Project 2025 and the Environment

Project 2025 is decidedly in favor of energy extraction, that is oil drilling, coal mining, extracting fossil fuel from the environment. It would dismantle environmental protections and regulations and support for energy research in order to meet short-term goals of the fossil fuel industry. 

Join us as we walk through proposed changes to the Department of Energy to see the environmental destruction Trump and his minions want to inflict. 

They propose: 

• Eliminating of the Clean Energy Corps. Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Clean Energy Corps, which they note focuses on “‘deploying next generation clean energy technology’ to ‘help America meet its goals of a carbon-free power sector in 2035 and a decarbonized economy in 2050.’” That sounds good to me, but Project 2025 proposes defunding the Corps because: “Taxpayers should not have to fund a cadre of federal employees to promote a partisan political agenda” (p. 386).
• Canceling Applied Energy Programs in the Office of Electricity. These programs improve battery efficiency and grid-enhancing technologies, to combat climate change and build a robust, modern energy infrastructure. Project 2025 would eliminate them (p. 374). 
• Shutting Down Environmental Offices within the Department of Energy. Project 2025 suggests trashing the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (p. 377) and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration (p. 382). This would dramatically slow down progress toward cleaner energy by encouraging investment in fossil fuels rather than renewable energy sources.

If we widen our view to other departments, we can see that in:

• The Department of the Interior, Project 2025 would focus on “Energy Dominance” (that is, fossil fuel energy dominance), rescinding dozens of Interior orders, lowering energy “rents, royalty rates, and bonding requirements to no higher than what is required under the Inflation Reduction Act” (p. 523). In other words, the current minimum fee for energy companies to use our land would become the maximum. 
• The Environmental Protection Agency, along with a radical roll-back of regulations that protect our air, water, and soil, Project 2025 would install new political appointees in charge of air pollution regulations, including “a political Chief of Staff in D.C. to manage the entire air office” (p. 428). An EPA Office of Air “political Chief of Staff” would not be in office to protect our air, but to ensure corporations get the government they paid for.

The assaults on the environment proposed by the authors of Project 2025 are legion. In fact, a third of the 900-plus page Mandate for Leadership is devoted to the Department of Energy, the EPA, and the Department of the Interior. Much of that is a laundry list of program defunding, regulation roll-backs, and industry give-aways.

If you care about the environment, if you are concerned about climate change, if you want to leave a livable world to your children and grandchildren, vote blue, all down the ballot!