EDGI’s Environmental Historians Action Collaborative working group annotated select sections of Project 2025, placing its environmental messages and proposals within their larger political and historical contexts.
Project 2025 proposes to severely reduce the federal role in environmental protections of all sorts. Its arguments for doing so operate through its failure throughout to acknowledge or even to name four of our nation’s most formidable environmental challenges:
Unnameable Challenge #1–Climate Change: In many ways the central problem not to be named in Project 2025, or else written off as “alarmist” politics of “the Left.” Even as climate change is already exacerbating the damage from hurricanes (Helene and Milton), Project 2025 would ramp up its ravages on our future nation and the world.
- Project 2025 would shred support for disaster relief and preparedness that can cushion the impacts of extreme weather. For instance, it would abolish:
- The National Flood Insurance Program
- Federal grants to state and local governments for disaster preparedness
- Federal funding for tracking, projecting and improving our understanding of climate change would cease.
- Regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would be cut back or suspended.
Unnameable Challenge #2–A Clean Energy Transition: Not recognizing climate change as a problem, Project 2025 authors also see no reason for America to transition away from fossil fuels. Instead, they double down on oil and gas, long the federal government’s most incentivized “winner” of energy subsidies. Domestic fossil fuel production is to be encouraged still further, while federal support for cleaner alternatives is to be curbed or eliminated.
Unnameable Challenge #3–Scenic and Ecological Preservation: Failing to acknowledge this major set of environmental challenges, Project 2025 proposes to:
- Open many more public lands to oil and gas, mining, and other extractive industry;
- De-designate National Monuments;
- Disregard habitat protections for endangered species.
Unnameable Challenge #4–Environmental Justice: another problem that Project 2025 dares not name, while proposing to:
- Dismantle Justice40, the Biden Administration effort to channel more federal resources to disadvantaged or “environmental justice” communities, through sweeping restrictions such as barring any grants to NGOs;
- Eliminate offices devoted to environmental justice and civil rights in key agencies like the EPA;
- Disregard indigenous rights to or their historical relationships with America’s public lands, except when these groups favor oil and gas or other extraction.
Annotation authors: Scout Blum, Leisl Carr Childers, Joe Conley, Finis Dunaway, Leif Fredrickson, Jason Heppler, Evan Heppler-Smith, Robert Lifset, Christopher Sellers, James Skillen, Adam Sowards, Ellen Spears, Jennifer Thomson, James Morton Turner, Conevery Valencius, Keith Woodhouse