It’s not enough to make individual Americans’ lives hell by banning abortion and then cutting nutritional assistance for hungry babies—because Jesus loves the little children … of Fortune 500 CEOs. No, Republicans have also been plotting to transform the entire Earth into a hellscape just as soon as they can kill the dreaded woke mind virus that put Joe Biden in the White House.
Specifically, they’re preparing to hit the ground running in case the clammy meat fart who profaned the Oval Office the last four years of the 2010s returns to finish the job. Issue one on the agenda? Turning the planet into a 24/7 heat lamp where Donald Trump can safely stash his McNuggets.
A new 920-page blueprint for dismantling what’s left of our nation’s regulatory framework is a waking nightmare for anyone who plans to keep living here, and it comes just as climate change warnings grow ever-more dire and President Joe Biden’s environmental infrastructure initiatives begin to yield green shoots.
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Politico:
Called Project 2025, [the blueprint] 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.
Oh, good God. One can only imagine what form someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “regulation of polluting industries” would take. Forget about storing spent nuclear fuel rods at Yucca Mountain—if this horror show of a blueprint somehow gets implemented, you’ll be able to stash them under Space Mountain for the price of an all-day Disney family pass.
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.
Yes, but what would it do to the economy? Imagine all the windmill oncology nurses who’d be thrown out of work almost immediately.
And it’s a plan for any Republican presidency. Not just a Trump one.
“Project 2025 is not a white paper,” said Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, which touts the document as a road map for the first 180 days of a future Republican administration. “We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces. Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”
As Politico notes, the blueprint sparked controversy back in April when media outlets reported on the 20,000-person database (i.e., right-wing LinkedIn) that the Heritage Foundation is assembling to help future GOP presidents staff their administrations. The effort dovetails with Trump’s own plans to purge the government of “deep state” workers who are insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader. But its potential impact on climate policy has not been fully explored.
[T]he ideas laid out in Project 2025 show that conservative organizations want to achieve a more fundamental shift — moving federal agencies away from public health protections and environmental regulations in order to help the industries they have been tasked with overseeing, said Andrew Rosenberg, who was a senior official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Clinton administration.
“What this does is it basically undermines not only society but the economic capacity of the country at the same time as it’s doing gross violence to the environment,” said Rosenberg, who’s now a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
More gross violence? We’re already somewhere on the continuum between Itchy chainsaw-murdering Scratchy and Steve Buscemi in the wood chipper. How much more violence can Republicans possibly inflict before someone stops the fight?
In fact, the GOP is planning to thoroughly unravel the moderate progress we’ve made on climate policy at the same time that the Associated Press reports we’re dangerously close to an environmental tipping point that could seriously disrupt our humble 6,000-year experiment with not having to suck the marrow out of bleached wildebeest bones in order to survive beyond next Tuesday.
The AP:
A system of ocean currents that transports heat northward across the North Atlantic could collapse by mid-century, according to a new study, and scientists have said before that such a collapse could cause catastrophic sea-level rise and extreme weather across the globe.
...
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is a vital system of ocean currents that circulates water throughout the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's a lengthy process, taking an estimated 1,000 years to complete, but has slowed even more since the mid-1900s.
A further slowdown or complete halting of the circulation could create more extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere, sea-level rise on the East Coast of the United States and drought for millions in southern Africa, scientists in Germany and the U.S. have said. But the timing is uncertain.
Meanwhile, Biden’s climate-focused infrastructure initiatives are just starting to boost the economy while at the same time laying the groundwork for a greener future.
The Washington Post:
A surge in government funding and related private investment is beginning to make its way to businesses and communities across the country, building electric vehicles, new bridges, airport upgrades and a host of other infrastructure and green energy projects that are juicing the economy — just when it needs it most.
...
The jump in private investment, in particular, is already filtering into the economy. Business spending on infrastructure, such as manufacturing plants, transportation equipment and software, rose 56 percent in the most recent quarter, accounting for 15 percent of the economy, according to data released Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. While it’s difficult to tell exactly how much of that growth directly resulted from the Biden administration’s policies, economists say the uptick in business activity is striking at a time when higher borrowing costs and tighter lending standards have curtailed other investments.
“We were expecting infrastructure spending to hit in 2024 and 2025, but it’s making its way through the economy much faster than that,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for KPMG. “We’re getting renewed strength from infrastructure spending and other stimulus that is adding to the economy in a big way.”
One portion of the Project 2025 blueprint, written by former Trump appointee Bernard McNamee, involves gutting the Department of Energy. McNamee also wants the department to stop “focusing on grid expansion for the benefit of renewable resources or supporting low/carbon generation.”
That move would naturally stifle green energy projects, damaging the planet as well as the U.S. economy.
“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,” said Mike O’Boyle, a senior director at the nonpartisan policy firm Energy Innovation, “so they’re poised to reap the benefits both for their energy consumers but also in terms of manufacturing.”
To sum up, this horrifying, planet-killing initiative would likely make climate change orders of magnitude worse while undermining the domestic economy and benefiting narrow, entrenched, obscenely wealthy interests.
In other words, everything Republicans have been doing for decades—only more so.
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