It is official: 2024 was the hottest year on record. Temperatures not only surpassed 2023 as the previous hottest year, they leapt – for the first time – past the goal set in the Paris Climate Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Whether you turn on the TV to news of the most recent super storm or raging wildfire, or can see these disasters firsthand just by looking outside, the climate crisis is all around us.
If there was ever a single worst time in history to undermine climate science and America’s climate leadership, it is right now. So it is an outrage that incoming President Donald Trump’s picks for key administration posts signal his intent to do just that. And the clear pro-fossil fuel, anti-science agenda extends beyond Trump’s picks for the positions most obviously related to climate policy. We know that nominations like fossil fuel industry shill Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and oil executive Christ Wright as head of the Department of Energy spell disaster for the lives and livelihoods, and health and wealth, of countless communities and working families. But those are not the only foxes in the henhouse.
Case in point: Russel Vought, Trump’s choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is an architect of the notorious Project 2025 – the authoritarian playbook for decimating democratic institutions and checks and balances to serve up an extreme far-right agenda. Vought authored a chapter on the Executive Office, outlining ways Trump could increase his power. As head of OMB, Vought would oversee the office tasked with overseeing “the implementation of the president’s vision across the Executive Branch.” It is an immensely powerful office with influence over a vast amount of the federal government. And Vought has climate policy squarely in his sights.
Vought has laid out his desire to attack civil servants who work to protect public health and address the climate crisis, saying, “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
In his Project 2025 chapter, Vought suggests efforts to address climate change are merely “social engineering” and promotes reshaping the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Now, the sharp edge of this particular attack has become clear with reporting that Vought seeks to undermine the National Climate Assessment, which is produced by the USGCRP. The Assessment is the foundational report used by the federal government for policies addressing or related to climate change, the product of research by hundreds of scientists and a key to US climate leadership worldwide. Vought is calling for more White House control of the Assessment, and giving OMB a role in selecting the scientists who produce the report.
Climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania Michael Mann told E&E News the goal of the incoming administration “is to undermine any policies aimed at accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.” Attacking the National Climate Assessment is a means to that end.
Americans’ health and economic wellbeing depend on not just continuing but speeding up our full transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, as well as addressing the climate crisis in other ways. Undermining the science that serves as the underpinning for all our efforts to tackle the climate crisis is nothing short of a crisis in its own right.
This is Project 2025 in action.
On the campaign trail, Trump did all he could to distance himself from the people behind the abysmally unpopular Project 2025, saying he had “nothing to do with them” and had “no idea” who they were. Now, in addition to Vought, Trump plans to nominate Project 2025 contributors to powerful posts throughout his administration.
Project 2025 also suggests dissolving the critically important National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and “fully commercializing” the National Weather Service, which NOAA houses. These science agencies enable us to find effective approaches to curbing the climate disaster and warn people of dangerous weather events to come.
One week before Election Day, Congresswoman Sara Jacobs of California published a piece in Newsweek under the headline, “Project 2025 Is January 6’s Attempted Coup Dressed in a Nice Suit.” Project 2025 represents not only a coup against democracy and checks and balances, but against our government’s role in solving our nation’s problems and America’s leadership in solving the world’s – chief among them, the climate crisis. For the sake of a livable planet and all the communities that continue to be devastated by extreme climate-fueled weather events, the Senate should vote to reject the nominations of Russel Vought and any other contributor to Project 2025.
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
