Project 2025
A Matter of Degrees
Dr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Project 2025 has been all over the news lately. But what exactly is this conservative playbook for the Federal government? And what does it mean for climate policy?
This week, A Matter of Degrees dives into the Heritage Foundation's plan for the next conservative presidential administration. Just weeks away from a pivotal election, we lay out what Project 2025 would mean for the climate movement and how it threatens to unwind all the progress we've made. This 900+ page document covers a lot of ground and, as we found out, the devil is in the details. In this episode, we walk through the policies that define Project 2025's vision for a Federal government that's fundamentally anti-government, anti-science, and anti-equity and justice. We also take a hard look at just exactly how we got here: who wrote Project 2025, who benefits from it, and what we can learn from it.
To discuss all of this, and much more, we spoke to Abbie Dillen, the President of EarthJustice, Zoya Teirstein, a staff writer at GRIST, and Jade Begay, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Also referenced in this episode is Zoya's article on Project 2025 and climate policy and The Second Half Of The Decisive Decade: Potential U.S. Pathways On Climate, Jobs, And Health report by Energy Innovation, which models the impact of different climate and energy policy pathways starting in January 2025.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Climate change allegedly is everywhere. |
| 0:03.0 | And if the American people elect a conservative president, |
| 0:07.0 | his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere. |
| 0:13.0 | And according to our intelligence community, the number one threat facing our country today is |
| 0:19.0 | drum roll, climate change. Not Russia, not China, not |
| 0:23.8 | AI, climate change. Today we're going to talk about Project 2025, the controversial playbook |
| 0:30.4 | for a right-wing presidential administration. You just heard a clip from one of their training |
| 0:35.2 | videos obtained by ProPublica and documented. |
| 0:38.8 | But what exactly is Project 2025? |
| 0:42.0 | Who created it? |
| 0:43.5 | And what would it mean for climate progress? |
| 0:51.0 | Welcome back to a matter of degrees. |
| 0:53.7 | I'm Dr. Leah Stokes. And I'm Dr. Catherine Wilkinson. |
| 0:57.7 | Project 2025 calls itself the Presidential Transition Project. |
| 1:02.1 | It's housed at the ultra-conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. |
| 1:06.5 | In April 2023, the group published an almost 900-page document titled Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise. |
| 1:15.4 | The proposal lays out detailed plans for the next conservative presidential administration. |
| 1:21.2 | It's essentially a wish list of the far right to gut the U.S. government. |
| 1:25.2 | On the first page of their website, which is just |
| 1:28.0 | Project 2025.org, you can see what they're all about. Finish building the wall is the first |
| 1:34.3 | bullet point, and the proposals just go on from there. In the 80s, it was acid rain. We were all |
| 1:40.5 | going to die from the acid rain. And then it moved to global warming, which I think, you know, most of the people watching this table remember. |
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