[NOTE: There is a post-publication update at the end of this post.]
In my previous post I examined what Project 2025 — the GOP playbook for remaking the executive branch — had to say about redirecting energy policy away from renewable climate concerns. This post will focus on GOP plans for environmental policy and the EPA. Those plans are outlined by Trump activist and former Trump EPA official Mandy Gunasakera in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Gunaskera’s framing of the environmental regulatory task dovetails with anti-regulatory narratives commonly found in online conservative communities. It refers to “justified skepticism” toward the EPA as “an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left [sic] for political ends.”* Referring to the energy “transition” and “greening” in scare quotes, it promises to end the Biden EPA’s “assault on the energy sector.” And it portrays the EPA under Democratic presidents as experiencing “massive growth” that it uses for “political ends.”
While EPA budgets are larger under Democratic congresses than Republican ones, most experts know that over time the agency has made due with less and less. Chapter 1 of Climate of Contempt details how the EPA’s mission has grown and evolved. Yet the agency’s share of the federal budget has shrunk over time — while the U.S. population and GDP have grown, and environmental problems grew more and more complex.
Project 2025’s plan for EPA treats climate risks alternatively as unimportant or a fiction, and promises profound (and some legally-dubious) steps to redirect EPA away from climate policy, including:
- the elimination of California’s authority to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles
- eliminating the social cost of carbon in EPA decision-making
- elimination of regional EPA laboratories and the EPA Office of Research and Development
- elimination of the Office of Emergency Management
It also calls for the congressional repeal of statutes that promote the energy transition. It does not go as far as J.D. Vance’s recommendation that all senior civil servants be fired. But as noted in a previous post, it does endorse the use of “Schedule F” in several places — code for the elimination of large swaths of the career executive branch experts that make regulatory regimes work.
Online information flows and social media bubbles breed certainty about things that are not true. They help GOP voters become certain that dedicated civil servants are a dangerous “deep state,” that climate science is a hoax or an unimportant problem, or one whose cure is worse than the disease. They breed certainty that members of the climate coalition are less interested in solving an important political challenge than dictating how GOP voters should live. And for reasons outlined in Part 2 of my book, some GOP voters who favor policies addressing climate risks worry that Democratic Party rule poses other important threats to their ways of life.
Belief in falsehoods is now a fairly common and widespread feature of U.S. politics, as is belief in that members of the other party are dishonest and immoral. The faulty premises of Project 2025’s environmental policy plan reflect that reality. Unless and until voters or regulators find a way to weaken the power of online propaganda, GOP opposition to the energy transition seems likely to intensify. — 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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* Does anyone ever lose a policy fight any more for reasons other than “capture” by the other side? [/sarcasm]
