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  • GPNYC Board
    • Sep 16

Project 2025 and Environmental Issues

One other issue Gray Panthers has a history of focusing on is environmental justice. And because of that, it is worth making a blog post looking at what Project 2025’s plans are for the environment.


Or, perhaps I should say: “Project 2025’s plans to damage the environment.”


The term “climate change” appeared fifty-four times in the Project 2025 document. Not once was the term mentioned in a manner suggesting that the makers of the document treat this as a serious issue, despite there being 97-99% consensus among climate scientists that man-made climate change is happening.


And on many of the occasions the term “climate change” is mentioned, it is in reference to destructive actions the writers of Project 2025 have cooked up so that the temperature of Planet Earth could be turned on to “extra high.” For example:

  • Page 709 says that: “the next conservative Administration should withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.” This is the company Project 2025 proposes joining: Eritrea (a dictatorship), Iran (a theocracy), Yemen (with an unstable government), and Libya (also with an unstable government). The fact that Project 2025 wants to join company with these three nations is telling.

  • Page 293 says that the next conservative administration should: “Denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability when it comes to agriculture.” This is utter nonsense. Stronger hurricanes fueled by climate change have a severe impact on food productivity and affordability. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that Hurricane Katrina contributed to higher sugar, rice, and banana prices, for example. Hurricane Sandy caused price gouging of food here in New York—something that some New Yorkers who lived through Sandy might remember. These two hurricanes, and many other natural disasters made worse by climate change, show that divorcing climate change from food productivity and affordability is nonsense.

  • Page 378 says that the next conservative administration should: “End the focus on climate change and green subsidies.” To which we ask: “Why?” The answer for them, probably, is that the makers of Project 2025 seem to care little for the environment.

  • Project 2025 also wants to: “Repeal climate change initiatives and spending in the department’s [Housing and Urban Development] budget request.” The Environmental Protection Agency (whose operations Project 2025 wants to significantly diminish) says that 13% of greenhouse gases come from “residential & commercial” (which includes housing). If Housing & Urban Development could play a role in reducing greenhouse gases from housing, why should they be stymied in doing that work?


All these proposals show a pattern of Project 2025, and those who view it as gospel, as being hostile to taking the climate crisis seriously, in spite of the scientific consensus on climate change, and in spite of the natural disasters aggravated by climate change. This is a shame, because climate change is one of the biggest challenges of this generation and the one to come.


 

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