Photo: A protest at COP28 in Dubai. Credit: Flickr/Mídia NINJA
Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism.
This article is part of a Liberation News series exploring the different facets of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan assembled by leading figures of the right wing elite laying out how a future Trump administration would shred the civil and economic rights won in the 1930s and 60s. Read the series’s inaugural article for an overview of the project and its significance.
Climate change is undeniable. Extreme weather events and triple-digit heat waves are worsening each year with each of the last ten years breaking heat records globally. Although the United States has yet to take any meaningful action that meets the urgency of the climate crisis, Project 2025 reverses what little action has been taken and goes full steam in the opposite direction.
Although I wasn’t alive at the time, many may remember when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire due to the high levels of pollutants dumped by industry straight into the river. At the same time in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, air quality levels were based on the intensity of burning you felt in your eyes, and on many days, residents couldn’t hang laundry outside to dry because it became visibly dirty again from air pollution. This was the 1960s just before the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and legislation like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act were passed that hindered corporations from releasing pollution unchecked. This nightmarish past will be our future if Project 2025 were to be implemented.
Pollution is the result of capitalism. The system inherently requires maximization of profits, endless growth of markets and increasing investments for the shareholder class. This means corporations will always look for ways to cut costs whether through poverty wages, outsourcing production, or not bothering with costly pollution controls in their facilities. The EPA – which has been purposely weakened over the decades starting with the funding cuts of Reagan – still plays a crucial role in regulating pollution from industry through fines and emission control requirements.
Project 2025 is an attack on people and the planet and would override Endangered Species Act protections, and requirements for environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The plan would severely limit the EPA and Department of Interior’s ability to reduce methane emissions and environmental pollutants and to conduct climate research. Also on the chopping block are protections for public health and environmental justice. Project 2025 would also eliminate the Endangerment Finding that allows the EPA to cut emissions from vehicles and industry under the Clean Air Act. The plan would undermine EPA efforts to designate PFAs, now a common pollutant in U.S. drinking water and soil, as hazardous chemicals, and would also limit powers under the Toxic Substances Control Act to assess the cumulative impact of chemicals on the population.
In general, the Project would remove career scientists at the federal level – meaning staff who have scientific integrity and are qualified to serve in their positions – with far-right political appointees.
The Department of Energy could no longer work on any climate-related research and development, such as renewable energy, battery storage and other climate technologies. The plan would also eliminate standards for energy efficiency in appliances. The plan would stop the development of solar and wind energy systems, which on top of the Biden administration’s 50% tariff on solar cells from China, would bring the already slow U.S. transition to renewables to a screeching halt.
Oil and gas production, which has actually increased under the Biden administration despite initial executive orders that limited drilling on public lands, would be ramped up even more under Project 2025. The plan would undo the permanent protections on the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, expand Arctic drilling, and trample on any remaining Indigenous land rights. The plan would revive coal production and also ramp up liquified natural gas production, which consumes immense amounts of energy to produce.
The Project would also dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which leads the nation on weather, ocean, climate and fisheries science. Under NOAA is the National Weather Service, which Project 2025 states should focus only on commercial operations. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be downsized and eliminate any climate research. The majority of privately run weather services currently source their data from NWS, which provides warnings about tornadoes, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather events. Without forecasting data from NWS, the U.S. population will be put at even greater risk of increasingly dangerous weather.
Project 2025 also plans to eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program, leaving populations who live in vulnerable areas that private insurers refuse to cover, with no safety net. The plan also shifts responsibility for natural disasters from the federal government to the states, meaning residents in poorer states will have little to no disaster relief in a country that is already sorely lacking in recovery funds.
Project 2025 would also cut federal funding to electric vehicle manufacturers and would eliminate emissions standards in the transportation sector. Although vehicle manufacturers tend to tailor their production to California standards in order to sell to this major market, the reduction in national standards allows for an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector while potentially exposing communities near high-traffic areas to higher pollution levels.
The Project would also eviscerate Department of Agriculture food safety protections and controls over Big Ag’s takeover of our food system. It would eliminate already weak regulations on pesticide and GMO use, as well as cut programs that support farmers who are implementing environmentally sustainable practices.
We are already teetering on the brink of surpassing 1.5 C warming globally, which spells catastrophe. The United States surpasses all other countries for its contribution to the warming planet through the highest cumulative emissions since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest share of emissions per capita today. And that’s on top of the U.S. military as the biggest institutional fossil fuel consumer on the planet.
Project 2025 shifts this already disastrous trajectory into high gear. A Carbon Brief report shows that Project 2025 would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional carbon emissions in the United States by 2030, which equals the combined emissions of the European Union and Japan.
Project 2025 is an attack on science as a means to remove any regulatory barriers to corporate profits regardless of what it means for the health of residents or the planet’s ability to sustain life as we know it.
But there is another factor at play that has the power to stop the implementation of Project 2025 and win real climate action no matter who is in the White House. That is us, the people organized. We must fight to defend the environmental protections we have and to win the transformations that are needed for our survival. It was the people’s movement that won the environmental protections of the 1970s and we can do it again. But this time, we need to overthrow the capitalist system itself that will always try to overturn any gains made in order to maximize profits at our expense. We must fight for socialism, where meeting the needs of the society and planet are the priority. A system run by and for the people that can utilize the knowledge and tools that already exist to solve the climate crisis.
