How a Republican election sweep could transform U.S. climate policy
Posted on July 18, 2024
President Biden’s signature environmental actions could be reversed if the GOP takes control of the House, Senate and White House. The EPA and other agencies could see their budgets slashed.
Defunding or dismantling federal agencies focused on the environment. Slashing regulations aimed at combating climate change and cutting deadly air pollution. Boosting the use of fossil fuels that have helped drive the U.S. economy but also contribute to the heat waves afflicting millions of Americans this summer.
These are just some of the ways Republicans could shift U.S. climate policy if they win the White House, flip the Senate and maintain their House majority in the November election. While such a scenario seemed less likely a few weeks ago, it appears more probable in light of President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, an increasingly brutal Senate map for Democrats, and an attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump that has invigorated his base.
While it is far from certain that Republicans will control all levels of government in 2025, the party’s leaders are feeling optimistic. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told The Washington Post on Tuesday that “there’s obviously going to be a big downballot effect” from recent events. That prospect has unnerved some leading liberal climate groups and boosted the confidence of Trump supporters, some of whom continue to dismiss the scientific consensus that a warming climate poses significant risks.
“To say climate change is the biggest threat to humanity is absolutely insane,” said William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration. “The remedy that President Biden has is, ‘Let’s spend a ton of money solving a problem that doesn’t exist and turning over your lifestyles.’ That’s certainly not the position of the Republican Party.”
Republicans already have a playbook if they gain full power in Washington: legislation that passed the House in recent years but later died, either because of Senate opposition or a veto by Biden. This includes bills to allow more pollution from diesel trucks, strip away protections for imperiled species and open up more federal lands to oil drilling.
“A Republican trifecta would be disastrous for our climate, for our democracy. … I’m deeply alarmed at it,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate group led by young people that called Friday for Biden to drop his reelection bid and “pass the torch” to a new Democratic nominee.
“We think it’s absolutely critical for President Biden’s legacy on climate that we do our best to win this election, and that doesn’t feel like what we’re on track to do right now,” she added.
Another potential playbook for Republicans is Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint for the next conservative administration drafted by right-wing think tanks and former Trump officials. Pendley wrote the chapter on the Interior Department, which recommends increasing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic wilderness, slashing the fees that fossil fuel firms pay to drill on public lands, and providing legal protections for energy companies that unintentionally kill birds.
More broadly, Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The plan endorses shuttering an Energy Department office that has roughly $400 billion in loan authority to help emerging clean energy technologies. And it would cut the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, which aims to address the pollution that disproportionately harms poor and minority communities.
“Project 2025 is an absolute gift to the fossil fuel industry,” said Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy at the Sierra Club. “All of the progress we’re making would be reversed if that scenario happened.”
While Trump said on his Truth Social platform this month that he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” many of its authors served in the Trump administration or could have prominent positions if he wins in November. Trump has also praised the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that helped organize the plan.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, said a Republican trifecta could give new life to GOP energy legislation that passed the House last year but died in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The measure, dubbed H.R. 1, would sharply increase U.S. oil, gas and coal production and ease permitting restrictions that delay pipelines, refineries and other fossil fuel projects.
“I would highly recommend looking at H.R. 1 as a guide to what a Republican Congress would do,” Furchtgott-Roth said.
As for Project 2025, she said, “that was conceived way before President Trump was the Republican nominee, and it was meant as some ideas for all Republican or Democratic nominees — for people all over the world.”
Going after green energy
One of the most controversial proposals in Project 2025 is a recommendation to repeal Biden’s signature 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The law has poured billions of dollars into boosting green technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles, with most of the new investments in Republican-led states and congressional districts.
To fully repeal the tax credits for these green technologies, Trump would need Republican lawmakers to pass new legislation. But even without Congress, Trump could direct the Treasury Department to significantly limit which companies could claim the credits.
The subsidy for electric vehicles would probably be a top target. Trump has repeatedly railed against EVs, falsely claiming they don’t work. His vice-presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), introduced a bill last year to scrap the EV credit and replace it with an incentive for American-made vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel.
It remains unclear, however, whether Silicon Valley tech moguls could soften Trump’s stance on EVs. Vance has ties to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has invested in a start-up that designed an electric sports car, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk has endorsed Trump and plans to steer roughly $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Musk could weigh in, but at the end of the day, I have a really hard time thinking that Trump and his administration would change their views on this,” said a former Trump administration energy official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.
Another former Trump official, Alex Herrgott, said many green-energy projects still received federal permits during the Trump administration, and because of market forces, their costs would continue to fall in a second Trump term.
“There is no doubt that a second Trump administration would pick up where it left off — whether it was conventional energy, oil and gas pipelines, or the market-dictated acceleration of the renewable energy transition,” said Herrgott, who served as executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council under Trump and now leads the nonprofit Permitting Institute.
It is difficult to predict how these and other decisions could affect the level of carbon emissions in Earth’s atmosphere, the main driver of global warming. But a recent analysis by Carbon Brief, a United Kingdom-based climate policy and science publication, found that a Trump win in November could cause an additional 4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions by 2030 — equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan.
“A Republican sweep in November’s election would avoid congressional roadblocks to Trump rolling back all of Biden’s climate legacy,” Simon Evans, deputy editor and senior policy editor at Carbon Brief, said in an email. “Under those conditions, Trump could push the U.S. towards the extra 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2030 that we modeled — and potentially beyond.”
A platform silent on climate
At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday, the party formally adopted a platform that makes no mention of climate change. Instead, it proclaims that America should “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” referring to oil and gas as “liquid gold under our feet.”
By contrast, the draft Democratic Party platform mentions “climate” or “clean energy” 141 times, including in a seven-page chapter devoted to climate solutions, according to an analysis by the environmental group Evergreen Action.
Some Republicans who have pushed their party to accept climate change criticized the platform for neglecting the issue.
“I would have liked to see at least a mention of the Republican legacy of environmental stewardship and conversation,” said Chris Barnard, president of American Conservation Coalition Action, a group of young Republicans who support climate action.
Barnard noted that polls consistently show climate change ranks as a top concern for younger Republican voters. The party ignores the issue, he said, at its own peril.
“Our message to Republicans continues to be that they can’t just be saying ‘drill, baby, drill,’” he said.
Some attendees of the Republican National Convention passed a shocking sight on their way to Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum: two oil executives slumped over an office table, burying their heads in a massive pile of sand.
The executives were actors in performance art commissioned by Climate Power, a liberal strategic communications firm, which says the scene represented the Republican Party’s continued denial of climate change at the bidding of the oil industry.
“This is just one of the ways that we’re communicating the climate stakes of this election,” said Alex Witt, a senior adviser at the firm.