In the US, conservative groups have crafted a plan for demolishing the federal government’s efforts to counter climate change!
The 920-page blueprint, whose hundreds of authors include former Trump administration officials, would go far beyond past GOP efforts to slash environmental agencies’ budgets or oust “deep state” employees.
Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.
If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it.
It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.
“We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan as a road map for the first 180 days of the next GOP administration. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”
More information here.
To be honest, I’m trying really hard not to read about what’s happening in the US in the lead up to their next election. All it does is make me even more pessimistic about the future than I am already. I’d rather hang on to some faint shreds of hope that we can influence the outcome of the existential crises we face, by doing whatever we can to bring about a change of direction here in Aotearoa New Zealand.