Scott Waldman, who covers the climate beat for Politico, doesn't even try to conceal where he's coming from regarding the energy-policy component of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.
Conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change — and it wouldn’t stop with President Joe Biden’s policies.
The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees.
Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.
If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.
“Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan as a road map for the first 180 days of the next GOP administration. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”
Now, yes, Heritage has undergone a Trumpward drift in the last few years, and a lot of the rest of Project 2025 reflects "deep state" paranoia - and would set the table for the Very Stable Genius to amass power unconstitutionally in the presidency, but the energy-policy aspect is good stuff. Waldman writes his article with a can-you-believe-how-awful-this-is tone, but anybody who actually understands why fossils fuels are a blessing and essential to human advancement will have a "sounds great to me" response.
More than 400 people participated in crafting Project 2025’s details. Former Trump administration officials played a key role in writing the chapters on dismantling EPA and DOE.
The plan to gut the Department of Energy was written by Bernard McNamee, a former DOE official whom Trump appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. McNamee, who did not have regulatory experience, was one of the most overtly political FERC appointees in decades. He was a director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that fights climate regulations, and was a senior adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
McNamee outlines cutting key divisions at DOE, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office. He has called climate change a “progressive policy.”
He also calls for cutting funding to DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, in part to stop “focusing on grid expansion for the benefit of renewable resources or supporting low/carbon generation.” Instead, he calls for strengthening grid reliability, which he describes as expanding the use of fossil fuels and slowing or stopping the addition of cleaner energy. Part of his plan includes a massive expansion of natural gas infrastructure.
“Prevent socializing costs for customers who do not benefit from the projects or justifying such cost shifts as advancing vague ‘societal benefits’ such as climate change,” McNamee wrote in the report.
McNamee did not respond to requests for comment.
Preventing the expansion of the electric grid would slow down renewable energy projects, threatening U.S. climate goals while cooling the sector’s economic growth, said Mike O’Boyle, a senior director at the nonpartisan policy firm Energy Innovation and head of its electricity program.
“If we totally step away from the role of the federal government, our economy is going to miss out in a big way because the rest of the world is moving on climate, so they’re poised to reap the benefits both for their energy consumers but also in terms of manufacturing,” he said.
Mandy Gunasekara, who was EPA’s chief of staff under Trump, wrote a chapter within the plan to move the agency away from its focus on climate policy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
It outlines eliminating or downsizing agency functions including the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. It also would also relocate regional EPA offices and would “downsize by terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”
The overarching theme in remaking federal agencies is to shift power away from the federal government and toward states, in an effort to diminish regulations.
“The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states,” Gunasekara wrote.
Diminish regulations! Heaven forfend!
McNamee is exactly right when he speaks of justifying cost shifts. It's also known as redistribution backed by the unique coercive power of government.
Wind and solar do not hold their own in the energy marketplace. They need a leg up in the form of subsidization. That's because they are intermittent, whereas fossil fuels are dense, readily available, and comparatively inexpensive.
But here's the problem with Project 2025: It's way too bound up with Trump. And that's unavoidable, because energy-policy experts with their heads on straight and free-market proponents who were understandably eager to serve in federal-government positions from 2017 to 2020 were going to have to serve in an administration with his name on it.
The Politico piece features a photograph of Trump announcing US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.
Again, a great move, but let's not kid ourselves for a second that Trump actually gave a diddly about why. His handlers told him it would make him look great, and that's all he needed to know.
The overwhelming presence of Trump in the Republican Party provides the opportunity for "journalists" like Waldman to conflate sound and much-needed moves on the energy front with the most unfit president in the nation's history.
I saw all this coming when Trump's cult began forming in 2015. The uninformed masses were going to associate actual conservatism with Squirrel Hair's incoherent mishmash.
Clarity is called for regarding climate hooey, but the drool-besotted leg-humpers have made achieving it damn difficult.
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