The conservative vision for a new energy future.
“Stop the war on oil and natural gas” is a refrain repeated again and again throughout Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a controversial 900-page report laying out the aims and intentions for a second Trump presidency. The report has garnered widespread attention for its far-reaching ambitions to reshape the American federal government, from nationwide restrictions on abortion pills, to expanding executive power, to its sweeping attack on U.S. climate policy.
Although Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 in light of recent backlash, he has been unable to completely sever ties. Over half of the report’s authors were members of his first administration, including 140 White House staffers and six of his former cabinet secretaries. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the report, played an outsized role in his previous administration, which adopted over two-thirds of its proposals.
Whether or not his administration will look directly, page by page, for guidance on specific policy proposals, Project 2025 is certainly reflective of a potential second Trump term. In the case of climate and the environment, that future is especially bleak. From gutted climate science funding to revamped investment in fossil fuels, the report champions a multilateral attack on green policies throughout the federal government.
“Stop the war on oil and natural gas”
Project 2025 lays out a plan to expand fossil fuel infrastructure while cutting back on renewables. “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world,” it declares. This grand vision goes far beyond Trump’s earlier policies––such as, for instance, pulling out of the 2015 Paris Agreement––to a full-scale expansion of fossil fuel development in the US.
The main target of this fossil fuel agenda is the Department of Energy. Project 2025 lays out instructions to overhaul the agency’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which in recent years has attempted to prioritize renewable investment, to instead expand natural gas pipelines and protect liquid natural gas (LNG) exports. It also seeks to wipe out a variety of clean energy offices: the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the Clean Energy Corps. This would turn the Department of Energy into an all-out boon for fossil fuel infrastructure and development.
As for the Department of the Interior, which oversees government-owned and tribal lands, Project 2025 advocates for an expansion of drilling, gas pipelines, and coal mining on public lands. Even tribal lands are not safe: according to the report, the agency has an “obligation to develop the vast oil and gas and coal resources for which it is responsible,” including any territory protected for its ecological and cultural significance.
Finally, Project 2025 seeks to undercut the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate fossil fuel emissions. It opposes a 2009 EPA ruling, long cherished by climate advocates, that granted it authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. This––combined with gutting agency funding, removing the Office of Environmental Justice, and scrapping the Greenhouse Gas Reporting System––would wreck the ability of the EPA, already quite limited, to regulate industry emissions. Together, this multi-pronged attack throughout the executive branch would precipitate an explosion of fossil fuel infrastructure and emissions.
Related posts
- 2024: a crucial election year for our climate
- Why are the far-right climate-sceptical?
- Finding common ground: the culture war of climate science
Defunding the “climate change alarm industry”
Project 2025 reframes climate science, which has long documented the deleterious effects of greenhouse gasses on our climate, as a political tool that has been weaponized by progressive officials. According to the report, “the Left” uses climate science to “scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations.” In response, the report aims to strip federal funding for climate science, and to introduce climate skepticism into the skeleton of the executive office.
Project 2025 first seeks to break up and downsize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees weather forecasting and climate research, claiming that the agency has become one of the “main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” From gutting the Office of Atmospheric and Oceanic Research (the center of federal climate change research) to ensuring that data collected by the National Hurricane Center is “presented neutrally” (without highlighting the well-documented linkages between worsening hurricanes and anthropogenic climate change), the report seeks to bulldoze climate science funding within the executive agency.
Project 2025 also opposes the climate and environmental science used to guide EPA’s rulings and regulatory decisions. The project favors viewpoint “diversity” and “balanced perspectives” within the agency’s climate research. It opposes any sort of precautionary approach, and pushes the EPA to consider private-sector interests––including those of fossil fuel corporations––in its regulatory decisions.
Finally, the project highlights the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), under the Executive Office of the President, as a potential weapon against clean energy policies. If the DOE or EPA continue to use climate science to regulate greenhouse emissions or restrict fossil infrastructure, the report notes, the president might use the OSTP to counterbalance their efforts. This office, in producing scientific reports in line with conservative skepticism regarding the severity of anthropogenic climate change, would operate as another tool to suppress fossil fuel regulation and the shift to clean energy.
“Whole-of-government unwinding” of executive agencies
Beyond defunding climate science and extending gas pipelines, the vision of Project 2025 is totalizing––promoting a fossil fuel agenda on all levels of the U.S. federal government. “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” the report notes. This “whole-of-government unwinding” would take place in every nook and cranny of federal administration: transportation, agriculture, financial agencies, and even foreign aid.
In the case of the Department of Transportation (DOT), Project 2025 seeks to slash any efforts to prioritize or subsidize electric vehicle (EV) production and investment. It promotes lowering fuel efficiency standards which, it says, have made gas-powered cars less competitive. This, combined with limiting the ability of the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions according to the Clean Air Act, would undercut any major shift toward electric vehicles.
As for the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the report seeks to block the agency from incorporating climate or environmental concerns, which it calls “ancillary issues,” into its operations. This includes cutting subsidies for sustainable agriculture, and eliminating programs that conserve wetlands and grassland––both of which are crucial for preserving carbon sinks on U.S. land. The report even argues that, to reduce wildfires, the USDA should oversee a massive expansion of the private timber industry––instead of actually addressing the root causes of worsening wildfires.
Project 2025 also seeks to root out funding or financial investment in clean infrastructure across several financial agencies. According to the report, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Export-Import Bank (dealing with international trade) need to shift focus away from clean energy investment. Instead, it argues, “the next Administration should use the Treasury’s tools and authority to promote investment in domestic energy, including oil and gas.”
In effect, these efforts would protect industry and banks from needing to disclose emissions, slash transportation and agriculture regulations, and block investments to renewables. Even the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is responsible for administering foreign aid, is not safe from the project’s fossil agenda: the government should “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs,” according to the report.
A new paradigm for U.S. climate policy
Project 2025, as a barometer for a potential second Trump term, presents a very bleak future for U.S. climate policy. The project advocates for an unprecedented expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, defunded climate science, reduced regulatory authority, and the elimination of climate concerns from all corners of the federal government, from agriculture to transportation to foreign aid. And, if given the majority in Congress, the report seeks to reverse any gains from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest stride toward clean energy in U.S. history.
Of course, the Biden administration, along with the Harris campaign, also remain divided on climate policy. While Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act drastically expanded subsidies for renewables, his administration also oversaw the nation’s largest ever boom of oil and gas production. Rising gas prices and anxieties about energy security have pushed all politicians toward fossil fuel development, and Democrats are no exception. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris insisted during the debate last month.
But the Trump campaign, and his second term envisioned by Project 2025, present a completely new paradigm of U.S. climate policy, which is antagonistic to environmental and climate legislation on all levels of the federal government. The report speaks about environmentalism in wholly combative terms, as a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power.” Project 2025 sounds the death knell to bipartisan climate policy. It ushers in a new era of climate skepticism, and the unmitigated flood of fossil fuel investment.