[NOTE: There is a post-publication update at the end of this post.]
Progress on climate change will be a big part of Joe Biden’s legacy. He defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, backed the doomed Build Back Better bill, and signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those actions might have earned him a little more solid support from progressives than they did. But historians will record that the IRA shifted the trajectory of carbon emissions from the energy sector downward, which is no small feat.
That progress assumes that the clean energy policy supports in the IRA are not repealed by the next Congress. Which brings me to Project 2025. This post will look at Project 2025 plans for energy policy; the next post will look at what Project 2025 has to say about environmental regulation.
As noted in a previous post, Project 2025 is a sort of Republican playbook for remaking the executive branch in ways that undo or weaken regulation. The current Supreme Court has assisted that project by eliminating longstanding traditions of deferring to agency experts’ interpretations of their enabling laws — including (especially) the EPA’s power to restrict carbon emissions using the Clean Air Act. Conservative think tanks, former Trump Administration officials, and Republican donors have coordinated these efforts skillfully, and Project 2025’s publication, Mandate for Leadership, represents the latest step in that effort.
Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, presumably because many of the regulations in its crosshairs are popular. He has instead embraced the more vague and cartoonish GOP platform, which is full of falsehoods about inflation, crime, and the economy, but says relatively little about energy policy. Characteristically, it asserts that the U.S. produced more oil and gas under Trump than Biden (p. 7), which is false. And J.D. Vance repeated some of these falsehoods at last week’s Republican convention.
Readers of my book will know that world crude prices tend to drive variations in U.S. production. For those old enough to remember a GOP that cared much more about good governance than it does today, or who know thoughtful Republicans who still do, the party platform document is a startling read. But it excels at what Donald Trump does well: namely, leveraging the sense of victimhood that right wing media has cultivated in voters for more than two decades.
So why, then, worry about Project 2025’s energy plans? Because Donald Trump is famously disinterested in policy nuts and bolts, and many of the substantive energy policy developments that occurred in the first Trump Administration were generated by the subject matter experts involved in Project 2025, developments with which Trump went along.*
Chapter 12 of the document explains how a GOP presidency would reshape energy policy. Authored by former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) commissioner Bernard McNamee. In Climate of Contempt I argue that in today’s bitterly partisan online political environment, too many people become too certain about an uncertain energy future, and then lobby others to join them in that certainty. McNamee’s contribution to Project 2025 is an example of that phenomenon.
It is straightforwardly opposed to policies that promote cleaner energy and quietly dismissive of the climate consensus. It is worth a read, and you can read it here.
The chapter claims that the United States faces a “new energy crisis” caused by “extreme ‘green’ policies,” presaging their characterization by RNC speakers last week as the “green new scam.” It places terms like “green,” “combating climate change,” and “ESG” in scare quotes throughout, and claims that these ideas and policies are undermining energy security. Despite the broad public support they attract, the document identifies renewable energy and climate change as “progressive causes,” which is consistent with the GOP branding of the energy transition as “woke capitalism.” It promises to redirect national laboratories that “have been too focused on climate change and renewable technologies.”
The plan is specific about eliminating parts of the DOE that promote renewables and a greener electric grid, including:
- the DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations
- the Office of Grid Deployment
- the DOE Loan Program
- the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (implied)
- the Office of Electricity (implied)
- the Office of Electricity (implied), and
- the Office of Nuclear Energy (implied)
The plan is based on the premise that the transition to a lower carbon energy economy is inconsistent with providing secure, affordable energy. It ignores (or assumes the insignificance of) the costs and harms associated with climate change, and so promises to “eliminate carbon capture utilization and storage programs,” “end the focus on climate change …,” and “eliminate the grid development office.”
The energy transition is popular, but people also worry about security and affordability. Project 2025 plays to the latter set of fears by steering attention away from the unfolding harms associated with climate change. While we cannot know now exactly how the tradeoffs between energy reliability (security), affordability (access) and decarbonization will unfold, we do know that right now there are win-win opportunities to deploy MUCH more renewable energy in many locations and reduce prices at the same time, without threatening reliability. And we know that rising seas and ever-more-severe weather are imposing massive costs that make the pursuit of the transition worthwhile. All of which suggests that the energy transition is worth pursuing, even if it must be pursued carefully.
The transition is popular, which is why Congress incentivized (in 2005, 2021 and 2022) many of the programs Project 2025 would eliminate or neuter. But voters driven by partisan identity are willing to tolerate policies they don’t like in order to prevent what they see as an existential threat: namely, rule by the other party.
For those of us who support the energy transition, that fact lies at the heart of the political challenge. Voters are at the heart of that challenge. Influencing their voting decisions is the only way to get the transition back on track. — David Spence
Postscript: On 8/10/24 Propublica posted descriptions of Project 2025 “training videos” in which the authors discuss the need to “eradicate” references to climate change in federal policy. Click here for that reporting.
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* Others have alleged that Project 2025 is the work of white nationalists or Christian conservatives bent on installing a dictatorship. This charge is shrill, inaccurate, and mirrors the GOP’s hyperbolic allegation that the Biden Administration is a dictatorship. And while the GOP’s position on other issues does aim to undermine the rule of law and norms of fair political competition, the production of energy chapter was overseen by a former FERC commissioner whose record belies that sort of careless hyperbole.
