US ‘Project 2025’ Threatens Green Investments
With the potential of Trump 2.0 looming, many fear an arch-conservative climate-denying manifesto could become official policy.
Green investors are increasingly worried about what a second Donald Trump presidency might mean for US energy and climate policy. Central to their fears is a manifesto called ‘Project 2025’.
The 900+-page document, produced by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, sets out in minute detail how the entire executive arm of the US government could be remade as an agent of ultra-conservative ideals.
“Project 2025 wants to politicise agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission,” Danielle Fugere, President and Chief Counsel of As You Sow, told ESG Investor. “If that happened, you wouldn’t even have the backstop of career public servants.”
Project 2025, it is important to note, is not Trump’s official platform. In fact, he and his campaign team have attempted to distance themselves from it in recent weeks – particularly from the radical recommendations it makes on reproductive rights, an area where the Republican candidate is vulnerable to attacks from likely Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
Still, the former president’s critics point out that much of it was written by members of his previous administration, including two key chapters on energy and the environment.
Climate-related topics are not the only areas of focus in Project 2025. In fact, more media attention has been given to its social recommendations – including extreme positions on abortion and reproductive rights, arch-conservative views on immigration and trans rights, and a proposal to ban pornography.
Much has also been made of a proposed plan to overhaul and politicise government departments and agencies, purging the public service of so-called “cultural Marxists” and “woke bureaucrats”, and replacing them at every level with vetted conservatives.
Less attention has been given to the energy and climate proposals. But these are controversial and far-reaching, amounting to a total reversal of all President Biden’s climate reforms – including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and a return to a world where fossil fuels would dominate not just in America, but the entire world.
Wholesale climate denial
In the opening chapter, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts describes environmentalism as “nothing but a pseudo-religion meant to baptise liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue”.
He goes on: “Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids … They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.”
A chapter on reshaping the US Department of Energy and related agencies, written by Trump’s former energy regulator Bernard McNamee, dismisses concerns about climate change as being “ideologically driven”, and sets out a radical agenda that would comprehensively demolish the climate reforms of the previous administration.
Proposals include repealing the IRA –the biggest climate law in American history – ending the war on oil and gas, and abandoning so-called “climate reparations” – that is, aid to other countries impacted by climate change.
The manifesto also proposes shutting down the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or if that can’t be achieved, defunding it, ending its focus on climate change and green subsidies, and eliminating energy efficiency standards for appliances. It also suggests scrapping the Clean Energy Corps – a US$62-billion clean energy investment fund – and ending a programme aimed at remaking the energy grid to allow for more renewables.
On fossil fuels, it backs the use of natural gas over renewables in electricity generation, and promotes the expansion of natural gas pipelines for use in heating and industry. It also supports more liquefied natural gas [LNG] exports, and says the government “should not use environmental issues like climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects”.
But Project 2025’s ambitions go beyond domestic policy, calling on the US to impose its pro-fossil fuel agenda on the rest of the world.
“The next conservative president should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offence, asserting them around the world,” Roberts writes in the introduction. “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth.”
Gutting the EPA
Like the chapter on energy, the chapter on the EPA was written by a close Trump ally – Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff for the EPA and was reportedly among those who pressed for the former president to withdraw from the Paris Agreement – which he did, and has vowed to do again.
The EPA has been a seminal element of US climate policy. It was through the agency that former president Barack Obama put in place his Clean Power Plan that limited power plant emissions. He did this by executive order, after attempts to legislate an emissions trading scheme was blocked in Congress.
As a result, the EPA has become a symbol among conservatives of undemocratic overreach of the executive branch, and its powers have recently been massively limited by the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court, including through its decision to strike down the Chevron doctrine.
Project 2025 aims to continue that work. Gunasekara argues the EPA has been coopted by “embedded activists” to pursue a “global, climate-themed agenda” that is not supported by the US Congress.
This chapter proposes slimming down the agency and ending its focus on climate, focusing instead on “practical, cost-beneficial, affordable solutions to clean up the air, water, and soil”.
Many of the proposals are designed to allow the continued use of fossil fuels. For example, the manifesto proposes banning other states from imitating California’s laws on vehicular carbon emissions – though it would allow them to mimic non-carbon related rules.
When Trump was asked during last month’s presidential debate against Biden – which eventually resulted in the Democratic candidate pulling out of the race – what his views were on climate change, he repeated his old answer. “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air,” he said, diverting attention away from carbon emissions towards more localised environmental impacts that have little or nothing to do with climate change.
Gunasekara echoes this in her chapter on the EPA: “A conservative EPA will deliver tangible environmental improvements to the American people in the form of cleaner air, cleaner water, and healthier soils.”
Trump’s actual agenda
The Republican candidate and his team may have attempted to distance themselves from the abortion-related elements of Project 2025, but on energy and climate policies they are aligned: fossil fuels are celebrated, while climate change is not even mentioned once.
“Under President Trump, the US became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal,” the manifesto states.
It goes on: “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again. The United States has more liquid gold under our feet than any other Nation, and it’s not even close.”
Likely Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, by contrast, has a strong record backing climate policy, both in her home state of California and as Vice President in the Biden administration – meaning voters have a stark choice come November. “This election is critical,” said Fugere.
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