project 2025, the environment and the climate crisis

Two years ago, the Biden-Harris administration signed the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. This historic legislation, key to the administration’s ambitious climate agenda, is the largest clean energy investment in U.S. history.1 

Since 2022, the IRA has saved Americans money,2 limited greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,3 and boosted clean energy.4

 Its total benefits by 2030 are projected at $49 billion domestically and $5.6 trillion globally.5

As climate change devastates public lands and waters,6 economies, health, and infrastructure,7 building a clean energy economy to combat its impacts is a race against the clock. In recent years, climate change has intensified extreme weather events, increasing the frequency, severity, and danger to communities.8 Since June 2023, every month has set new heat records, with 2024 predicted to supersede 2023 as the warmest year ever recorded.9

Recognizing this urgency, the Biden-Harris administration has taken more than

300 climate actions to protect against the immediate and long-term threats of climate change.10 Their science-based approach has worked to reverse more than 150 harmful policies from the previous administration.11

The expansion of the U.S. clean energy sector both benefits consumers and addresses climate change.

Project 2025 dismantles economic, social, and regulatory policies; halts efforts to combat the climate crisis and environmental injustice; and rejects the overwhelming scientific consensus driving climate action.13 The playbook threatens to reverse progress and return to policymaking that prioritizes fossil fuel profits over the well-being of Americans.

Project 2025 would repeal IRA tax credits, weaken the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulatory authority, and lower or eliminate existing emissions standards. The playbook also recommends easing environmental permitting restrictions for new fossil fuel projects.

Project 2025’s stated policies would lead to

  • Increased GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, reversing years of progress and making it virtually impossible to limit warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal that is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
  • Increases in public health and climate risks because of dismantling federal oversight of emissions monitoring.
  • Consequences include exacerbated extreme weather events such as heat waves, wildfires, and hurricanes.
  • Secondary impacts, such as disruptions to power, water systems, transportation, and communication networks, threaten the health, economy, and safety of Americans.

Highlights of the plan include:

  • Eliminating or rolling back safeguards that protect Americans’ access to clean air, clean drinking water, and protected public lands.
  • Dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act (President Biden’s 2022 Clean Energy Plan) that has already created more than 300,000 new jobs, and eliminating tax credits and rebates that are helping electrify homes and businesses across the country
  • Handing our public lands over to oil and gas companies to drill whenever and wherever they want, including in some of our most precious and pristine public lands, while leaving us to deal with the pollution and toxic waste they leave behind.  
  • Halting all government action to reach our climate goals, putting Americans and the U.S. economy at further risk of more extreme weather and a faster-warming planet.
  • Privatizing the National Weather Service and preventing it from forecasting extreme weather events and providing research on the advancing climate crisis.
  • Targeting iconic landscapes: The project also calls for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, among other irreplaceable natural treasures.
  • Guttting the Endangered Species Act (ESA): Project 2025 would rewrite the most successful legal tool we have for protecting wildlife in ways that would harm imperiled species. It specifically calls for removing protections from gray wolves and Yellowstone grizzlies.
  • Repealing the Antiquities Act, which would strip the president of the ability to protect priceless public lands and waters as national monuments.
  • Weakening the Clean Air Act: Project 2025 would nix the part of the law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set health-based air quality standards.
  • Giving communities less say in environmental decisions: The plan would undermine key portions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which ensures you have a voice in major projects built near you.
  • And much more

The dangerous policies outlined in Project 2025 would threaten our democracy, increase pollution and energy costs, further exacerbate the climate crisis, and make life harder for communities already struggling.

Sources:

American Progress: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-project-2025-threatens-the-inflation-reduction-acts-thriving-clean-energy-economy–lots of good detail

Earth Justice: https://earthjustice.org/article/what-project-2025-would-do-to-the-environment-and-how-we-will-respond

Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/what-project-2025-and-why-would-it-be-devastating-environment