Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action

Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Bulletin, By Michael E. Mann | August 16, 2024

Summer 2024 saw another round of devastating heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and record-setting global temperatures. The window for averting a catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the planet is rapidly closing. Can we meet this moment? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. For this is a tale of two worldviews.

In one—based on facts and evidence—environmental policy is motivated by science and reason, with the intent of advancing the common good and the sustainability of our civilization and our planet. The climate crisis is seen as the defining challenge of our time, demanding immediate and urgent action.

In the other—steeped in myth and conspiratorial ideation—environmental threats are an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and politicians on the take, and environmental sustainability is a Trojan horse, a tool used by “globalists” to instill a new socialist world order. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by environmental extremists.

Nothing better illustrates this yawning chasm in worldview than two deceptively similar-sounding projects known as the fact-based “Agenda 2030” and the conspiracy-rife “Project 2025.”

The first, “Agenda 2030,” is a United Nations program for Sustainable Development unanimously adopted by UN member nations on September 25, 2015. Agenda 2030 supports a set of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, or “SDGs,” promoting “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” and the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of our civilization. Among its priorities are the health of the planet’s oceans and forests and the overriding threat of human-caused climate change.

I’ve contributed to the program personally. Back in 2018, I developed a free online course for the SDG Academy, which the UN describes as the “premier source of high-quality resources and guidance on education for the SDGs, with the mandate to enrich the field of sustainable development and advance Agenda 2030.” My course, which is still offered today (so far more than 35,000 people have taken it) is entitled “Climate Change: The Science and Global Impact.” Its stated purpose is that “we need to understand the science behind global warming to avoid the most damaging and irreversible climate change impacts on people and planet.”

So perhaps I’m a bit personally invested in Agenda 2030 and its mission to educate the public and policymakers about the climate crisis. But it is objectively disturbing to see that program attacked in such bad faith by the right. Representative of the assault is the plutocrat and dark money-funded Heritage Foundation, which has denounced Agenda 2030 as “hopelessly flawed from the start,” “replete with imprecise goals and targets,” “senseless, dreamy, and garbled,” and “[the] antithesis of a focused development strategy.” They insist, in fact, that “the US should call out the SDGs for their ineffectiveness and call for a re-evaluation of this failed endeavor.” Strong language. We’ll return to the Heritage Foundation and their role in all of this in a bit.

Agenda 2030, indeed, possesses all the elements despised by the bad actors who help manufacture and promote far-right conspiracy theories. Like the much-vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Agenda 2030 operates under the auspices of the United Nations, feeding the fears of the “one world government,” right-wing fever swamp.

Its laudable goals of reducing poverty, hunger, and social inequality play into conservative fears of “socialism.” Its focus on environmental sustainability feeds the “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside) framing that has for so long been used by conservative influencers seeking to weaponize their base against environmental action.

As a result, social media is now rife with the claim that Agenda 2030 is part of a left-wing global socialist plot against individual liberty and freedom, an excuse for even more pervasive and long-lasting pandemic-like lockdowns.

Now, let’s talk about “Project 2025,” a 900-page plan drafted by the aforementioned Heritage Foundation to implement a far-right policy agenda in the United States. If implemented—by a second Trump administration, for example—it would shrink the federal government, putting thousands of civil servants out of work. It would further expand the powers of the president. It would dismantle the Department of Education, impose massive tax cuts, and halt the sale of the abortion pill. It would cancel the National Weather Service and privatize all its meteorological data.

Project 2025 would gut the EPA, which is responsible for enforcement of environmental policies, and it would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It would eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors changes in our atmosphere, oceans and climate. Project 2025 would eliminate clean energy loan programs at the Department of Energy and remove climate change—one of the greatest national security threats we face—from the National Security Council agenda. It supports more oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive Arctic and asserts that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources.”

Trump and Project 2025 are inextricably linked in numerous ways. Project 2025 was written for Trump, by Trump affiliates, who will staff the various agencies in a prospective second term. Six of the report authors are former Trump cabinet officials. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, wrote the foreward for a book about it (Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America), written by Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 brainchild Kevin Roberts. Roberts briefed Trump about Project 2025 during its nascent stages back in 2022 on a private flight to a Heritage Foundation conference where Trump went on to say that the effort would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

ProPublica recently obtained more than 14 hours of videos from the Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy, an online training archive to prepare incoming political appointees in a prospective Trump administration so they can hit the ground running from day one; 29 of the 36 speakers in the series are connected to Trump either through this campaign or his previous presidency. Among the instructions given in the academy, Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, said that future appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Trump and his co-conspirators were obstructed by their own incompetence during his first term. That proved to be a saving grace from the standpoint of environmental and climate policy. The whole point of Project 2025 is to make sure they don’t repeat that mistake and instead, go in with a detailed, comprehensive blueprint that will allow them to fast track their agenda.

We face a planetary-scale threat in the form of a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on implementing, in Project 2025, the most extreme, anti-environmental policy agenda in American history. In all likelihood, it would mean the end of meaningful global climate action at this critical juncture. The fate of our planet quite literally hangs in the balance. It’s something for all Americans to think about as they prepare for the pivotal 2024 election. https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/project-2025-the-right-wing-conspiracy-to-torpedo-global-climate-action/