What Project 2025 would mean for the fight against climate change

Project 2025, a controversial conservative roadmap that aims to guide the next Republican administration, calls for the elimination of multiple energy- and environment-related offices and rules — moves that would restrict the government’s ability to combat climate change and pollution.

Policies promoted under the plan would place political personnel in positions to oversee science at major federal agencies and reduce such agencies’ limitations on polluting industries.

The project additionally proposes chopping up several agencies. It called for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s oceans, weather, climate and fisheries science agency, to be “dismantled.”

NOAA is home to the National Weather Service (which the plan says should henceforth focus on commercial operations), as well as the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (which the plan says should be “downsized,” with much of its climate research “disbanded”).

The plan would also eliminate offices within the Energy Department that focus on renewable energy, climate technology and energy technology research. And the Energy Department chapter further calls for a “whole-of-government assessment and consolidation of science,” including “a review of all the federal science agencies.”

In addition, with the help of Congress, Project 2025 seeks to eliminate energy efficiency standards for household appliances. Such standards have been a target of congressional Republicans, who have made multiple efforts to block or roll back Biden administration restrictions on appliances. 

Former President Trump has also blasted regulations requiring more efficient lightbulbs, showerheads and a range of other items.

Trump has sought to distance himself from the project in the wake of the leader of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that put it together, controversially calling for a “bloodless” revolution. 

However, many sections of the plan were written by officials from the former president’s first administration — and the provisions on energy efficiency standards are one of many areas where the plan appears to broadly dovetail with policies Trump has called for. 

The project would also reinstate a Trump-era measure that moved the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., for instance — a move critics said effectively pushed out long-time staffers who had been based in Washington, D.C. 

In an interview with The Hill, Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma, who co-wrote the Interior Department section of the proposal, said that section is “all about increasing [oil and gas] development and production from federal lands.”

Sgamma, who leads a group that lobbies on behalf of the oil industry, said the raft of proposals are intended to reverse Biden administration policies that restricted fossil fuel development on those lands. 

Upon taking office, Biden signed an executive order pausing all new oil and gas leasing on public lands, which has since ended. More recently, he signed permanent protections for about 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The plan would undo these actions, restoring Trump-era policies that opened up more Arctic lands for drilling, reduced protections for endangered species and implemented restrictions on environmental reviews and other review processes in an effort to bolster infrastructure and energy projects

Some of the blueprint’s proposals for the Interior Department would likely require an act of Congress. For example, the plan also calls for the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, the statute that allows presidents to designate national monuments. 

Others, however, could likely be accomplished through the executive branch, such as opening up more Arctic lands for drilling, reducing protections for endangered species and implementing restrictions on environmental reviews and other review processes in an effort to bolster infrastructure and energy projects.

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the plan calls for the consolidation of science and policy under political officials. Its plans for doing so include appointing at least six political appointees who are in charge of overseeing and changing the agency’s research and science activities. 

It also calls for moving high-ranking career officials out of the EPA’s Office of Water, and eliminating the agency’s civil and criminal law enforcement office — instead moving the law enforcement officials to the agency’s office of general counsel. 

The law enforcement office, known as the Office of of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, is in charge of pursuing criminal and criminal penalties when companies break laws by polluting. 

Asked about the reason for moving those senior officials out of the water office, Mandy Gunasekara, author of the plan’s EPA chapter, told The Hill some officials who are in those roles could use their positions to put up roadblocks to policy proposals they disagree with. She said moving law enforcement to the general counsel’s office could address “discrepancies” between the people who make the rules and those that apply them.

The EPA section of the plan also calls for an “update” to the agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health and the environment. This endangerment finding compels the EPA to do something to address the threat of these emissions. 

It’s not clear whether an “update” could weaken or overturn this finding. 

In addition, the plan would make the agency’s consideration of potentially toxic substances more industry friendly and “revisit” a rule that is currently set to bolster the cleanup of cancer-linked PFAS chemicals. 

Gunasekara was the EPA’s chief of staff during the Trump administration. She declined to say whether she’d want to serve in a second Trump administration.

The primary architect of the Interior Department section, William Perry Pendley, is also a former Trump official. Pendley was the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s presidency, but he was never confirmed by the Senate — despite leading the agency for more than a year before being ousted by a judge. 

Pendley is a longtime advocate of selling off public lands, writing in a June op-ed that the BLM should sell them to resolve housing shortages in the western U.S. He has also denied both the reality of climate change and the existence of a hole in the earth’s ozone layer, called the Endangered Species Act a “failure,” and made headlines for calling undocumented immigrants a “cancer” and claiming that Islam was at war with the U.S.

The project “makes no secret about who wrote this,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, in reference to Sgamma’s role in the Interior section.

Pendley “would love it if most oil and gas policy was handed over to states even when it comes to federal lands,” Weiss added.

Project 2025 has sparked concerns among environmental advocates. Climate activist Jamie Henn said what alarms him about the project is not necessarily that it’s more extreme than Trump’s proposals, but that it’s more specific. 

“Trump would frack the National Mall if he thought it would make a couple of bucks for donors and Big Oil,” said Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit that supports ending fossil fuel use.

But he said “Trump tends to speak in slogans,” while “this is a plan that really gets into the details.”

“We’re not only going agency by agency, we’re going into every single agency program,” Henn said. “They’re coming in with sledgehammers and scalpels to try and dismantle any barriers to the fossil fuel industries.”

The project’s proponents said its goals are to get a conservative administration ready for action with a detailed policy plan. 

“My goal is very much parallel to the goal of the whole project, and it’s to make sure that the next opportunity conservatives have to lead the administration, we don’t lose any time,” Gunasekara told The Hill.  

She described her aim in drafting the plan’s EPA section as “1. set out a clear policy vision and then 2. figure out the steps it would take to ultimately implement that in the most efficient manner possible.”