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/

August 21, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change | Leave a comment

Think we don’t have a choice when it comes to saving the planet? Think again.

As temperatures around the world increase, Lord Deben explains why it is still within our collective power to mitigate the effects of climate change – before it’s too late

  https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/climate-100/climate-change-insurance-industrial-revolution-temperature-b2597363.html— 19 Aug 24

Climate change is increasingly causing global disruption. Human beings naturally seek certainty and modern societies have long taken for granted the relative certainties of the weather. That assumption underpins everything, from insurance, to food security, to global trade, to mass tourism.

We travel and we trade as if that certainty is a given, and we insure against the once-in-a-hundred-years occasion that it isn’t. Indeed, our whole free enterprise system depends on businesses being able to restrict their risks and limit the call on their capital. Insurance and the limited liability company are the necessary facilitators of capitalism.

However, as each year is hotter than the last; as wildfires rip through whole nations and are followed by floods and hurricanes of unparalleled force and extent; and as no part of the world is spared extreme weather events, the insurance model is fundamentally threatened and the ability to limit risk undermined.

From individual homeowners, no longer able to insure against flooding, to great international businesses that can’t protect their global supply chains, a warming world is disrupting the very system that has brought us unparalleled prosperity and opportunity. And every year it gets worse and more extensive.

2023 was the hottest year on record. Canada experienced its worst fire season and there were catastrophic blazes in Hawaii, the Mediterranean, central Amazonia, and Chile. The ferocity and the spread grows apace – and with it, the indirect effects.

People who have no water for their children invade their neighbours who have. Unparalleled levels of heat drive men and women to move – not for a better life, but just to be able to live. The migration that is already a toxic issue throughout Europe and North America is eclipsed when heat becomes intolerable, state structures collapse, and whole nations like Bangladesh are awash with rising sea levels.

The numbers on the move will be of a different order in a world where the rich nations have already shown themselves unable to deal with immigration. They’ve seen nothing yet!

However, this is not just a human disaster. We are sustained by what may well be a unique environment. Centuries of astronomy have not revealed another world capable of maintaining life as we know it. It seems that planet Earth is a rare phenomenon which may well depend on some delicate balances.

It was once too hot to support life, and it was the emergence of trees and bushes that gradually took carbon out of the atmosphere and enabled the emergence of fish and reptiles, insects and mammals, and finally human beings. Those decaying trees laid that carbon down to become, over millennia, coal, oil, and gas. For 200 years we have been putting that carbon back into the atmosphere, so it isn’t surprising that we’ve reversed the cooling and turned up the heat.

And, if the process continues, we don’t know what that will produce. Already, global warming has shifted the earth’s energy balance with unprecedented flows of heat into the oceans; ice caps; soils; and atmosphere. The rate has doubled in less than 50 years, and, as the melting ice caps move more water towards the centre of the globe, it slows the planet’s rotation and lengthens our days.

Almost imperceptible at the moment but, if we allow the effect to increase, it could begin to counter the moon’s attraction on which we depend for the relative stability of our climate. The sheer scale of what is happening means that the ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream, could change entirely and with them the weather patterns that they control.

This is why scientists have sought to convince the world to keep warming below a 1.5-degree increase. Anything more and we really cannot tell what cataclysmic changes would occur. Although we can go back more than a million years and trace temperatures and the air’s carbon content by analysing the layers of ice, we can find no comparable warming.

The ebb and flow of warm and cold periods continues as it has always done, but nothing like the global heating that has grown persistently since the beginning of the industrial revolution. That is entirely unprecedented, man-made, and already very close to levels that are likely to be catastrophic.

So, as American cities black out because of wildfires; China wrestles with persistent drought; Greece battles to protect its monuments from the flames; Niger swelters with temperatures of more than 40 degrees; and even the East of England is officially designated a semi-arid region – the world has a choice.

If this is what we get with 1.5 degrees warming, do we still cling to business as usual until 3 degrees warming produces results we hardly dare contemplate? Or does humankind rise to the occasion and meet the global threat with a global response, creating a new industrial revolution in which renewable energy powers a society that doesn’t cost the Earth, but builds a cleaner, greener, and fairer world?

It is the fundamental challenge of the human condition. We can rise to the heights or disappear in the depths. We have the choice.

August 20, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change | Leave a comment

Why Nuclear Energy Is Not the Solution to the Climate Crisis

In this Q&A, Dr. M.V. Ramana discusses key insights from his new book and why nuclear power does not help mitigate climate change.

The Good Men Project, August 19, 2024 by Beyond British Columbia, By Sachi Wickramasinghe

Despite about 20 countries declaring plans to triple nuclear energy by 2050 and the backing of billionaires like Bill Gates, we should not support expanding nuclear power.

That’s according to a new book, Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, by Dr. M.V. Ramana, the Simons Chair in Global Disarmament and Human Security at the school of public policy and global affairs at UBC.

We spoke to Dr. Ramana about key insights from the book and why nuclear power does not help mitigate climate change.

What motivated you to write this book?

Just 20 or 30 years ago, talking about nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly source of electricity would probably get you laughed out of the room.

But in the last decade, advocates of nuclear energy – from energy companies to governments and tech billionaires – have advertised the technology as a clean source of electricity that is vital to solving climate change.

Their arguments make no sense given what we know about the history and the technical characteristics of nuclear energy, so one motivation for this book is to lay out those arguments yet again, because they seem to have been forgotten.

How do you respond to claims that nuclear energy is necessary for meeting our carbon reduction goals?

Many technologies have low carbon footprints but we need to consider two other important factors: cost and deployment time.

Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. Investing in cheaper low-carbon sources of energy will provide more emission reductions per dollar. Second, it takes about a decade to build a nuclear plant. If you add the time needed for environmental clearances, community consent and raising the huge amounts of funding necessary, you’re looking at 15-20 years before a nuclear project can even start producing electricity. This timeline is incompatible with the urgent demands of climate science.

Thus, nuclear power fails on two key metrics for evaluating any technology claiming to deal with climate change.

What risks associated with nuclear energy are most overlooked by its proponents?

First, nuclear reactors by their very nature are susceptible to catastrophic releases of energy and radioactivity – we’ve seen that happen with Fukushima and Chernobyl. It’s impossible to guarantee severe accidents won’t happen again.

Second, all activities linked to the nuclear fuel chain, from mining uranium to dealing with the radioactive wastes produced, have significant public and environmental impacts. Some radioactive materials remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no demonstrated solution to managing these wastes.

Third, the technology to generate nuclear power is closely tied to the one to make nuclear weapons. Expanding nuclear energy will increase the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation.

Proponents downplay all these problems. But as I explain in my book, they will afflict new nuclear reactors too.

What renewable energy sources are most promising, and how can we accelerate their adoption?

Solar energy has become the cheapest power source in the past decade, with solar and wind now leading new-electricity generation.

We have learned how to manage grids with high proportions of renewable sources. To balance this variability, we must invest in a mix of renewable energy technologies across various regions, and in battery and other storage technologies to store excess energy. In addition, we need to shape electricity demand to more closely match supply.

These renewables are not a panacea, but they seem to be the best option. Addressing climate change isn’t just about technology; it’s also about making appropriate social and political changes. For reasons discussed in my book, nuclear power is incompatible with the kind of social and political transformations needed to address climate change.

Featured Researcher

M.V. Ramana, PhD, Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/why-nuclear-energy-is-not-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis/

August 20, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change | Leave a comment