Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution – study

A petroleum refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Photograph: Rex Wholster/Alamy

The impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 would result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs, a new analysis finds.

Should Trump retake the White House and pass the energy and environmental policies in the controversial Project 2025 document, the US’s planet-heating emissions will “significantly increase” by 2.7bn tonnes above the current trajectory by 2030, an amount comparable to the entire annual emissions of India, according to the report.

Such a burst of extra pollution would torpedo any chance the US could meet its goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, which scientists say is imperative to help the world avert disastrous climate change. It would also, the analysis found, result in 1.7m lost jobs in 2030, due to reduced clean energy deployment that is not offset by smaller gains in fossil fuel jobs, and a $320bn hit to US GDP as a wave of new domestic renewables and electric car manufacturing is reversed.

“The US faces a fork in the road starting in January of 2025 with two climate and energy policy pathways that are highly divergent,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy research at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy thinktank that conducted the modeling. “These future policy pathways result in stark differences for our health, our pocketbooks, the economy and climate.”

The new analysis provides a glimpse of what could hinge upon November’s presidential election. Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, has been part of a Biden administration that has overseen a raft of climate-friendly legislation and regulations, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, which has pumped billions of dollars into new solar, wind, electric car and battery deployment.

This activity has helped create more than 300,000 new jobs in clean energy technologies, as well as doubling the pace of US emissions reductions. America is now on track to cut its emissions 37% by 2030, compared with 2005, putting it within “striking distance” of reaching its climate target, Gopal said.

Such progress would be erased, however, should Trump be elected and fully embrace Project 2025, a comprehensive rightwing blueprint that the former president has distanced himself from, even though 140 people who worked in the last Trump administration contributed to it. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, wrote the foreword to a book by a leader of Project 2025.

Project 2025 calls for a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere”.

Adopting this policy wishlist would, compared with business as usual, result in 2.7bn tonnes of extra emissions by 2030 and 26bn tonnes of further emissions by 2050, the point at which the world would need to have eliminated new fossil-fuel pollution entering the atmosphere to avoid climate breakdown, Energy Innovation found.

It would also, according to the new modeling, cause several thousand extra premature deaths by the end of the decade due to worsened air pollution, and cause a bump in Americans’ household costs compared to a path of more ambitious climate action. The Project 2025 team did not respond to a request for comment.

“Project 2025 just seems like the road to hell made with evil intentions,” said Gina McCarthy, the former top climate adviser to Biden. “It really has to be rejected, and I think it summarily will be. Even Trump has realized how extreme it is: he had to publicly disown it.”

In his own commitments, Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas, and to eliminate Biden-era policies that spur the take-up of electric cars. A previous analysis of Trump’s plans by Carbon Brief estimated the impact of his new administration would be even greater than in the latest study, adding an extra 4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases by 2030.

Vance has called the IRA a “green energy scam” that primarily benefits China, although some other Republican lawmakers have begun to warm to the legislation as the majority of the more than $300bn in climate investments has flowed to GOP-held areas. Last week, 18 Republican members of Congress wrote to Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives speaker, imploring him not to gut the spending, as Trump has indicated he should do.

Harris, who enjoys the backing of many green groups, has accused Trump of intending to “surrender our fight against the climate crisis”.

In a speech in Arizona last week, she said: “And, Arizona, every day you feel the impact of extreme heat and drought. You know this crisis is real. He calls it a hoax.”

However, even if Harris wins and secures the Biden climate policies there is still a significant gap to getting the US to net zero. Energy Innovation said that further actions, such as cutting pollution from buildings, restoring degraded land and new regulations upon industry and energy use, will be required if the climate targets are to be hit.

“The benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act have been startling to see,” said McCarthy. “But it is a foundation to do more.”