The Republican Party National Convention kicks off Monday to give its pro forma approval to Donald Trump as presidential nominee under the slogan of "Make America Wealthy Once Again." I guess that creates an opportunity for the Donvict to collect his personal slice of the take from selling a bunch of new hats labeled MAWOA. Woe is more like it. Presumably, there will also be tee-shirts touting Elon Musk’s tweet that Trump is the toughest candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Uh-huh. Trump on safari with the 26th president, much less dismantling corporate monopolies, is an image even the most subservient AI would refuse to contrive.
Expect the theme for the whole Milwaukee convention to be that everything was hunky-dory in America under Trump, the best ever in the history of the universe, and Joe Biden screwed it all up. With help from Kamala Harris and the “radical Democrat agenda.” Uh-huh.
As usual, lies will underpin everything. Trump will surely display the stitches in his ear if he has any—“Can you zoom in here? Look everybody. Most terrible attempted assassination in history.” It’s hard to know exactly how they’ll play Project 2025 given the ludicrous attempt by Trump to deliver a version of his well-honed “never heard of those guys.” Thankfully, the traditional media has finally got the message and produced some good if belated coverage exposing just how much extremism is contained in its 922 pages. They need to keep it up right through Election Day. This manifesto is no joke and no idle threat. It is the culmination of an extended effort.
The ideologues behind the Project view the current operation of the U.S. system as a Gordian Knot incapable of being unraveled except with a sword. They are prepared to swing it. There is at least one or two things in their document that, if implemented, would negatively affect 9 out of 10 Americans in their social, economic, political, sexual, and/or religious lives. In other words, they propose a counter-revolution to dismantle the decades of hard-won gains in all those realms. How successful could they actually be? Their favored transformation would certainly be unlikely to happen under normal circumstances. Anybody seen those lying around anywhere?
Trump is the wild card. And he’s wounded legally now. Which makes him more dangerous than ever because he’s more vulnerable than ever. If NY Justice Juan Merchan orders him to prison in September with no stay while on appeal, how will that turn out? As Saturday showed, surprises happen. Their full impact is unpredictable. Meanwhile, the truly circus part of the campaign—the part Trump was once adept at manipulating but is now like a has-been comic telling his old jokes twice in the same set—begins in just a few hours.
The major focus on the first day is apparently going to be energy and environment. Oh boy! It’s tempting to call Trump’s relentless spray of energy, climate, and environmental views and vows stupid. And, of course, in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises, stupid is an accurate description. Continuing to push for greatly expanding oil, gas, and even coal production at a time when the former two are at their historical peaks while people are being cooked by climate-change-enhanced heat waves is madness, stupidity, and malignity combined.
But unlike his disastrous idea of running the federal government on tariffs instead of income tax revenue—which has only the fringiest of adherents—his stance on energy, climate, and environment policy is not an agenda he invented. This was in the works long before Trump was losing money owning casinos. He didn’t go to Big Oil this year with a billion dollars worth of ideas. He went with his hand out, saying, essentially, “I’m your man, what’s the plan?” And they’ve got one. In short: Talk green, practice green-washing, and keep fossil fuels alive far longer than scientists say we dare without catastrophic climate consequences.
Carbon Brief, a UK-based news service focusing on science and policy on climate change, brought it home in March with an estimate that a Trump victory could mean more than 4 billion tons of additional U.S. emissions by 2030. These extra emissions “would negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.” The group also stated:
In November 2023, the Financial Times reported that Trump was “planning to gut” the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], increase investment in fossil fuels and roll back regulations to encourage electric vehicles. The newspaper added that Trump had called the IRA the “biggest tax hike in history”.
It quoted Carla Sands, an adviser to Trump, as saying:
“On the first day of a second Trump administration, the president has committed to rolling back every single one of Joe Biden’s job-killing, industry-killing regulations.”
Indeed, Republicans in the US House of Representatives have already made multiple attempts to repeal parts of the IRA. While some analysts think a full repeal of the act is unlikely, it is clear that a second-term Trump could – as Politico put it – ”hobble the climate law”.
A February 2024 commentary from investment firm Trium Capital argues that the impact on IRA will depend not only on whether Trump wins victory in November, but also on whether the Republicans retain control of the House and gain a Senate majority.
It’s typically been Trump’s most outlandish statements on every subject that catch mainstream media and social media attention. However, whether he’s spouting nonsense about wind turbines, forehead-slapping ignorance about electric boats, or outright disinformation about sea rise—“It basically means you’ll have a little more beachfront property”—it’s his wrecking of sound environmental policy that truly matters.
There’s a long list of that wreckage which could be made of existing good policy in a Project 2025-enhanced Trump presidency. The list of interests being served is short but powerful, and the list of victims being many and likely hampered from obtaining adequate redress.
Here’s just one example of the intentions of the Project’s creators from the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Policy Director Rachel Cletus’s analysis:
Attacks on the process of advancing climate science to inform policymaking
In a blatant effort to politicize climate science, Project 2025 states that ‘The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs… The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration. Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research…’ And then it goes on to spread disinformation: ‘OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.’
Here are the facts: The USGCRP is tasked by Congress (under the 1990 Global Change Research Act, passed under the Bush administration) to produce regular updates on the state of climate science via the National Climate Assessment (NCA), with the Fifth NCA being released last year. As my colleague Rachel Licker and former UCS-er Andrew Rosenberg point out in this blogpost, the NCA provides exactly the kind of information policymakers need, without being policy-prescriptive. The NCA is produced through the work of hundreds of scientists, relying on research done by thousands more. It is not a political document. Suggesting that a new President “critically analyze” the work of scientists or reject their work just because it was done under a different administration is a blatant attempt to politicize science and would leave us all worse off.
NOAA scientists are doing essential work to keep us safe, including generating the science we need to understand and prepare for the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change. Good governance and leadership require facing hard facts—like the reality of climate change—head-on and taking decisive action to address problems rather than pretending they don’t exist.
That’s just a taste. And the Republican National Platform is even worse. It doesn’t mention “climate” once, just like a lot of government documents in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. Which is important to remember. It’s not just Donald Trump. Without him, the bulk of the elected Republican Party is aligned with the extremism in Project 2025 and the party platform. Without him, we still have a Supreme Court majority conceived in deception and shenanigans that is turning precedence into pulp. Without him, we still have the plague of dark money, which has turbocharged extremists in Congress. But with Trump actually at the helm, we face even deeper peril and a quicker pace on the trajectory to Republican Gleichshaltung.
Against this we have the Biden-Harris administration’s record of achievements, a long list of them environmental in nature. Not perfect by any means. But tweakable, expandable, and adjustable with a Climate 2.0 agenda. As nobody needs me to explain, the only way that agenda happens is with Democrats in the White House and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Donald Trump and his entourage of toadies will spend this coming week providing fodder for our winning all of that.
—MB
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