As detailed in its nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 rejects climate science and dismisses efforts to reduce planet-warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy in favor of serving the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Overseen by Roberts, who wrote the book’s foreword, the Heritage plan for a future GOP administration seeks to gut or hamstring federal agencies working on renewable energy deployment, climate science, and environmental safeguards while opening up state and federal public lands for oil and gas extraction.
In Project 2025’s policy book, Roberts attacked environmentalists, the U.N., and the Environmental Protection Agency, calling for the unfettered use of oil and gas
In the foreword of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy book, Roberts sets the tone for the plan's hostility toward climate action and wholesale endorsement of fully extracting our oil and gas reserves, a path scientists have warned would be catastrophic.
- Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.” He claims that those who suffer most from environmental policies are the “aged, poor, and vulnerable.” Roberts continues, “At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Roberts attacks global elites and calls for abandoning international organizations like the United Nations. Claiming that “global elites” and organizations like the United Nations are making decisions on climate change that are insulated “from the sovereignty of national electorates,” Roberts argues, “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned.” Additionally, Project 2025 demands that “the next conservative Administration should withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Roberts claims the EPA “quietly strangles domestic energy production,” later adding, “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world.” Roberts goes on to claim that “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for ‘we the people.’” Under Roberts’ leadership, Project 2025’s section on energy production was reportedly written by the oil and gas industry and provides a blueprint for how the next president can turn “drill, baby, drill” into federal policy. Notably, the industry is already producing record amounts of oil and gas under the Biden-Harris administration, all while holding thousands of unused drilling permits. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Media Matters, 8/8/24; Vox, 3/13/24; PolitiFact, 3/29/22]
Update (9/9/24): The Times replied to this piece with the following statement: “Climate Forward is a live journalism event that has a history of bringing together newsmakers who seek to influence climate and political policy for a day of rigorous, challenging interviews. We anticipate the same for this year's event.”
