'Chilling': Under Trump, Project 2025 could undo climate, energy progress in WV

Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a national alliance of labor unions and environmental groups, was talking about the Project 2025 proposal, a 920-page collection of policy plans from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, that lays out a blueprint for another Trump term. The document is posted at the Project 2025 website and is available at bit.ly/Project2025Document.

Published last year and crafted by former Trump administration officials, Project 2025 has drawn heavy scrutiny for what critics have said would be a weaponization of the federal government against its own people through consolidated presidential control of a weakened Department of Justice, civil service and domestic policy practices that encourage discrimination and far-reaching rollbacks of climate protection.

Trump’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Project 2025, which calls for:

• Shuttering the Department of Education because it is “an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm”
• Withdrawing U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a hormone-blocking medicine that can be used to medically terminate pregnancy
• Setting Medicaid on a block-grant or per-capita-cap track in a proposal expected to deeply cut federal Medicaid spending over time and cause states to cut eligibility and benefits — a move that could have outsized impact in West Virginia given its historically high federal Medicaid matching assistance percentage
• Shifting the majority of FEMA emergency preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government
• Ending time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness
• Privatizing all student lending programs
• Targeting public-sector unions
• Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS
• Calling for pornography to be outlawed, and imprisoning those who produce and distribute it
• Issuing an executive order that wipes out the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which holds contractors responsible for avoiding discrimination

“It fundamentally is about dismantling government’s role to protect our environment, clean air and water, worker rights, consumer protection, voter rights,” Walsh said during a June 6 virtual news conference to announce his group’s endorsement of President Joe Biden for a second term.

Julie Archer, project manager at West Virginia Citizen Action Group, a progressive organization, called Project 2025 “an authoritarian blueprint” for defunding public education, further restrictions on reproductive rights, implementing homophobic and transphobic policies — in addition to rolling back and environmental protections and hastening climate catastrophe.

But West Virginia’s proneness to severe flooding and power outages, disproportionately mounting electricity cost burden and coal-reliant economy make it especially vulnerable to energy and environment proposals in Project 2025 that would fundamentally weaken federal support for energy growth and environmental protection in the state.

Those proposals are in line with Trump’s presidential track record.

“[Project 2025 is] a mishmash of proposals whose only unifying theme is an overweening regard for preserving and maximizing the privileges of established wealth,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based pro-renewable energy think tank.

IIJA, IRA spur clean-energy investment

Project 2025 indicates support for congressional repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by Biden in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

Those two have been widely credited for spurring unprecedented clean energy job growth in largely Republican states since their enactment.

West Virginia has been the site of some $1 billion in private investments in clean energy manufacturing and technology announced since Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021, according to a report released this year by Climate Power, a climate action-focused communications firm.

The report details battery, electric vehicle and other clean energy technology projects with announced private investments totaling $938 million and estimated creation of 5,095 jobs since 2022. Investments in West Virginia surpassed those in every neighboring state except Ohio.

The Inflation Reduction Act was opposed by all congressional Republicans and enacted in August 2022 only with critical support from Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., then a Democrat in the evenly divided Senate. The law created and expanded tax incentives that reduced the cost of qualifying energy projects and equipment and incentivized energy production in low-income and energy communities like those across West Virginia.

Project 2025 calls for:

• Eliminating Department of Energy offices viewed as investment routes for billions in spending on a wide range of confirmed and potential battery storage, nuclear, solar and carbon capture projects
• Suspending EPA advisory bodies
• Eliminating the office that oversees requirements for industry to report on the storage, use, and releases of dangerous chemicals and improvement of chemical accident prevention at facilities like those throughout the Kanawha Valley

Under Project 2025, the president would issue an executive order to “reshape” the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a body established by Congress in 1990 that coordinates federal research of climate change and evolving environmental conditions. The platform says the next president should “critically analyze” and potentially refuse to accept any Global Change Research Program assessment prepared under the Biden administration.

“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,” Rachel Cletus, policy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national science advocacy group, said in a June 14 blog post.

Project 2025 urges breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — which houses the National Weather Service — due to what the document claims is NOAA being “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and … harmful to U.S. prosperity.”

“Project 2025’s attempts to explain and justify its policy recommendations regularly produce contradictions and sometimes require the invention of threats and the outright denial of facts and reality,” O’Leary said. “What else can explain the call to ‘break up’ an otherwise obscure and completely nonpartisan body like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose only sin in the eyes of Project 2025’s authors seems to be that it reports facts, which the authors find inconvenient?”

Wide-ranging Department of Energy cuts

Other Project 2025 objectives are:

• Cutting federal support for carbon capture programs long embraced by West Virginia political leaders as a potential lifeline for the state’s coal industry through application at coal-fired plants
• Cutting the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which oversees carbon capture programs and works to minimize environmental and climate impacts of fossil fuel and industrial processes
• Increasing the level of private-sector responsibility for the disposal of nuclear waste
• Eliminating the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which oversees the federal hydrogen hub program. The office helped the Morgantown-based Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub receive up to $925 million to create a hydrogen production and delivery network throughout West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania
• Eliminating the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office viewed as an investment route for next-generation nuclear projects and repurposing of coal plant sites into small modular reactors
• Eliminating the Office of Emergency Management, which oversees reporting of oil discharges and hazardous substance releases, and the Risk Management Program, which requires facilities that use extremely hazardous substances to develop risk management planning
• Suspending and reviewing activities of EPA advisory bodies

Maya Nye, a St. Albans native and federal policy director at Coming Clean, a chemical industry-focused environmental health nonprofit, said Project 2025 proposals would make both chemical disasters and climate disasters more likely by cutting what she called vital government agencies, “common-sense” regulations and infrastructure benefits designed to protect people.

“Proposals to dissolve scientific and environmental justice advisory boards read like an industry wish list rather than a real game plan for addressing the significant and growing chemical and climate threats we face,” Nye said.

Track record full of weakened protectionsThe Trump administration rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections, with Trump appointing three Supreme Court justices to form a conservative supermajority court that has eroded the legal authority for federal agencies to regulate environmental health.

Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research group, found in September 2020 that major climate policy rollbacks under Trump could add 1.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035. That cumulative impact is equivalent to nearly one-third of all U.S. emissions in 2019.

In March 2019, an audit from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that Trump’s former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System overseeing much of the EPA’s chemical safety research not to release any reports without permission from the agency’s Trump-appointed leadership.

In 2019, Trump’s EPA issued a final rule weakening the federal Risk Management Program. The rule rescinded a requirement to hire a third party to perform a compliance audit after a reportable accident under the rule and a requirement to assess theoretically safer technology and alternative risk management measures applicable to eliminating or reducing risk from process hazards.

West Virginians quiet on Project 2025

West Virginia’s members of Congress had little to say about Project 2025.

Spokespeople for Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., and Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Gov. Jim Justice’s U.S. Senate campaign.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said during a June 20 virtual news conference she wasn’t in favor of abolishing the Department of Education or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which she voted for.

“I can understand the frustrations of the Project 2025 folks — whoever they might be — that see an administration that piles on regulation after regulation which adds costs, doesn’t really achieve the environmental benefit that it’s supposed to, and has impossible deadlines,” Capito said.

Capito said she would “look at” Project 2025 as soon as the conference ended. But a spokesperson declined on Wednesday to comment on the record about Project 2025.

What will voters do?

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication published an analysis Thursday finding relatively few voters had heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, with only 47% of pro-climate voters saying they had heard “some” or “a lot” about the law, despite it being the largest congressional investment in climate action in the nation’s history.

After reading a short description of the law, nearly all pro-climate voters say they supported it.

The program’s research found a significant portion of American registered voters (37%) are pro-climate voters, the great majority of which plan to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

“In a close election — as 2024 is expected to be — these voters could be decisive,” program researchers concluded in a blog post Thursday.

In a CNN-hosted presidential debate Thursday night in which Biden’s hushed, stumbling vocal delivery made headlines, Trump pushed a wide range of false claims about his administration and declined to say whether he would take any action in a second term to slow the climate crisis.

“I want absolutely immaculate, clean water and I want absolutely clean air,” Trump claimed.

“I don’t know where the hell he’s been,” Biden retorted, raising his voice.

Climate advocates want voters to see what they’ve seen.

“I am hoping that people actually take a look at [Project 2025],” Walsh said, “because I think it reflects a very small minority view of the future of this country.”