During a two-week stretch in late September and early October, a pair of fearsome hurricanes battered the southeastern United States. Helene and Milton sowed chaos and destruction from the moment they made landfall, swallowing up whole towns with catastrophic flooding and reducing countless homes to rubble. As of Oct. 11, the combined death toll from both hurricanes had surpassed 240.
New research indicates that a warming climate increased Helene’s ferocity, and scientists anticipate that storms of its magnitude will become more common as global temperatures continue to rise. The mountain of evidence linking global warming to extreme weather events worldwide has prompted the U.S. government to take steps to slow the pace of climate change.
Project 2025, a controversial policy plan from an influential right-wing think-tank, would effectively end all government action centered on climate change. The Heritage Foundation published the nearly 900-page document in 2023, calling for sweeping reforms to federal agencies and proposing new rules around trade, immigration, health care and education. The group also recommends diluting or abolishing longstanding regulations protecting land, water, air and wildlife.
Environmental organizations describe Project 2025 as a deregulatory disaster that would jeopardize the future of the planet.
“This plan … is an absolute gift to corporate and industrial polluters,” Sierra Club Director of Climate Policy Patrick Drupp told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 15. “We’re in the middle of a climate crisis fueled by the fossil fuel industry, and this plan would just exacerbate that.”
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Trump Said Heritage Would ‘Lay the Groundwork’
The Heritage Foundation has touted Project 2025 as a playbook for the next conservative presidential administration to “return the government to its people,” allowing it to curb federal spending, strengthen the private sector and bolster the power of individual states. While Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the document amid widespread backlash to its policies, at least 140 former Trump administration officials contributed to the plan.
Trump teased the plan during an April 2022 speech to the Heritage Foundation, stating that the organization was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
In the past, Trump has baselessly called the scientific consensus on climate change “a con,” “bullshit,” an “expensive hoax,” and claimed it was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” During his time as president, Trump methodically rolled back and weakened climate regulations and environmental protections. Trump’s own campaign platform does not mention climate issues. Instead, it calls only to “make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!”
His Democratic opponent this year, Vice President Kamala Harris, cast the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, a mammoth bill that Congress passed under the Biden administration with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42%, compared to 2005 levels. In the policy proposals section on her website, Harris’ campaign vows to “unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, and increases resilience to climate disaster.” Her plan also emphasizes lowering energy costs while investing in domestic clean and renewable energy production.
Reversing Course on Climate
Project 2025 would build on the former Trump administration’s campaign to remove climate considerations from all areas of government. The document contends that liberal administrations have greatly exaggerated the threat posed by climate change, leading to draconian regulations domestically and billions of dollars wasted overseas.
“Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations,” the plan states.
Accordingly, Project 2025 calls on the next conservative administration to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement—a global pact between nations to collectively curtail greenhouse gas emissions—and its parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The document also advocates for stripping climate provisions from a range of foreign aid programs.
Walking away from international climate accords would undermine global efforts to rein in harmful emissions, environmental experts warn. It would also set a dangerous precedent that other countries could follow.
“Withdrawing from the UNFCCC … only hampers global climate action and does nothing to protect the United States,” said Courtney Federico, associate director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization. “The U.S. is a huge emitter of greenhouse gasses, (and) the hurricane that just took place is the clearest reminder of the real costs of climate change.”
Besides halting U.S. climate action on the international stage, Project 2025 would discontinue governmental efforts to move away from fossil fuels and invest in greener alternatives. The plan calls for a total repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains generous tax credits centered around clean energy and has helped create more than 300,000 jobs.
“The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was a historic step forward in domestic climate policy,” Federico said, adding that repealing the legislation would reverse the progress made since its passage. “Looking at Project 2025 … they’re essentially calling for a whole-of-government rejection of anything climate-oriented.”
A Fossil-Fuel Agenda
As most countries work to reduce their oil and gas dependency and encourage the adoption of renewable energy, Project 2025 doubles down on U.S. fossil-fuel production. The plan calls for rolling back federal rules restricting drilling on public lands, empowering oil and gas companies to ramp up production and release atmosphere-warming emissions at record levels.
At the same time, Project 2025 would eliminate government processes for tracking and regulating fossil-fuel emissions, stripping federal agencies of their oversight power, and preventing them from monitoring air and water quality effectively.
The document pushes for “turning over America’s public lands to the fossil fuel industry to drill as much as they possibly want,” said Drupp, Sierra Club’s climate policy director. “It’s exacerbating the crisis we’re already in the middle of and then completely eliminating our ability to deal with it.”
Project 2025 also suggests trimming down the Endangered Species Act, the landmark environmental statute protecting U.S. wildlife. The document disputes ample research showing the ESA to be exceptionally effective, claiming instead that government officials have used its critical habitat provisions to “seize private property” and “prevent economic development.”
Finally, Project 2025 recommends phasing out federal agencies and programs in favor of private companies. It advocates for turning the National Flood Insurance Program over to commercial insurers, not accounting for the fact the program was created after private companies failed to establish a stable flood insurance market. It also proposes commercializing the National Weather Service and the free public data it provides—a suggestion that has raised alarm bells among climate experts.
“I don’t know why in the world you would try to privatize the National Weather Service,” Drupp said. “I think about where that leads: Does that mean we’re pay-walling hurricane reports? Or you have to pay a monthly subscription to get wildfire alerts?”
Like other policies from The Heritage Foundation, Drupp says Project 2025’s climate proposals would be most harmful to communities already overburdened with environmental challenges.
“The document does not care about communities that are facing disproportionate impacts and burdens from pollution,” he said. “The policies in general, the attacks on clean air and clean water—those are just ways of exacerbating environmental injustice.”
Read more coverage of Project 2025 here.
Read more coverage of this year’s elections cycle at our Election Zone 2024 page.
2025 Awards: SPJ Diamond Awards
Finalist, Environment/Science
See all Mississippi Free Press Awards here.