Trump’s Project 2025: A Dream for Polluters and Nightmare for America

Trump Promises Big Oil Donors That He’ll Kill Clean Energy 

Washington, D.C. – New reporting on Donald Trump’s private comments to the Big Oil donors propping up his campaign and paying his legal bills underscores how Project 2025 previews what a second term under Donald Trump would look like: he will double down on his extreme and dangerous first-term record that literally put the oil and gas industry in charge. This sweeping plan, authored by individuals and groups with extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry, would put Trump’s promise to be a dictator on day one into action.

According to the Washington Post, Trump told an assembly of Big Oil executives gathered together by oil billionaire and Trump megadonor Harold Hamm that he would seek to kill the wind energy industry and do whatever he can to benefit the oil and gas industry. Controversial climate denier and key figure behind Project 2025, William Perry Pendley, told the Post there is no reason to move forward with wind energy, “the priority has to be oil and gas.” As AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler noted in response to this troubling report, workers in the nascent offshore wind industry have much to fear from a second Trump term.

“We need only look at Donald Trump’s record as the most anti-environment, pro-polluter president in American history to understand what he’ll do if re-elected,” said Climate Power executive director Lori Lodes. “In order to please his Big Oil donors, Trump has launched an all-out war on more affordable, cleaner American energy, placing hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in private sector investments at risk. Project 2025, which was literally written by the oil and gas industry, shows us how a second Trump term would be even worse than his first: more giveaways to Big Oil; more pollution in our air, water, and communities; more climate denial; and the end of our clean energy economic boom. Under Donald Trump, Big Oil, corporate polluters, and our competitors like China win while everyone else loses.”

Key Elements of Trump’s Extreme Project 2025 Plan

• GUT THE CLEAN ENERGY PLAN: Eliminate the clean energy plan’s tax credits that benefit consumers and are driving the clean energy economic boom that has created more than 270,000 new jobs.
• GUT CLIMATE  AND PUBLIC HEALTH PROTECTIONS: 
  • Slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) capabilities to protect the public, reduce climate pollution, and end or weaken essential environmental and public health protections.
  • Eliminate EPA’s role in setting clean car standards while gutting fuel economy standards and blocking states from adopting California’s ambitious clean car standards.
  • Hand over the regulation of polluters to Republican state officials. 
  • Let polluters off the hook by limiting enforcement actions. 
• DRIVE UP COSTS FOR CONSUMERS:
  • The plan is an all-out push to kneecap clean energy and keep us hooked on dirty, dangerous, and costly fossil fuels. This will pad Big Oil’s profits at the expense of families.
  • The plan calls for eliminating all energy efficiency standards for appliances, raising energy costs, and restricting consumers’ freedom to choose what to purchase. Inefficient appliances also threaten the reliability of the electrical grid, particularly during heat waves and other peak usage times.
• BLOCK CLEAN ENERGY: 
  • Block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar.
  • Eliminate the Department of Energy’s (DOE) renewable energy offices.
  • The plan calls for the DOE to stop backing any new loans or loan guarantees, for Congress to sunset all of DOE’s loan authority, and “eventually eliminate the Loan Program Office” (LPO) altogether.
• GIVE BILLIONS TO OIL AND GAS COMPANIES: 
• Limit consumer choice to lower-efficiency, higher-pollution, and higher-cost vehicles in order to drive up oil consumption (and oil company profits).
• Just like Trump’s 2017 tax law that immediately shoveled $25 billion to oil and gas companies, this plan would slash the corporate tax rate even further to help Big Oil drive up its record profits. 
• Curtail President Biden’s reform of long-outdated leasing rules and fees, which allowed Big Oil to pad its profits extracting fossil fuels on public lands without paying taxpayers a fair rate or ensuring oil and gas companies put up the resources necessary to pay for any spills or accidents.

• DOUBLE DOWN ON ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: 
  • Eliminate the EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.
  • Stall or stop ongoing efforts to protect communities of color that are disproportionately exposed to environmental and public health risks.
  • Block efforts to monitor and prevent air pollution, and halt funding to protect communities from the impacts of climate change.
  • Deny communities the ability to raise environmental justice concerns with EPA.
• REJECT SCIENCE: Prohibit the use of scientific determinations to drive regulatory, enforcement, and legal decisions in the EPA and across the federal government.
• UNDERMINE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP: Walk away from the Paris Accord, again.
• GIVE AWAY OUR PUBLIC LANDS TO FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES: 
  • Reduce public lands protections or even eliminate some national monuments in their entirety.
  • Let Big Oil “drill, drill, drill” with impunity in some of our most special places to pad their profits, including almost doubling the size of the Willow Project and opening up vast swaths of the pristine Arctic to drilling.
  • Its recommendations for public lands and other matters within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction would significantly harm efforts to fight climate change, seriously threaten wildlife, and imperil America’s most cherished natural places — all to serve the narrow interests of Big Oil and other polluters.

The project’s architects, which include both climate and election deniers, hope to hasten “the overturning, via executive order, of what [they] believe are wrong policies of the current administration.” As Politico reported: “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.” Under the plan, a second Trump term would “start by rejecting any work on climate science prepared during the Biden administration.” “The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser.

The individuals charged with the relevant chapters of the Project 2025 plan are former Trump administration officials with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. William Perry Pendley, the lead for the DOI chapter of the plan, is a climate denier who called climate change “junk science” and said those who believe in it are “kooks.” Mandy Gunasekara wrote the EPA chapter of the plan. She is a climate denier who recently called climate change “mild and manageable,” and her CO2 Coalition profile describes her as “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan” while she was President Trump’s principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Bernard McNamee, a former FERC commissioner and Energy Department official under Trump, wrote the DOE chapter of the plan. His work for the Texas Attorney General included Texas’ challenge to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.