Donald Trump’s Horrific Plan for the Planet

The Stupid will Burn – if we let it.

A whole lot of people who don’t find Joe Biden “exciting” enough have probably never heard of the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. Global Change Research Program, or the National Climate Assessment.

And, if Trump is elected, chances are, they never will.

E&E News:

Former President Donald Trump’s second term could begin with a clear direction on climate policy: Trash it.

Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — if he prevails in November. It outlines a series of steps that the former president could take to reverse the climate actions taken by the Biden administration.

Trump has already said that boosting fossil fuels would be one of his top priorities. A proposed executive order in Project 2025 offers him a path for that goal, laying out a total restructuring of the U.S. Global Change Research Program to diminish its role across more than a dozen federal agencies.

Project 2025 also calls for replacing the White House climate adviser with an “energy/environment” adviser who would pivot to serving the needs of the fossil fuel industry.

“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” the plan states. “As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas.”

The Washington-based Heritage Foundation worked with conservative organizations to produce Project 2025, which offers 920 pages of policy prescriptions to ensure the chaos of Trump’s first term is not repeated if he gets a second. The think tank did not respond to a request for comment.

But Tom Pyle, a Project 2025 contributor and president of the American Energy Alliance, said Heritage is now recruiting Trump loyalists ready to implement the agenda on Day One. Installing personnel who can carry out such executive orders will be the key step in determining if they are followed, he said.

“Project 2025 has the potential to be an essential tool for President Trump should he be elected for a second term,” Pyle said. “But a plan is only as good as the people who implement it, so getting competent and committed conservative personnel into the administration will be more critical.”

The Trump campaign declined to provide comment to E&E News but has stated in the past that the former president will determine his own policy priorities, regardless of outside pressure.

Trump’s climate record suggests that the proposed executive order would be in line with his energy agenda. 

In recent months, he has repeatedly promised to be a “dictator for a day” to ramp up oil and gas drilling. And allies expect that he will seek to unwind President Joe Biden’s climate policies much faster than he did the policies of President Barack Obama.

Project 2025 calls for the president to use an executive order to “reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program and related climate change research programs.”

The program was established by Congress in 1990 to coordinate federal research and spending to better understand how climate change affects the country. One of its key successes was to reveal how the depleted ozone layer was harming Americans, which led to regulations that successfully addressed the issue.

A top target of Project 2025 is the program’s National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that is due again in late 2026 or early 2027. The proposed executive order would require a “critical analysis” of the assessment and a rejection of all related climate science work prepared by the Biden administration.

In Trump’s first term, his administration worked to bury and then remake the assessment. The report was quietly released the day after Thanksgiving, when the public is less likely to pay attention to news, and Trump said he didn’t “believe” it. In the waning days of the administration, Trump officials attempted to craft the next version of the report but ran out of time.

The Trump administration only “discovered” the Global Change Research Program in its final months and officials immediately tried tampering with it by promoting bad science, said Don Wuebbles, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois who worked on all five of the climate assessments.

In a Trump White House, he said, it won’t matter that there is overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are driving climate change and that it’s a crisis that needs to be addressed.

“Those people are irresponsible and have no ethics, and unfortunately who knows what will happen in an unethical White House,” he said, adding, “What peer-reviewed science papers are they going to use as their basis? Because the current assessment is entirely based on established well-known observations and analysis.”

Guardian:

“Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before,” said Myron Ebell, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for Trump’s first term. “He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.”

The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will be the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370bn bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles. Ebell said the legislation, signed by Biden in 2022 with no Republican votes, was “the biggest defeat we’ve suffered”.

Carla Sands, a key environment adviser to the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who has criticized Biden’s “apocalyptic green fantasies”, said: “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.”

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has already pushed bills to gut the act. But fully repealing the IRA, which has disproportionally brought popular funding and jobs in solar, wind and battery manufacturing to Republican districts, may be politically difficult for Trump even if his party gains full control of Congress.

However, Trump could still slow down the progress of the clean energy transition as president by redrawing the rules for the IRA’s generous tax credits.

He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail.

“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” said Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff. She argued that the agreement puts too little pressure on China, India and other developing countries to reduce their emissions.

In recent rallies, Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has called renewable energy “a scam business” and vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. On his first day in office, Trump has said he would repeal “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate” and approve a glut of new gas export terminals currently paused by Biden.

Critics of Trump, who are already fretting over his potential return to the White House, warn this agenda will stymie clean energy investment, place Americans’ health at the mercy of polluters, badly damage the effort to address the climate crisis and alienate America’s allies.

“A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, now fellow at the University of New Hampshire.

“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”