Project 2025 Means Undoing Climate Solutions. We’ll Fight Back.
We are prepared to defend the environment and communities no matter who holds political office.
The Park Fire burns through the night on July 30, 2024 near Chico, California. (David McNew / Getty Images)
September 27, 2024
The Project 2025 policy playbook written by former government officials and Heritage Foundation staff would strip away our rights to clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet. It would trade these basic freedoms to help polluters profit.
Though the scope of planning written down in Project 2025 is new, many of the ideas it presents are not. At Earthjustice, we’ve seen presidential administrations push similar agendas before — and through the courts we have pushed back.
What Project 2025 says about climate change:
- The plan’s authors are climate skeptics: The document refers pointedly to “the perceived threat of climate change.”
- Climate solutions? Don’t need ‘em: Project 2025 calls for undoing many of the clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate solutions bill in history. It also supports Congressional efforts to repeal the law entirely.
- Shut down climate research: The plan would get rid of more than a dozen government offices and agencies that study climate change.
How Earthjustice will respond:
- Confront government with climate reality: We have fought every administration in recent decades to include climate change impacts in various decisions. Earlier this century, we joined in a suit that became a landmark Supreme Court ruling, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, which found that carbon emissions are air pollutants and consequently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must set limits on such pollution. We will defend the necessity to combat climate change — but further delays will hurt us all. An analysis from Energy Innovation found that enacting Project 2025 would increase carbon emissions by 2.7 billion tons by 2030 — equivalent to the annual emissions of India. These policies would cost households $32 billion in higher energy costs, result in 1.7 million lost jobs, and decrease the U.S. GDP $320 billion per year by 2030.
- Fight for science: Earthjustice has previously defended the critical role of scientific experts within the government. In 2020, we won a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s illegal decision to remove independent science advisors from the EPA.