An assault on climate change action

Phil Nelson examined Project 2025 to better understand what we might expect from the Trump administration. Did it cause his skin to crawl?

The Heritage Foundation, in anticipation of the election of Donald Trump as president in 2024, commissioned a blueprint for how presidential power could be used. Released in 2023, the document was subtitled “The Conservative Promise.”

Even eight months before his election, some writers were warning that Project 2025, if implemented, would cement American as a rightwing authority state.

Trump himself distanced himself from the document during the final months of his campaign, saying he had not even read it. That statement alone said little. Trump is notoriously a non-reader.

Wanting to know more precisely what Project 2025 had to say about climate change and the energy transition, Golden resident Phil Nelson earlier this year studied the 920-page document. A retired geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, he has long been active in Citizens Climate Lobby and otherwise engaged in efforts to promote energy transition.

Nelson reported during a weekly session that he sponsors, called Zoom at Noon, that the recommendations collectively represent an assault on climate action. He also spoke at an April 24 meeting of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.

Big Pivots posed a dozen questions to Nelson.

Phil, how closely do the actions of Trump and his appointees in regard to climate change during his first three months in office correspond with the prescriptions spelled out in Project 2025?

Phrasing of the text in Project 2025 usually implies collaboration with Congress, whereas many of the executive orders and actions by cabinet officials are sidestepping Congress. And Project 2025 does not call for nor foresee an entity such as DOGE. At least one cabinet appointment (Zeldin, EPA Administrator) has been far more zealous than called for by Project 2025.

Why is Trump’s appointee as head of the Office of Management and Budget important as we view progress — or backward steps — in the energy transition?

Russell Vought authored Chapter 2 of Project 2025 on the Executive Office of the President and now holds the job as head of OMB. His metaphor for OMB’s role should suffice: “it is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.” Russell Vought is now head of OMB, a role which he also held under Trump 1.0. This is the only case I found where the author of a chapter of Project 2025 has been appointed as the administrator.

Colorado is home to a very large component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What does Project 2025 have to say about NOAA? Are we seeing the instructions spelled out in Project 2025 being implemented today?

Project 2025 comes down hard on the research section of NOAA, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, or OAR. It states that OAR is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and recommends that “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

The New York Times reported in April on an OMB proposal that would allocate just one-third of last year’s budget to OAR, effectively eliminating the office, but this cut requires Congressional approval. Other offices in NOAA would also be adversely affected by this OMB proposal, but not as badly as OAR.

Did you see anything in Project 2025 that suggests the future of National Renewable Energy Laboratory?

Not specifically. Most relevant to NREL: “DOE is tasked with engaging in basic and fundamental science and research through the 17 National Laboratories.”

DOE is urged to stick with fundamental research and “not pick winners and losers.” Demonstration projects should be left to the private sector. The document is remarkably quiet on the work of the national laboratories, possibly because the authors consider them to lie within the domain of basic research.

By the way, who wrote the sections about climate change? And how much of this massive document is about climate change?

No single section is focused on climate change, which is instead found within the various chapters devoted to governmental departments — Interior, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, etc. Each chapter is authored by a different author. Project 2025 covers the entire executive branch. One must look carefully within each chapter to find topics germane to climate change issues.

What role did the authors of Project 2025 see for renewables in advocating for an “all of the above” approach to energy?

The document calls for an end to all of DOE’s applied energy programs and a return to fundamental energy research, although no examples of the latter are cited. Repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is urged to discontinue the subsidizing of renewable energy developers and investors. Offices that originated to implement the IIJA and IRA are slated for defunding, renaming, redirection, or partial/full elimination.

One surprise is support for the Energy Information Administration, which provides data and forecasts on energy use. There are modest requests for expansion of its reporting and analyses.

Did Project 2025 have anything to say about transmission?

It asks that the Office of Electricity focus on cyber and other reliability threats to the electric grid and that funding of commercial technology and deployment be discontinued.

It recommends that the Office of Grid Development be eliminated and its programs to build transmission facilities for renewable energy sources be discontinued, with the caveat that programs enhancing the reliability and security of the electric grid be continued and reassigned to another office.

Funding for research of many types has been a core government function for the better part of two centuries. The expeditions of John Fremont in the 1840s, for example, were funded in the name of research. So were the expeditions of John Wesley Powell and the other great surveys of the West in the post-Civil War period. And in the last 75 years massive amounts of money have been devoted to research with academic and other partners in a great many fields, including nuclear energy, oil and gas extraction and, more recently, wind and solar. What role does Project 2025 see for the government in further research?

There is good support for basic research in nuclear energy. There is general antipathy to funding research on clean energy and decarbonization of energy generation. It recommends the elimination of ARPA-E, which in the past has funded important technical advances.

ARPA-E or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is an agency within the U.S. Department of Energy tasked with funding the research and development of advanced energy technologies.

Was there any single thing that you read that absolutely made your skin crawl?

Let’s rename it “profound disappointment.” There is complete lack of acknowledgement of the problem of climate change and the desire to discredit and rescind all efforts of the previous administration to deal with the problem.

Chris Wright spoke briefly then took a few questions from reporters after touring the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on April 3. At left is Martin Keller, director of NREL Photo/Allen Best

Chris Wright, Trump’s secretary of energy, doesn’t completely disavow the reality of climate change but says the threat has been greatly exaggerated and says we will remain on fossil fuels for the next century. How do you think we should see Wright in light of Project 2025?

So far, Chris Wright has generally flown under the radar. An exception: He attended the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in March and applauded the work done under its sponsorship, a stance which runs counter to Project 2025’s goal of its elimination. This is one arena where we now must wait and see.

How unusual is this document in proposing actions in the change of presidential administrations? Was this a first? Has it occurred before? Have Democratic-leaning groups done the same thing?

Better to find a professional historian to properly handle this question. However, we can recall the House Climate Crisis Action Plan released in 2020 by the Democratic majority in the House, a 500-page document chock full of legislative recommendations across the range of federal government, to deal with climate change. Its components became the stuff and substance of the IIJA and the IRA, which are now targeted for dismantling.

You can see/hear Nelson’s explanation at his Zoom at Noon session. You need the passcode: &iM7^v64