Project 2025 aims to push America towards ecological catastrophe

Offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated at the Department of Energy, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for home appliances would be eliminated. The environmental oversight capabilities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be significantly reduced or eliminated altogether, preventing those agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, or conducting climate change research.

In addition to these overhauls, Project 2025 advocates getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that protect public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating Endangerment Finding, the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to limit emissions and air pollution from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends ending government efforts to assess the social costs of carbon, or the harm each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or positive health side effects, of their policies, such as improved air quality.

“When you think about who is going to be hit hardest by pollution — whether it’s conventional air, water and soil pollution, or climate change — it’s very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group. “Weakening these kinds of protections will have a disproportionate impact on those communities.”

Chemical plants and factories dot the roads and suburbs of an area known as “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana.

Photographer: Giles Clarke/Getty Images

Other proposals could destroy the country’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service and replacing them with private companies. The plan appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments to support either side of the climate debate.” But the National Hurricane Center gets most of its data from the National Weather Service, like most other private weather companies, and eliminating public weather data could destroy Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s absurd,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund. “There’s no problem that this solution solves, it’s looking for a problem.”