Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action

Summer 2024 saw another round of devastating heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and record-setting global temperatures. The window for averting a catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the planet is rapidly closing. Can we meet this moment? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. For this is a tale of two worldviews.

In one—based on facts and evidence—environmental policy is motivated by science and reason, with the intent of advancing the common good and the sustainability of our civilization and our planet. The climate crisis is seen as the defining challenge of our time, demanding immediate and urgent action.

In the other—steeped in myth and conspiratorial ideation—environmental threats are an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and politicians on the take, and environmental sustainability is a Trojan horse, a tool used by “globalists” to instill a new socialist world order. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by environmental extremists.

Nothing better illustrates this yawning chasm in worldview than two deceptively similar-sounding projects known as the fact-based “Agenda 2030” and the conspiracy-rife “Project 2025.”

The first, “Agenda 2030,” is a United Nations program for Sustainable Development unanimously adopted by UN member nations on September 25, 2015. Agenda 2030 supports a set of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, or “SDGs,” promoting “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” and the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of our civilization. Among its priorities are the health of the planet’s oceans and forests and the overriding threat of human-caused climate change.

I’ve contributed to the program personally. Back in 2018, I developed a free online course for the SDG Academy, which the UN describes as the “premier source of high-quality resources and guidance on education for the SDGs, with the mandate to enrich the field of sustainable development and advance Agenda 2030.” My course, which is still offered today (so far more than 35,000 people have taken it) is entitled “Climate Change: The Science and Global Impact.” Its stated purpose is that “we need to understand the science behind global warming to avoid the most damaging and irreversible climate change impacts on people and planet.”

So perhaps I’m a bit personally invested in Agenda 2030 and its mission to educate the public and policymakers about the climate crisis. But it is objectively disturbing to see that program attacked in such bad faith by the right. Representative of the assault is the plutocrat and dark money-funded Heritage Foundation, which has denounced Agenda 2030 as “hopelessly flawed from the start,” “replete with imprecise goals and targets,” “senseless, dreamy, and garbled,” and “[the] antithesis of a focused development strategy.” They insist, in fact, that “the US should call out the SDGs for their ineffectiveness and call for a re-evaluation of this failed endeavor.” Strong language. We’ll return to the Heritage Foundation and their role in all of this in a bit.

Agenda 2030, indeed, possesses all the elements despised by the bad actors who help manufacture and promote far-right conspiracy theories. Like the much-vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Agenda 2030 operates under the auspices of the United Nations, feeding the fears of the “one world government,” right-wing fever swamp.

Its laudable goals of reducing poverty, hunger, and social inequality play into conservative fears of “socialism.” Its focus on environmental sustainability feeds the “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside) framing that has for so long been used by conservative influencers seeking to weaponize their base against environmental action.

As a result, social media is now rife with the claim that Agenda 2030 is part of a left-wing global socialist plot against individual liberty and freedom, an excuse for even more pervasive and long-lasting pandemic-like lockdowns.

Now, let’s talk about “Project 2025,” a 900-page plan drafted by the aforementioned Heritage Foundation to implement a far-right policy agenda in the United States. If implemented—by a second Trump administration, for example—it would shrink the federal government, putting thousands of civil servants out of work. It would further expand the powers of the president. It would dismantle the Department of Education, impose massive tax cuts, and halt the sale of the abortion pill. It would cancel the National Weather Service and privatize all its meteorological data.

Worst of all, it would put an end to US climate action at this critical moment.

The energy and environmental provisions of Project 2025 were effectively written by polluters, with front groups such as the Koch-funded “Competitive Enterprise Institute” and “Heartland Institute” playing a key role in drafting the report. They are seeking to dismantle climate policy in the US through a combination of executive actions, such as the elimination of federal agencies with oversight over energy and environmental policy, and legislative actions.

Project 2025 would gut the EPA, which is responsible for enforcement of environmental policies, and it would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors changes in our atmosphere, oceans and climate. Project 2025 would eliminate clean energy loan programs at the Department of Energy and remove climate change—one of the greatest national security threats we face—from the National Security Council agenda. It supports more oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic and asserts that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources.”

Perhaps most problematic, Project 2025 would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the single most substantial piece of climate legislation in US history. Passed with a tie-breaking vote from current Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and 50 Senate democrats but not a single Republican, the IRA provides $370 billion of investment in clean energy infrastructure. Independent experts have estimated that it will greatly accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, leading to an estimated 40 percent reduction in US carbon emissions by 2030.

Let’s stop to appreciate the masterful projection on display here from those promoting Project 2025 while simultaneously attacking and waxing conspiratorial about Agenda 2030. For, while the latter supports a laudable agenda of fairness, justice, and environmental sustainability, the former promotes inequality, injustice and environmental devastation. And while Agenda 2030 reflects an agreement among all of the United Nations member nations around the world, “Project 2025” was hatched by the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation and written by a shadowy group of a hundred conservative activists. The true irony here is that, while the assault on Agenda 2030 is driven by right-wing conspiracy theories, Project 2025 is an actual, full-blown plutocrat-funded conspiracy.

Why does all this matter? The world must reduce global carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and bring them down to zero by mid-century to avert catastrophic planetary warming and the devastating impacts that come with it. Achieving those results is already an uphill battle and, while the policy progress during the Biden administration gets the United States part of the way there, there is far more that needs to be done.

The United States can’t afford four years of inaction. But that’s what precisely what Project 2025—a central plank of the Republican party in the 2024 presidential election—will provide. If Trump wins the presidency again, particularly if Republicans expand their control of Congress to both houses, we will see an abrupt termination—rather than the needed acceleration—of efforts underway to decarbonize the US economy. The GOP has threatened to weaponize a potential second Trump term against any and all domestic climate action and will fast-track the most climate-averse policy agenda in the history of our nation to be signed into law by Trump.

But what happens in the United States doesn’t stay in the United States. Despite the renewed leadership on climate seen under the Biden administration, other nations are now extremely wary of what a second Trump presidency could portend, particularly on climate, where they fear he will refuse to honor our commitments to the rest of the world and derail four years of progress on climate. There would be nothing to block the fossil fuel industry from taking the reins of US energy and climate policy, joining the ranks of Russia and Saudi Arabia to establish a formidable global petrostate alliance, what I’ve termed a “coalition of the unwilling.”

When the US leads on climate, other nations step up their game—as seen under both Obama and Biden. But when the US displays intransigence and signals to the rest of the world it is not serious about its commitments, then other countries like China ease off in their own efforts—as occurred during Trump’s first term. This is why I have stated before that a second Trump presidency would be game over for climate action writ large. Or put slightly differently, the climate cannot survive another Trump term.

That’s the real threat posed by Project 2025, and it is planetary in scope and impact.

The Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from Project 2025 in recent weeks as internal polling indicates that the more the public learns about the plan, the less they like it. The campaign now insist, in fact, that it has its own, separate plan distinct from Project 2025 (albeit with remarkably similar goals). As if seeking to confuse anyone trying to keep track of all of this, the Trump campaign called its new, separate effort Agenda (no, not 2030 but) 47. Because if elected Trump would become the 47th president.

But there is no way for Trump and the GOP to distance themselves from Project 2025, which is, after all, simply a formalization of the policies seen in Trump’s first term, when he outsourced his energy and environmental policies to polluters. In fact, the Heritage Foundation prepared a similar blueprint for Trump back in 2016, and he implemented nearly two thirds of the Heritage recommendations in the very first year of his presidency.

Trump and Project 2025 are inextricably linked in numerous ways. Project 2025 was written for Trump, by Trump affiliates, who will staff the various agencies in a prospective second term. Six of the report authors are former Trump cabinet officials. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, wrote the foreward for a book about it (Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America), written by Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 brainchild Kevin Roberts. Roberts briefed Trump about Project 2025 during its nascent stages back in 2022 on a private flight to a Heritage Foundation conference where Trump went on to say that the effort would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

ProPublica recently obtained more than 14 hours of videos from the Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy, an online training archive to prepare incoming political appointees in a prospective Trump administration so they can hit the ground running from day one; 29 of the 36 speakers in the series are connected to Trump either through this campaign or his previous presidency. Among the instructions given in the academy, Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Trump and his co-conspirators were obstructed by their own incompetence during his first term. That proved to be a saving grace from the standpoint of environmental and climate policy. The whole point of Project 2025 is to make sure they don’t repeat that mistake and instead, go in with a detailed, comprehensive blueprint that will allow them to fast track their agenda.

We face a planetary-scale threat in the form of a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on implementing, in Project 2025, the most extreme, anti-environmental policy agenda in American history. In all likelihood, it would mean the end of meaningful global climate action at this critical juncture. The fate of our planet quite literally hangs in the balance. It’s something for all Americans to think about as they prepare for the pivotal 2024 election.