‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate
policy for next Republican president
Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of
proposals for the next conservative president to gut environmental protections
Dharna Noor
Thu 27 Jul
2023 07.00 EDT
An alliance
of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster
the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it
has emerged.
Against a
backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor,
Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank
the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles
Koch.
Called the
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the
first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate
experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate
policy.
The nearly
1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is
full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal
government – including environmental policy.
“Heritage
is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the
next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the
administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people,” the
foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in an April statement.
The guide’s
chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency
offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash
funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable
energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.
The plan,
which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee,
a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public
Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a
senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.
Another
chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving
it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s
environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a
whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported.
The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at
the EPA under Trump.
The guide
also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William
Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under
President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.
Republicans in Congress continue to show they will
stop at nothing to undermine environmental protections
David Shadburn of the League of Conservation Voters
Before his
time in the Trump administration, Pendley headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation,
a conservative law firm where he advocated for selling off public lands. He
also authored a book, Sagebrush Rebel, praising Reagan’s anti-regulatory
policies.
“He did a
bunch of terrible things,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations
at the Center for Climate Integrity, about Pendley’s time at the Department of
the Interior. “He worked to dismantle [the Bureau of Land Management] while he
was in it.”
The
Heritage Foundation has enjoyed a longstanding influence in GOP politics, even
helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M
Conway detail in their 2023 book, The Big Myth. Many of Reagan’s policy
proposals were cribbed from the pages of the thinktank’s first Mandate for
Leadership, published in 1980, which asserted that the US was in the middle of
a “crisis of overregulation”.
“It doesn’t
trouble me that any individual or institution would develop advisory plans for
politicians. What troubles me is the Heritage Foundation’s long history … of
working to undermine environmental protection at the expense of health and
wellbeing of the American people, at the expense of life on Earth,” said
Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard.
Meanwhile,
House GOP members are also continuing to attack federal climate funding in
their spending bill proposals, putting governmental functions at risk.
Earlier
this month, the Clean Budget Coalition – composed of more than 250 advocacy
groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on
climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must
be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government
shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added
additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target
environmental funding.
The
spending bills are currently in the House appropriations committee, which is
chaired by Texas Republican Kay Granger, who is a top recipient of campaign
funding from the oil and gas industry, the Lever reported this week. They will
go to a full vote in the House, and then the finalized proposals will move into
negotiations with the Senate. If Biden vetoes them, a government shutdown could
be on the way.
“Republicans
in Congress continue to show they will stop at nothing to undermine
environmental protections and attack anything that would help addressing the
climate crisis,” said David Shadburn, a senior government affairs advocate at
the League of Conservation Voters.
Some of the
provisions would hamstring the EPA’s powers, blocking the agency from enforcing
new pollution limits on power plants and tailpipe emissions or from
implementing controls on mercury and other toxic air pollution, and effectively
shuttering a critical program for deploying carbon-free energy.
“House
appropriations Republicans are abusing the appropriations process to impose a
cycle of environmental injustice,” said Deanna Noël, climate campaigns director
for the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.
Other
“poison pills” would prohibit listing the dunes sagebrush lizard under the
Endangered Species Act, remove protections for the greater Yellowstone
ecosystem’s population of grizzly bears, and bar the Department of the Interior
from creating a working group to help restore bison populations. Still others
would require the energy secretary to sell 1m barrels of refined petroleum from
the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and block the implementation of a rule forcing
federal defense contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and create
emission reductions plans.
These disgraceful poison pill riders are nothing short
of corporate giveaways to the corrupt fossil fuel industry
Deanna Noël of Public Citizen
Every GOP
representative can submit proposals to the House appropriations committee, and
since no member is required to sign off on specific proposals, it is not clear
who exactly is responsible for each “poison pill”. But as the Lever reported,
many Republican representatives who have effectively championed the provisions
are recipients of funding from polluting industries.
For
instance, a proposal to halt climate-related fisheries research funding was
written by a subcommittee led by Representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky, whose
top campaign contributors include mining and fossil fuel interests. Another
proposal would bar funding for the UN’s Green Climate Fund; it was buried in a
bill being overseen by major energy funding recipient Representative Mario
Díaz-Balart of Florida, the Lever reported.
“These
disgraceful poison pill riders are nothing short of corporate giveaways to the
corrupt fossil fuel industry,” said Noël.
The
proposals come as waters off the Florida coast reach levels of heat more
commonly found in hot tubs, and as much of the nation continues to swelter
under triple-digit temperatures.
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