Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation recently released a 920-page blueprint to drastically eliminate, or outright reverse, many of the climate change policies and laws put in place by the Biden administration, if a Republican wins the White House in 2024.
Titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the document is a sprawling, aggressive work that sets the tone all across the government to deconstruct and remake the federal government, starting with the White House and spreading to all executive departments. While radical policy shifts like these have been common in history, what makes this one different is that, coming out so far ahead of the 2024 election, its goal is for a new Republican administration to hit the ground running from day one.
And when it comes to climate and energy, the proposals are alarming. In essence, the document – spearheaded by Paul Dans and Spencer Chretien, both veterans of the Trump administration – wraps the reversal of many of the current climate agenda goals of the Biden administration (and further back, to the remnants of policy from the Obama administration) in a cloak of energy security, resiliency, and fear.
“Ideologically driven government policies have thrust the United States into a new energy crisis” says the introduction to the section on the Department of Energy and Commissions. This chapter was written by Bernard L. McNamee, once the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) during the Trump administration. One of McNamee’s most notable controversies was being caught on video stating that there was an “organized propaganda war” being waged by leftists against fossil fuels, and prior to that, backing efforts to bail out the coal and nuclear industries when he was with the Department of Energy, an effort that failed.
“The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme ‘green’ policies,” he writes, citing that taxpayer dollars are going towards “favored interests” like an electric grid, saying that, in a play straight out of Fear Politics, “government control of energy is control of people and the economy.”
As just one example, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, stating that “taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.” If this office cannot be eliminated, then the blueprint suggests reorienting it to focus on things like “fundamental energy research, consistent with law” and further goes on to say that, for example, when it comes to energy efficiency standards for appliances, government should “limit regulatory overreach and protect against excessively stringent standards.”
Another example has to do with the grid, where the proposal states that renewables should not be expanded for the grid and improving the grid nationwide should focus on reliability and expansion. As for clean energy and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration, which is an office dedicated to transitioning to a decarbonized energy system, the writers propose that “The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate all DOE energy demonstration programs, including those in OCED. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.”
And what about the Inflation Reduction Act? Gut it, says Project 2025. Despite estimates from Climate Power, an environmental advocacy group, that more than 170,000 jobs have been created directly as a result of the IRA, Project 2025 says the only solution is to “support repeal” of the IRA, as well as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, laws passed that, according to McNamee, “are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests.” He also calls for the end of government interference in “energy decisions,” ending the “war on oil and natural gas,” and to refocus FERC, where he was once director, to “ensuring that customers have affordable and reliable electricity, natural gas, and oil, and no longer allow it to favor special interests and progressive causes.”
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise concludes with a piece written by Edwin J. Feulner, once the president of The Heritage Foundation, and one of the leaders of conservative thought in the U.S. Feulner writes that after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, “the Administration had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations” which had been spelled out in its Mandate for Leadership that was developed before that election. These included tax cuts and cutting regulations, among other things. If a Republican wins the presidency in 2024 and begins to implement the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, one of its first acts would be to “rein in the Environmental Protection Agency.”
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