Project 2025 in the Real World

7/18/24 – The environmental consequences of another Trump administration

from Thelma & Louise

Hello everyone:

This week I’m here to remind you of the role politics and elections play in transforming life on Earth. My purpose here in the Field Guide is to articulate our relationship with the living world: as it was, as it is, and as it might be. As the U.S. presidential election nears, it’s essential that I explore how that relationship might change if Donald Trump were reelected. Whatever your politics, please note that my assessment of the environmental consequences of a 2nd Trump presidency is based on the promises and plans he has made, and on those made by the political movement behind his candidacy.

I published an earlier version of this essay, titled “Over the Cliff,” back in February. The warnings I offered then are even more important now, as a victory for democratic norms and a healthy environment feels increasingly tenuous.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The poet Charles Simic described himself as a child of history, but not the kind of history you want for your child. Simic grew up in the bombed streets of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during WWII. “I’ve seen tanks, piles of corpses, and people strung from lampposts with my own eyes,” he said. The family fled to the U.S. after the war. “My travel agents,” he wrote, “were Hitler and Stalin.”

Simic, who never forgot what the men in history books do to ordinary people, distinguished himself early on with poems like “Butcher Shop,” where a butcher’s apron hangs on a hook bearing “blood on it smeared into a map / Of the great continents of blood.” Half a century after WWII, as Yugoslavia broke into bloody fragments at the feet of Serbian nationalists, Simic wrote tirelessly for opposition newspapers there, trying to offer some sanity amid the chaos before it was too late. It wasn’t enough.

I tell you all this because Simic, who was one of my teachers when I was a young poet, was a brilliant and clear-eyed observer of the darker forces of political history. One of his nuggets of wisdom that feels particularly relevant today is this: “You just need a committed passionate fanatic minority to lead a society over a cliff.”

There are a lot of cliffs surrounding society these days, but the two that concern me in the Field Guide are those we call the climate and biodiversity crises, which are symptoms of our profound disruption of conditions for life on Earth. The 2024 elections for both the White House and Congress present another cliff which, if we fall over, will heighten the stakes for the living world.

The fanatic minority in question is a small coterie of incredibly well-funded radical American extremists, unafraid of their authoritarian and fascist impulses and determined to put Donald Trump back in office. Among the coalition are billionaires looking to hoard their unnecessary billions, Christian nationalists who have little regard for either Christ or the nation, and fossil fuel interests willing to burn the world.

Their reasons for supporting Trump’s reelection may not be directly about the environment, but the environmental consequences will be dire nonetheless.

The last year has been the hottest in the last 125,000 years. Ocean temperatures are off the charts. Extinctions are rising as habitats fall. Every relevant scientific observation and assessment indicates that we cannot afford a four-year delay in progress on reducing emissions, shrinking the fossil fuel industry, incentivizing renewable energy, replanting forests, and enacting robust plans for protecting and revitalizing wildlife populations and their habitats.

And a four-year delay is the best possible outcome, because the intent of another Trump administration will be, to the greatest extent possible, to dismantle the regulatory state, eliminate any federal role in reversing climate change, encourage fossil fuel extraction, weaken environmental protections, and make it difficult for any subsequent administration to fix what was broken. And, with the January 6th insurrection still in the rear view mirror, there is little reason to believe that a Trump administration will feel compelled to hand over power after another election.

While we don’t know what would happen under a 2^nd Trump presidency, we can look at two sources to make a prediction: what was done during his first term in office, and what the campaign and its allies are planning for the next. I’ll focus more on the latter, as the historian

Heather Cox Richardson

does here in her summary of what’s expected of a 2^nd Trump presidency in more general political terms. Note that she is not speculating, but listing what’s been “vowed” and “promised”:

The once-grand Republican Party has been captured by the right wing. It has lined up behind former president Donald Trump and his cronies, who have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants and children of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, ban Muslims, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists, and end abortion across the country. They will put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.

I would like to amend her last sentence to say “they will try to put in place,” because much depends on who fills up the seats in Congress, on how much the American public protests these changes, on whether the courts are able to rein in some of the administration’s excesses. But the very nature of the changes planned for a 2nd Trump presidency will make it much harder for Congress, protestors, or the courts to resist or undo the damage.

From an environmental angle, it’s worth noting, too, that much of the oxygen in the political theater would be consumed by court cases and the fights over the administration’s planned attacks on democratic norms, abortion rights, women’s rights, race and gender equality, immigration, etc. It will be hard to talk much or do much about rejoining the Paris accords (again), funding the EPA, or maintaining clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, when the streets are filled with people fighting against a national abortion ban.

It’s clear enough from the angry and childlike Republican national platform – “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again” – that another Trump presidency would be a ecological wrecking ball. But this does not begin to describe what’s been planned, or what’s at stake this time. The first iteration of the Trump presidency was haphazard – he did not expect to win or to govern, and it showed – but this next one, should it happen, would open the floodgates for an extraordinarily comprehensive effort to dismantle American governance.

You can read the plan. Or much of what’s planned, at least. The 920-page Mandate for Leadership by Project 2025, as it’s called, is the product of the conservative Heritage Foundation and more than 80 other like-minded groups, and its stated goal “is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Its director more bluntly described that “army” as “weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”

“Never before,” the director told Politico, “has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare” for taking and holding the reins of American power. The Project 2025 plan doesn’t include the random and quixotic aspects of Trump’s leadership, nor does it itemize his plans for personal vengeance, but it contains just about everything else. In the big picture, as Inside Climate News points out, “Project 2025 is part of a larger plan by Trump and his far-right allies to greatly expand the president’s authority over every part of the federal government.”

Whatever your thoughts on the size and power of the federal government, the reshaping of the executive branch into a unitary anti-regulation, Christian nationalist bastion cannot be in the interest of the majority of Americans, who broadly agree on many issues: environmental protection, climate regulation, free speech, rational immigration policy, abortion rights, gun control, and a tax increase for corporations and the wealthy. Project 2025 hopes to outlaw birth control and end no-fault divorce, too, which are universally popular.

While I’ll cheerfully admit that the federal government is huge, slow, byzantine, and sometimes ineffective, it’s worth pointing out that a more likely definition of the “deep state” targeted by Project 2025 is merely a sturdy executive branch, held in check by Congress and the courts, that does not offer extraordinary favor to the minority interests of a mostly white, male, conservative, Christian nationalist population and the corporations they are aligned with.

And, I should be clear, Christian nationalism is a tenet of Project 2025.

The notion of a “deep state” is a fringe conspiracy theory, but Project 2025 strikes me as an effort to build its conservative incarnation, not least because it intends to seed the government with thousands of loyal Trump supporters, and to increase the number of conservative political appointees across all executive agencies.

Trans-Alaska pipeline / credit: Rashah McChesney/Alaska’s Energy Desk

So, what specific policy recommendations in Project 2025 have me so concerned about life on Earth, including our own? Honestly, there are too many to count. I’ll run through the most important ones and provide a broad view of the rest.

Anti-Science Bias:

I’ll start with the strategic anti-science bias of the document, which advocates for ridding the government of “the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare in just about every area of social life.” In other words, scientists and other experts at federal agencies shouldn’t be allowed to shape regulatory action. I call this language strategic because it’s a calculated effort to push regulatory decisions toward the courts (which have been shifted hard to the right in recent years) and to states and Congress (both of which are now deeply shaped by conservative gerrymandering).

There is an awful synergy here too with action at the Supreme Court, which recently gutted the Chevron doctrine, a longstanding judicial policy of letting experts at agencies (rather than judges) define how to interpret their mandates from Congress.

Climate:

Nowhere is the anti-science bias more obvious than in Project 2025’s plan to eliminate progress on American efforts to reduce emissions and build out a renewable energy system. Climate chaos is “mild and manageable,” according to the authors. The sooty fingerprints of the fossil fuel companies are all over this document.

Not that a 2^nd Trump administration would need a push. As Politico reminds us, “Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed – against all scientific evidence – that the Earth’s rising temperatures will ‘start getting cooler.’” Of the various authors of climate-related chapters in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, several are climate-change deniers.

Their recommendations include repealing or gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, which is by far the single most important piece of climate legislation the U.S. has ever passed. The IRA is driving and incentivizing a new energy economy out of the ashes of the fossil fuel era.

Project 2025 also calls for:

• dismantling NOAA, eliminating its scientific research (especially climate research), and forcing the National Weather Service to end the free weather reports that the public often relies on during severe weather emergencies

• shutting down the Loan Program Office at the Dept. of Energy, which currently has $400 billion to spend on new clean energy technology

• eliminating climate change as a policy priority at the National Security Council

• encouraging Arctic drilling and more broadly pushing for maximum development of oil and gas reserves, stating that the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on public lands

• preventing the government from regulating CO2 emissions by reversing an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling on its harms to human health

• ending the enforcement of emissions standards for cars and trucks.

This is a catastrophic litany that would make the U.S. a pariah (again) amid the fragile global coalition focused on reducing the chaos of a rapidly heating world. The Times put it this way:

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.

Famed climate scientist Michael Mann explained in an op-ed for The Hill that Project 2025 would also “bar other states from adopting California’s clean energy policies and put the fossil fuel industry fox in the environmental henhouse by turning over regulation of polluters to Republican state legislatures.” And Bill McKibben’s recent post explained that even the Taliban has a more rational and forward-looking climate plan than what is enshrined in the GOP platform and Project 2025.

In the Project 2025 worldview, actions on climate are driven by “fear-based rhetoric” that’s used to force citizens to accept “ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.” Thus, their plan is to save us from liberal oppression, forgetting somehow that the difficult reality that awaits us in the Anthropocene is physical and biological rather than political.

vote to protect both the USFWS and this Canada lynx kitten / credit: USFWS

Environment and Biodiversity:

The plan for the EPA goes much further than getting rid of emissions regulation. According to Inside Climate News, Project 2025 would be “especially damaging” for the EPA and would do “gross violence to the environment.” The plan would, among many other changes,

eliminate the EPA’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, drastically slash the agency’s budget and terminate new hires in what the plan’s authors refer to as “low-value programs.” The plan would also revive the so-called “secret science” rule, a controversial proposal by the Trump administration that would have severely limited how the EPA can use scientific studies in its policy making.

Every function that makes the EPA invaluable, even protection of clean air and water or defending the existence of threatened or endangered species, is at stake here. Clean air and water action would be largely shifted to state and local authorities, where priorities differ and enforcement is harder. And as I explained in my three-part series on the Endangered Species Act, the agency needs far more funds for the far greater need that awaits the agency as habitats wither and extinctions increase.

The 32-page chapter on the EPA in Project 2025 is openly hostile to the top-down regulation of fossil fuel companies, chemicals, and pesticides. It refers to the companies behind the toxic transformation of the planet as “politically disfavored industries,” as if politics somehow trumped physics and ecology. Which, I suppose, is the point.

The EPA chapter is also extraordinarily detailed. The author, Mandy Gunasekara, has a long association with climate denial and advocacy for the fossil fuel and chemical industries. She was a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA under Trump, and was “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan,” according to DeSmog. She knows the agency well and seems well-positioned to turn it into an ineffective husk of its current self.

At a glance, other slashes that Gunasekara has planned for the EPA include:

• as a Day One Priority, telling Congress that “EPA will not conduct any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization”

• adding six senior political appointees “charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities”

• beginning a “pause and review” of major environmental regulations

• repealing regulation of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases

• weakening fuel standards for aircraft

• weakening emissions reporting across all sectors

• limiting the agency’s ability to make new rules or enforce existing ones

• increasing political appointees while decreasing scientific staff

• coordinating with the SCOTUS Sackett ruling by radically reducing what waters can be protected by defining them as “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water,” which eliminates many critical wetland habitats

• “revisiting” the designation of PFAS chemicals as hazardous

• ending any precautionary approach to the regulation of toxic chemicals and pesticides

• “reforming” Endangered Species Act assessments of harm to insects by pesticides by highlighting the benefits of pesticides for agriculture

• suspending and reviewing the activities of EPA advisory bodies

• asking the public to “identify scientific flaws and research misconduct” at the EPA

Meanwhile, the 28-page chapter on the Dept. of the Interior is a butcher shop specializing in reversing Biden policies that underpin the land protection and fossil fuel reduction goals of 30x30 and America the Beautiful, reinstating Trump-era aggressive fossil fuel policies, opening up public lands in Alaska and the lower 48 for coal, oil, gas, and mineral exploration, and gutting the Endangered Species Act.

Project 2025 falsely describes the Endangered Species Act as having a dismal success rate, yet the author’s recommendations will do nothing to improve it. First, he suggests that Congress “take action to restore [the ESA’s] original purpose and end its use to seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations.” Second, he advises (among other recommendations) that U.S. Fish and Wildlife:

• delist the grizzly bear in the Yellowstone and Continental Divide ecosystems and the gray wolf in the entire lower 48

• give western states jurisdiction over greater sage grouse management

• stop moving threatened and endangered species into new habitat that can support them in a warming world

• implement a “conservation triage” program to manage species because of a “constrained budget”

• stop using “so-called species specialists who have obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas”

Elsewhere, the document calls for re-enacting a Trump-era rule that gave legal protections to energy companies and other industries that kill birds, as in toxic tailing ponds near mines. That’s the abysmal anti-environmental sensibility that runs through Project 2025.

snow goose dead after landing in Berkeley Pit / Rich Marvin/Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology

You get the point. I haven’t even dug into the chapters on the Dept. of Agriculture, the Dept. of Transportation, and Dept. of Energy. If you want to read a 21st century far-right vision of the nation, and you have a significant tolerance for reading about the death of democratic governance, I highly recommend you poke around in the document.

The Heritage Foundation has been writing comprehensive policy plans for incoming Republican presidents for decades. But Trump has already proved to be the most enthusiastic recipient in the organization’s history, as a Rolling Stone article explains. Ronald Reagan implemented about half of the policies offered to him over his eight-year term, but Trump embraced two-thirds within his first year.

In fact, Trump and his former administration is deeply tied to the entire Project 2025 document, despite his recent disavowals. Now that the plan is getting broad and deep media attention, and its better-known details (cuts to Social Security and Medicare, bans on abortion and birth control, mass round-ups of immigrants, equating LGBTQ freedoms with pornography, reducing taxes on the super-wealthy, etc.) are polling about as well as cancer, he will continue to lie about his connections to it. But 140 people close to Trump were involved in writing it, including six former Cabinet secretaries, four ambassadors, a cluster of immigration hawks, his first deputy chief of staff, and his current campaign press secretary. And, of course, there’s video of Trump discussing the plan.

One bit of good news amid these horrors is that, as Cory Doctorow points out in a long, sharp-tongued analysis, the extremist coalition behind Project 2025 has plenty of weak points and fault lines, not least in the many proposals that Americans dislike:

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

More specific good news is that, according to a survey taken last August by Climate Power and Data for Progress, a majority of Americans, including Republicans, reject many of Project 2025’s changes to climate and environmental regulation:

“Project 2025 is a dream for polluters, but it would be a nightmare for our country,” said Climate Power deputy executive director Claire Moser. “When given a choice between maintaining President Biden’s clean energy plan and this extreme MAGA Republican plan to roll back climate progress and key environmental protections, voters strongly support the clean energy transition that is already under way. Even a majority of Republican voters reject key elements of this extreme plan – and it will be a political liability for GOP candidates running in 2024.”

Given all this, it’s possible that a hefty portion of the 2025 plan would be too unpopular or too difficult to enact, or that Trump’s antics and quests for vengeance would force a national focus elsewhere. But remember that the Heritage Foundation and others have prepared for that kind of opposition by planning to install as quickly as possible thousands of “weaponized conservatives” ready to go to work, motivated not by polls or media attention but by ideology.

As a Post article explains, the intent is to surround Trump with staff more loyal to him than to the rule of law: “The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders.”

In the wake of an apparent attempt to assassinate Trump, I should note that if for whatever reason he weren’t the Republican nominee, no replacement candidate will be any less likely to adopt the principles and policy recommendations of Project 2025. This is the core planning document for the charred remnants of a Republican party set on realizing the goal of extremist, white authoritarian rule for the benefit of a minority of corporate, racist, and zealous religious interests.

Finally, I have to insist that whatever objections climate activists and environmentalists may have to the Biden administration – the decision to allow the Willow project comes to mind – he’s done far, far more on climate action than any other president, and protected more U.S. lands and waters than any president since JFK. And, more to the point, everything we hold dear on the spectrum of climate action and environmental protection is at stake if Biden loses this election.

The enactment of Project 2025 would be as fatal to U.S. and global climate goals as it would be to many species.

There is an astonishing amount of good, optimistic momentum in the clean energy world, thanks to the groundwork laid by the Biden administration. This includes solar and wind energy production, battery storage tech, a national transition toward EVs, and much more. Another four years of Biden’s America the Beautiful and other conservation initiatives will make good progress toward keeping the fabric of life intact. And, of course, this will all take place within the suite of policies meant to secure a decent life and democratic norms for the American people, as this recent post reminds us:

Ideological movements, as Charlie Simic knew all too well, can grip the public imagination and turn a society toward a cliff of its own making. The populist leaders of those movements, whether charismatic or clever, don’t need violence to take office. As with Hitler and Stalin - Charlie’s travel agents - we can simply vote them in until their trap snaps shut. The 20^th century was a graveyard of violent ideologies disguised as utopias, led by authoritarians who promised freedom: Fear them, follow me, give me more power to fight that which we fear. We fall for it far too often, and then we fall too far.

But, somehow, the stakes are higher now. We live deeper in the Anthropocene, the most bizarre and consequential era in human history, when our fate is inextricably tied to the fate of life on Earth, which teeters on its own cliff. What we believe, and how we vote, matters not just for the future of American society but for the fabric of life itself.

Read more about the environmental and climate consequences of a possible 2nd Trump presidency in new articles from the Times, Inside Climate News, and The Hill, and for more general contrast read the Democratic National Committee’s platform, which makes a point throughout of carefully distinguishing its philosophy from that of Trump and Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a fascist confection, a theater of authoritarian power, and a delusion that has somehow amassed an army, but its false premises and brutal consequences take place in the real world, where an astonishing diversity of plants, animals, and other life make their home. This includes us, and a vote for Project 2025 is a vote to burn down our world far faster and more heartlessly than we are now.

the greater sage grouse wants your vote / Jennifer Hall, USFWS

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From

David E. Perry

at In the Garden of His Imagination, a beautiful brief hymn/essay about the joy of a stretch of river far from the noise of society and rich in the sounds and sights of life. Perry’s chosen landscape is hard, but his joy is deep.

From the Post, the bizarre and tragic proposal from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to slaughter 450,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in order to protect the endangered northern spotted owl. All owls are amazing creatures, and I am particularly fond of barred owls, but amid the deep disruption of the natural world caused by modern human society, barred owls have moved west and severely reduced spotted owl populations. USFWS has a legal obligation to protect endangered species, and no other strategy will work. The question is which ethic, in an impossible ethical dilemma, should we adhere to:

“This isn’t at all about one owl versus another,” Moran said. “This is about having spotted owls. If we do nothing, we will have only barred owls. If we do something, we’ll have both.”

From Canary Media, spikes in electric bills around the U.S. are caused by oil and gas price volatility and big utility investments in aging infrastructure, not clean energy, despite what fossil fuel interests would have us believe.

Also from Canary Media, the brilliant idea of covering irrigation canals with solar panels is finally coming to fruition on land owned by the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, thanks to funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. There are eight thousand miles of canals controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation, and covering them with solar panels “could generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy and reduce water evaporation by tens of billions of gallons.”

From the LA Times, a major step forward for geothermal energy, as Fervo Energy announced it has signed a 15-year deal to send 320 megawatts of clean, constant energy into the California grid. Geothermal is far behind solar and wind as a player in the clean energy world, but thanks to new technology it has serious potential to put the final nail in the coffin of gas and oil, because unlike wind and solar the energy output of geothermal is steady and round-the-clock.

From the Times, a fascinating and lovely essay about restoring a bit of the once-grand grasslands in the American South. I knew that bison once roamed east of the Mississippi, but did not know that the South once was filled with 120 million acres of grasslands, including 7 to 10 million acres of prairie.

From

Sam Matey

at The Weekly Anthropocene, “The Dawn of ‘Immigrant Species Biology,’” an excellent, thoughtful, and thorough guide to rethinking the notion of “invasive species.” Sam introduces two new studies that help us rethink our fear of shifting species in the Anthropocene, and in referencing some of his early posts helps us see the (usually) less harmful biological reality when new species arrive. If nothing else, read it for some reality checks regarding jorō spiders and spotted lanternflies.