The California-based think tank Energy Innovation on Wednesday published a report showing that the right-wing Project 2025 manifesto, if implemented by a Republican administration, would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2.7 billion metric tons by 2030 and cause there to be 1.7 million fewer jobs in that year, compared to the current trajectory.
The analysis illustrates the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. Project 2025 includes a 922-page plan of action written by right-wing groups, covering a wide array of public policy areas including energy and climate. Republican nominee Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, which has been the subject of extensive scrutiny over the last two months and has proven unpopular with the American public, but it’s broadly in keeping with his agenda, observers say.
The Energy Innovation report assesses the Project 2025 scenario against both current policies and a hypothetical “continued climate leadership” scenario in which the U.S. strengthens its climate policies to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement.
“The U.S. faces a fork in the road starting in January of 2025 with two climate and energy policy pathways that are highly divergent,” Anand Gopal, the think tank’s executive director of policy research and a co-author of the report, told The Guardian.
The report authors credited strong federal policy under the Biden administration with significantly lowering the country’s emissions trajectory, thanks to new laws and standards, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The result is that the U.S. is on track to lower emissions by 37% from its 2005 baseline by 2030. This puts the country “within striking distance” of meeting its 2030 commitment under the Paris agreement, which is to reduce emissions by 50-52% from 2005 levels.
Instead of closing that gap, a second Trump administration using Project 2025 as a blueprint would widen it considerably. Project 2025 calls for the repeal of most of the IRA, including clean energy tax credits. It also proposes eliminating emissions standards for appliances, making vehicle fuel economy standards less strict, expanding oil and gas leases, and increasing liquefied natural gas export capacity, among other measures.
Trump’s critics say that the Project 2025 agenda, despite his efforts to distance himself from it, is in keeping with his “drill, baby, drill” motto—which is written in all caps in his party’s platform.
The Energy Innovation report shows that Project 2025 would, in addition to its negative impact on emissions, also be bad for jobs. There would be 1.7 million fewer jobs in 2030 if the plan was implemented, compared to the current trajectory, the report says.
The authors wrote that while fossil fuel sectors would have more jobs under a Project 2025 scenario, those job gains would be “more than offset by job losses elsewhere in the economy,” due to the lost green jobs. They cited research showing that Biden administration policies including the IRA had already generated significant jobs.
The report also found that an administration guided by Project 2025 would have deleterious effects on public health, gross domestic product, and household expenses.
Energy Innovation’s estimate of the climate impact of a second Trump administration may in fact be a conservative one. A previous analysis by Carbon Brief, a data journalism website based in the United Kingdom, found that a Trump victory would lead to about 4 billion metric tons of added greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to the 2.7 billion metric tons cited in Wednesday’s report.
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