Yep. Titles are definitely not my forte.
This post will be, I promise, shorter than the last two entries. I could spend billions of pixels on the way Project 2025 fixates on climate change and making it worse. Obsessed is a good word, I think, for their laser focus on tearing out root and branch anything that even hints to the truth that that fossil fuels are making life o thei planet worse for Americans, much less anyone else. But the opening couple of pages of their section on the Department of Energy is illustrative of their approach. It starts with, at best, half-truths, and segues into terrible policies.
The section begins with boilerplate about energy independence and good jobs and lows costs. But very quickly it starts with the deception. In its words:
Yet ideologically driven government policies have thrust the United States into a new energy crisis just a few short years after America’s energy renaissance, which began in the first decade of the 2000s, transformed the United States from a net energy importer (oil and natural gas) to energy independence and then energy dominance. Americans now face energy scarcity, an electric grid that is less reliable, and arti f icial shortages of natural gas and oil despite massive reserves within the United States—all of which has led to higher prices that burden both the American people and the economy. The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme “green” policies.
There are a couple of sleights of hand tricks going on here. First, they are limiting their discussion to oil and natural gas. This removes all renewables from the equation without explicitly acknowledging that they are doing so. A lie by omission you might say, if you were interested in accuracy. Because of you were interested in accuracy, you would note that renewable such as solar and offshore wind are already cheaper to produce than coal and natural gas:
When it comes to the cost of energy from new power plants, onshore wind and solar are now the cheapest sources—costing less than gas, geothermal, coal, or nuclear.
The introduction goes on to lament that governments, federal and state, are going to “decide who is “worthy” to receive funding for energy projects.” and “directing huge amounts of money to favored interests and making America dependent on adversaries like China for energy” (you cannot go more than ten pages, apparently, without mentioning China in this document. It is apparently in the style guide, like using one space after periods. How the government giving companies huge amounts of money is going to leave us dependent upon China is left as an exercise to the reader.) Which is deeply ironic, since a significant reason that non-renewable power plants remain economically viable is the government providing them with huge amounts of money:
Sometimes, she adds, the regulatory structure of utilities actually makes it more profitable to keep a coal or natural gas plant running.
Langer says this is especially true for the state-regulated monopolies that supply power in about half of US states. These investor-owned utilities are guaranteed a certain rate of return on their investments in power facilities, which basically guarantees continued earnings in exchange for running those plants. Even if the actual market costs of their energy sources would make operations costly, these monopolies are set up so that that’s not really a concern.
Very clearly, then, Trump’s Project 2025 is not being honest off the jump about the impacts of renewables on the people’s pocketbooks or the subsidies that keep fossil fules afloat. They also seem to want you to think that gas prices have gone up when in fact they have decreased since their post-pandemic highs and the Biden Administration has neutered OPEC.
Having established a fantasy land as a baseline, the introduction then calls for the repeal of bipartisan infrastructure bill. Because its a spending bill and spending is bad, because the Private Sector Fairy gives all the good little Business Boys and Girls all the money they need to do business things for free! No spending needed! The infrastructure bill and spending bills like it, here in the real world, have been a significant part of why the US has done better than its peer economies. Wages have gone up, industry has returned to those areas most significantly hit by outsourcing, and making sure that the jobs that do come back are good paying jobs. All that goes away with those “spending bills”
Now, the Trump people would probably argue that their plans for massive across the board tariffs would do the same things, but economists are pretty clear that the opposite would happen. Tariffs and other protective measures are important in managing an economy, yes, but they have to be intelligently deployed. As they are in the Biden infrastructure bill. Otherwise, you just got disaster.
What is most telling to me is that even in this short section their fealty to the lie that climate change is not real binds them to a plan that is disastrous for the country and for the people most likely to vote for them. As Europe and China show us, there are progressive and conservative ways of dealing with climate change. But the Trumpists refusal to deal with reality has licked them into a plan that is nonsensical, economically stupid, and certain to cost them and their supporters outside the fossil fuel industry much more than any other route. It is Project 2025 in a capsule — a fantasy of control that leads to the worst possible outcome for them as well as the people they hate.