probability of multiple simultaneous droughts could increase from the late 20th century average by 40 percent by 2050 and 60 percent by late century.
As water, food and critical minerals become more difficult to secure, international instability increases. The potential for conflict is elevated and we are drawn into conflicts out of our own alliances and self-interests.
Conclusion
If enacted, the policies proposed in Project 2025 would seriously jeopardize the world’s ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Project 2025, as it relates to climate, is bad for the country and bad for the world. Instead of promoting an isolated, anti-science vision for the United States, the next administration should let science drive our energy policies, depending on competent civil servants to carry out their tasks for the welfare of the entire country. We should maintain our global leadership in climate, modeling the way for others to follow.
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