Above photo: VP Kamala Harris at COP28 summit on December 2, 2023. Karim Sahib /AFP.
Election season has sparked a frenzy of hysteria around Project 2025 and people are leaning on the Democratic party to stand as an oppositional force.
However, just as with many other policies, Democratic environmental policies vary very little from what is laid out in Project 2025. There has been nothing to indicate Kamala Harris will be any different.
As the 2024 election season heats up the Democratic Party has found its new boogeyman Project 2025 – a set of policy prescriptions developed by the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, with aims to implement them on the very first day former president Trump assumes the presidency, should he defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in November. As evidenced by recent political advertisements by the Democrats and their legion of Political Action Committees, the intent is to institute a profound fear factor by directly associating Project 2025 with a potential second Trump presidency.
Yesterday during the Democrat’s national convention in Chicago, speaker after speaker inundated attendees with the precarious elements of Project 2025, as if a Trump victory would all but ensure the policies contained therein would be promulgated instantaneously as if there’s not even a Legislative Branch of government that would also have to pass a series of bills before they’re signed into law. Michigan State Senator, Mallory McMorrow even took the stage with a large copy of Project 2025 that acted as a prop during her speech in which she eviscerated its policy proposals, though she mainly focused on the sections believed to be anathema to reproductive justice.
Project 2025, to be clear, should offer pause and act as an admonishment of what could come to pass if implemented. Scarier still should be the fact that far too many of the proposals contained in Project 2025 have already been implemented by the Biden/Harris administration, and others are currently being considered by House and Senate Democrats right now. And it could be argued, that environmentally, there’s not enough daylight between Biden/Harris/Democratic Party policies to fuel a solar panel, and this represents a dark specter for the pursuits of efficacious and lasting climate and environmental justice.
Among the major follies of Project 2025 is its abject misrepresentation of the environmental agenda of the Biden/Harris administration as well as that of Democrats in the Congress and even at the State and local levels of government. For instance, page 519 of Project 2025 suggests, “Unfortunately, Biden’s DOI is at war with the department’s mission, not only when it comes to DOI’s obligation to develop the vast oil and gas and coal resource for which it is responsible…” Statistics indicate this proclamation is bereft of veracity.
A recent piece by Washington Post climate change reporter, Maxine Joselow, indicates that, “The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands, and the United States is producing more oil than any country ever has .” And it should be noted that these numbers don’t include emissions associated with the U.S. military and the global operations to sustain and expand empire – the U.S. military is the world’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels and the world’s single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, estimated at approximately 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. All in all, contrary to the mendacious prognostications of Project 2025, right now in 2024 the United States is the world’s premier Petro State. .
But exposing the falsehoods contained in Project 2025 in no way exculpates Biden, Harris, or the Democrats from anemic and ineffective climate policies. In too many cases this actually implicates them as complicit with a growing and runaway climate crisis putting Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor folk and frontline communities at the forefront of increasingly frequent and more powerful climate-fueled cataclysms.
When it comes to the Biden/Harris/Democratic policies on fossil fuels, indeed it can be said, In Oleum Veritas.
As stated earlier, there are too many instances in which Biden/Harris and the Democrats have either already implemented or are actively pursuing policies contained in Project 2025. Ironically, some of this is due to Biden and the Democrats’ “historic climate bill,” the so called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Two years ago, in a piece I wrote for BAR after introduction of the IRA, I asked, “If a Republican introduced a piece of legislation that included opening up 600 million acres of oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico, dedicated billions of dollars to unproven “false climate solutions” like so called carbon capture and sequestration, extended the life of aging nuclear power plants, allowed for increased mining of uranium, and tied it to a commitment to ratify a separate, rubber stamped American Petroleum Institute (API) side deal that would deregulate landmark environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act…would we still refer to it as a ‘historic climate bill?’”
The fact of the matter is, many of the toxic aspects of the IRA align with policy proposals in Project 2025, and, right now, they are the proverbial law of the land. Take reforming bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for example. Page 533 of Project 2025 calls for, “…common-sense NEPA reform that must be restored immediately,” as well as provisions, “adopted by the Trump Administration, such as placing time and page limits on NEPA documents.” Project 2025 further calls for the new Administration to, “call upon Congress to reform NEPA to meet its original goal,” with consideration to, eliminating judicial review of the adequacy of NEPA documents or the rectitude of NEPA decisions”.
The framers of Project 2025 don’t need to wait for the next Administration as Biden/Harris and the Democrats already have them covered. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA), a set of NEPA or “permitting reforms” that Biden, Senate Majority Leader Schumer, and other Democratic Party congressional leaders agreed to pass as part of a side deal cut with Senator Joe Manchin in exchange for his affirmative vote for the IRA may as well have been written by the Heritage Foundation. Among other provisions, the FRA include the following:
- Each Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) shall not exceed 150 pages, unless it is extraordinarily complex, in which case 300 pages are allowed. Environmental Assessments (EA) are not to exceed 75 pages. [Page limits proposed by Project 2025];
- Deadlines for issuance of these documents. EISs must be issued within two years, and EAs within one year, of when they are deemed necessary. Sponsors now have the right to petition the court for failure to meet the deadlines, in which case the court may set a schedule for completion [Speeding up the environmental review process per Project 2025]; and
- When an agency prepares a programmatic environmental document for which judicial review was available, the agency may rely on the analysis for five years without reviewing it. After five years, the agency may only rely on the analysis if it is reviewed to ensure that it is still valid. [Reduces the number of thorough, site specific environmental reviews and allows for thes incomplete reviews to be referred to for longer period of time for other projects in the same area – a key desire of Project 2025].
But Biden/Harris and the Democrats aren’t done yet. That’s because of the proposed Energy Permitting Reform Act, sponsored by Senator Manchin and Senator John Barraso (R-WY). This proposed legislation is so bad that even some of the bourgeois environmental groups are referring to it as “The Bipartisan Project 2025 Bill,” due, in part, to the fact that it would strip away the ability of communities and local organizations to seek judicial review to stop harmful projects like fossil fuel pipelines and other infrastructure that threaten their ways of life, public health, and safety. You would think that a sobriquet like that would cause Biden to immediately announce that he would veto such a bill if it ever came across his desk – quite the opposite.
In fact, according to a piece written in Politico by Josh Siegel , a Biden Administration official noted, “There is no doubt in my mind if this bill gets to President Biden’s desk with over 60 votes in the Senate and the majority in the House he would sign it,” and added, “They [Biden and Harris] may approach things differently philosophically, but I don’t think there is a lot of daylight in terms of where they land.”
This all seems to point to the fact that environmentally, and perhaps with other sectors, the Democrats are attempting to beguile the public and voters with Project 2025 when they are the ones in fact have been making it a reality since 2022. To this end, we need to stop referring to Project 2025 as a “conservative agenda,” and characterize it for what it really is…a neoliberal agenda, that can be exercised and promulgated by both corporate political parties that form the duopoly. And the bottom line is for those who are genuinely concerned about Project 2025, due to the policies of Joe Biden and the Democrats, the set of proposals therein, in too many cases, would simply need to continue traversing the neoliberal pathway already in place and would not need to start from scratch.
Perhaps the best way for the new Democratic Party nominee for POTUS to actually confront and dismantle Project 2025 would be to come out with a comprehensive set of her own environmental and climate justice policies. But as indicated on her website , which remains not much more than a fundraising page, we shouldn’t hold our breath, and this is especially true for Black, Brown, and Indigenous folk who already find it hard to breathe due to the toxic environmental policies of the Biden/Harris administration that continue to treat their communities as energy and economic sacrifice zones.
No Compromise
No Retreat