Iowa already lives in a Project 2025 environment

Project 2025’s call to turn the state’s environmental regulators into pet dogs will seem familiar to Iowans.

We live it. We swim in it. We drink it.

You may remember Project 2025, written primarily by former Trump administration officials and published by the Heritage Foundation. This is a political plan in case Donald Trump wins.

Trump condemned this unpopular project. But you can’t believe anything this guy says.

We live in a state where environmental protections cannot protect farmers and farmland owners from taking responsibility for pollutants that flow from crops and livestock into Iowa’s waterways. It has no power to match the agricultural corporations that sell fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals.

Is all this dirty water contributing to the rising cancer rates in Iowa? Don’t ask.

Republicans who govern the state strongly oppose regulations requiring farms to take steps to reduce pollution. Most Democrats also oppose the legislation for fear of losing rural votes they don’t get.

The Iowa Environmental Protection Commission is dominated by members associated with agriculture. The Department of Natural Resources is understaffed, underfunded, and run by political appointees who happily serve Gov. Kim Reynolds, a friend of the pig barons and ethanol emperors. Even if the EPC approves stricter anti-pollution rules, they will have to go through a watchdog in Reynolds’ office.

Iowa regulators have approved carbon capture pipelines not as a climate change mitigation tool but to support ethanol production, which comes at a high environmental cost.

Iowans therefore have nowhere to turn when it comes to cleaning up our water. The DNR doesn’t even have enough power to keep a huge range of cattle out of the watershed around a “prominent” trout stream.

And if Donald Trump wins and his administration follows Project 2025, we will no longer be able to seek federal aid.

One of the main goals of the plan is to replace thousands of career government officials with political appointees loyal to the Trump regime. Career civil servants would certainly include scientists conducting research contrary to his agenda.

The Environmental Protection Agency would be essentially gutted. Its powers to solve problems through regulation would be drastically reduced. Under the plan, several offices within EPA would be eliminated or re-created.

This includes the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which weakens EPA’s ability to enforce existing environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

It will be easier to drain wetlands for development, but it will be more difficult to regulate chemicals, including forever chemicals. More public lands will be available for oil drilling.

The National Monuments Act, which allows presidents to create national monuments to protect vulnerable lands, would be repealed. The Endangered Species Act will be amended. Energy efficiency standards for appliances will be repealed or modified.

Try taking my gas stove, you fucking commies.

As you may have read here before, Project 2025 calls for abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service and climate research scientists that Republicans dislike. Forecasting will be privatized to companies that currently use NWS data in their forecasts. Wise.

Besides, climate change is either a punch line or no big deal.

Last week at the New York Times’ Climate Forward event, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet. Rising global temperatures have already contributed to devastating natural disasters.

“To me it looks like the weather, a hot year,” Roberts said.

And there is no global warming because it snowed!

Mandy Gunasekara, former Trump EPA chief of staff, wrote that sounding climate alarms is “a favorite tool the left uses to intimidate the American public into accepting its ineffective, freedom-crushing regulations.” She wrote the climate section of Project 2025.

But don’t call Heritage or the project’s authors climate deniers. No, sir.

“So there are two different kinds of science conversations,” Gunasekara said last year in an interview with NPR.

“There’s a politicized version that most people are exposed to… There’s an informed conversation going on – but a scientifically sound one – with many scientists across the country, around the world, where they understand that the perspective is softer and more manageable,” she said.

Gentle and easy to learn. Sounds like a shampoo ad. But not a Category 4 hurricane.

Remember that concerns about the consequences of global warming are “politicized.” Pretending nothing bad is happening is “essential.” I see.

Of course, it is not difficult to guess what kind of politics flows from these positions.

We would withdraw from virtually all international efforts to slow or stop warming. Government agencies should stop talking about climate impacts that will not occur. For example, climate change will no longer be included in military threat assessments, despite the fact that climate disasters will fuel conflict.

The Congressionally approved Inflation Reduction Act, which includes unprecedented efforts to stop emissions that fuel climate change, will be repealed if Heritage has its way.

A federal government that under Trump would basically put profits ahead of people affected by environmental degradation. It would also give states more power to approve locally harmful environmental policies. Swell

“I think, first of all, it’s about us respecting the concept of cooperative federalism. So it’s up to the federal government to work with states to achieve significant improvements in air, soil and water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Gunasekara told NPR.

Significant in this context means “almost nothing.”

Iowa agriculture will certainly suffer from climate change as heavy rains cause more flooding, droughts become longer and more intense, and pests that are not native to Iowa move north. And yet, under the Golden Dome of Wisdom, now redder than the heat dome, GOP leaders make no mention of it. Makes them sound like libraries.

There are legislative actions that could be adopted. Our state flower should be the fertilizer-fed algae bloom. The state fish? “Channel Catfish Floating Upside Down.”

So Iowans already know how to get angry, frustrated and powerless to clean up the state’s rivers, lakes and deteriorating state park facilities.

And, understandably, many Iowans are worried about what Trump, his minions and the states will do to further harm the environment. But don’t worry. I heard it would be “gentle and manageable.” Something like a derecho.

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