Project 2025 and Its Environmental Impact
You know how I know that Donald Trump is lying when he says that he knows nothing about Project 2025? The mastermind of Project 2025 is leaving his job after being pressured to quit by the Trump campaign. But while Trump plays dumb, distancing himself from the 952-page manifesto and the people behind it, his running mate is showing just how fully on board he is with it. Senator JD Vance wrote the foreword for an upcoming book by the leader of the parent organization of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In it, Vance writes, “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets in the fights that lay ahead. These ideas are an essential weapon.”
It is abundantly clear why the Trump campaign wants to run away from Project 2025: because it’s terrible, wildly unpopular, dangerous, and weird. Like their plans to deal with the climate crisis and the environment. Last week, the Earth experienced the four hottest days ever, on the heels of 13 months of unprecedented global high temperatures. Project 2025 would further harm the planet while rewarding corporate polluters and the fossil fuel industry at our expense.
The Environmental Impact of Project 2025
Project 2025 plans to make our air and water dirtier by limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to combat pollution and eliminating limits on forever chemicals in drinking water. It calls for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, gutting clean energy programs, and repealing President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and its investments in renewable energy. But what they really want to do is drill, baby, drill, and give oil and gas companies access to more public land and waters, making them even richer and many of us sicker.
Expert Opinion on Project 2025
Joining me now is Jamie Henn, founder and director of Fossil Free Media, a non-profit that supports putting an end to fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis. Jamie, I have pointed out some of the egregious things in their climate plan. What are some of the things that really scare you the most?
Jamie Henn: Well, Joy, thank you for having me. Look, Project 2025 is the greatest assault on our environmental and public health protections that we have seen in a generation. You know, as you said, this plan takes a chainsaw to a lot of the basic protections that I think Americans have come to rely on. When we turn on the tap, we expect there to be clean drinking water. Project 2025 would dismantle the Office of Law Enforcement at the EPA’s Water Division so that polluters would be free to put whatever chemicals they want into our drinking supply. We expect to breathe clean air. Project 2025 guts the ability of the EPA to regulate pollution from power plants and cars, making the air unsafe to breathe and our kids even sicker. We expect to eat healthy food. We hope that chemicals aren’t in there. As you said, Project 2025 aims to undo the progress that Biden/Harris made on PFAS and reclassify tens of thousands of substances that big polluters want to keep using at the expense of our health. Finally, I work on climate. I have a 3-year-old daughter. I worry about her future. Project 2025 would undo all of the progress we made over the last four years on climate, putting all of our families at risk. I think environmental protections can feel like a nice-to-have sometimes, but this is really about our health, our bodies, our kids. All of that is at stake in this election, and this plan takes direct aim at those protections.
Addressing the Health Risks
Joy: Yeah. I mean, I lived in Florida for 14 years. If you get rid of NOAA, people are going to die if there’s no predictability of storms coming. Storms can literally kill you. I grew up in Colorado. Tornadoes. People are going to die. Let me read you a couple of the quotes from Project 2025. “The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Here is another one: “The federal government has an obligation to develop vast oil, gas, and coal resources for which it is responsible.” I’ll just do one more: “Eliminating the standalone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the EPA.” That is the office that focuses on how race and income affect access to clean air, land, and water. It addresses things like the existence of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. So basically, they’re also going to remove any chance of knowing which communities are being poisoned first and most.
Jamie Henn: Yeah. Let’s break down each of those because they’re great examples of what this project aims to do. The last one you mentioned is really key. We know that Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution and climate impacts. The Trump Project 2025 plan aims to strip all of that from the EPA. We can’t use any of those indicators to look at a community like Cancer Alley and figure out what’s going on and how we protect people in harm’s way. The other part you mentioned is, to borrow a phrase, the really weird part, right? They want to privatize the National Weather Service because some of Trump’s donors have big stakes in weather companies. If you’re in the path of a hurricane, you’re going to have to pay to get information if you should leave your house or rely on Trump and his Sharpie to figure out if you need to evacuate. NOAA, as you mentioned, mostly because that’s the agency that does some of the best climate science research in this country. So, this plan really goes after our agencies both with a sledgehammer but also a scalpel to strip out any mention of environmental justice and any mention of climate. It’s worse than that. As you say, this isn’t just about dismantling agencies. It’s about turning them into wholly-owned subsidiaries. EPA becomes the Environmental Polluters Agency, working on behalf of big oil and gas. The Bureau of Land Management becomes a prospector for oil and gas companies so they can drill on our public lands and in our state parks. This is a truly radical version of this sort of policy and a completely dangerous plan that will really impact every American that lives in this country.
Conclusion
Joy: No wonder Donald Trump is going to the oil and gas billionaires and saying, “Give me a billion dollars,” because he’s going to do their bidding. Jamie Henn, thank you so much. Please come back. This was very important information.
Jamie Henn: Thank you.
Joy: And for more of our segments on Project 2025 and how it promises to upend our republic, go to [website].
