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As the world experiences what may become its Hottest year on recordthe right-wing group behind 2025 Project The policy roadmap for a second Trump administration wants to step up oil and gas drilling, roll back regulation and research funding, and “completely eliminate mention of climate change from everywhere,” according to a training video. Reported It was reported by ProPublica last week.
However, a senior staffer at the Center for American Renewal (CRA), one of the organizations involved in Project 2025, seemed to have doubts. In previously unreported private remarks, Micah Meadowcroft, who served at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration and is now CRA’s director of research and a contributing editor to U.S. News, said: American Conservatives— raises questions about the way Republicans talk about environmental policy.
Meadowcroft said the Republicans Secret recording Photographed by the Climate Reporting Center, which recorded The New Republictend to think that “environmental protection is not something you have to care about. You just create enough wealth and then you can buy yourself into a pollution deficit later. So it’s a luxury. Keep industrializing. Keep doing everything. We’ll worry about it later. Somebody’s going to have a technological breakthrough and it’s going to eat up all the plastic in the ground.” Meadowcroft called this approach “a stupid thing to do, to treat it as a selfish, clear, you know, sure prophecy.” As of press time, Meadowcroft had not responded to a request for comment on these remarks.
Meadowcroft called the move “silly,” but it sounds a lot like the 2025 plan’s “Leadership Mandate,” a 900-page document that lays out the coalition’s governance agenda and lists Meadowcroft as a “contributor.” debate “History shows that economic growth and technological/scientific advances through human ingenuity are the best ways to prevent and mitigate extreme weather events.”
Meadowcroft’s private remarks were recorded as Months-long investigation The 2025 Project, compiled by the Climate Reporting Centre, was released last week. Both reporters were working undercover for CCR, posing as relatives of wealthy conservative donors who were interested in the 2025 project and were considering donating to the CRA. They arranged a meeting with the organization’s founder and president, Russel Vought, who was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration. Prior to Vought’s arrival, the actor and the reporter placed cameras around the Washington, D.C. hotel suite where they were meeting. The meeting with Vought was arranged with the help of Meadowcroft. The reporter had met Meadowcroft a few weeks earlier at the National Conservative Convention (“NatCon”) in Washington, D.C. Like Vought, Meadowcroft was unaware that he was speaking with an undercover investigator.
Neither the Center for American Renewal nor the Trump campaign responded to CCR’s request for comment, but CRA’s communications director said on social media: “None of this is a secret. It would be easier to just Google it and ‘discover’ what has already appeared on our website and in countless media interviews.”
During NatCon, Meadowcroft said privately that Republicans and the “green left” tend to fall into similar traps when talking about climate: “I think historically both the Republican Party and the green left have had a very stupid technological optimism in their approach to environmentalism,” Meadowcroft said. He seems to think the “green left” has historically been too optimistic about the technologies available to reduce pollution, including electric cars and auto emissions standards. Those on the left, he complained, “insist that, ‘Look, you’re all going to be driving electric cars in 10 years.’ So when are you going to build a grid that can support charging stations, saturate them, and get cars down to a point where the middle class can afford them? They just wave their hands and say, ‘We’re going to save the country. We don’t have to figure it out. It’s going to happen.’ They think technology will catch up with regulation.”
Meadowcroft believes the right approach is to first “recognize that we have done an amazing job cleaning up America’s air and water,” particularly through the Clean Air Act, which he calls ‘Very successful’ but He then seemed to suggest that — instead of continually updating the EPA’s pollution rules to address new types of pollution and new data on the harm they cause —The government should Decide once and for all what clean air looks like to us. He said the government should not “keep seeking lower and lower pollution limits”.
The Clean Air Act does not explicitly define what it calls a “pollution control system”; as Meadowcroft points out, the act also does not provide an absolute, fixed definition of clean air. Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the so-called “Chevron Doctrine,” which gave executive agencies broad latitude to interpret and close such gaps, judges may soon be able to decide for themselves what “clean air” means. This is particularly concerning given how many right-wing judicial appointments—from the Supreme Court to the federal court system—have been active in groups like the Federalist Society. funds From some Same Dark Money Donors Support the 2025 project.
Walter and Meadowcroft In the CCR recordings, not much time is spent talking about climate policy. But what they do say largely echoes what’s in Project 2025. Vought talks about “repealing initiatives like Biden’s Green New Deal and things like that, fake infrastructure.” It’s part of a larger attack on what he calls a “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”
“We probably need to repeal NEPA,” Meadowcroft said at one point, referring to the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of permit decisions. He called NEPA’s review process “just insane. And it seems impossible to reform. It needs to be repealed and restarted.”
A second Trump administration will have unprecedented tools to pursue these policies, as well as others outlined in the 2025 Project. Comments by people like Meadowcroft—essentially attacks on their own side—suggest a divided movement fearful of dissent within its ranks; in conversations with Tom and Edward, Vought was more concerned that not everyone in Trump’s camp is a true believer. However, decades of right-wing efforts to undermine democracy and take over the judiciary mean that even a divided right will be better able than ever to implement its preferred policies.
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