If you browse the Internet or watch TV you've probably heard of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, mapped out by a coalition of 100 conservative think tanks, spearheaded (publicly at least) by the Heritage Foundation, which also had a hand in shaping and staffing the first Trump administration. Nothing written down in the Project 2025 manifesto is new, per se, nor is it new that they've written it down (Heritage put out a similar "Mandate for Leadership" in 2016, gearing up for the first Trump term. For that matter, they've been 

 updated, though, and it's handy to have it all written out, side by side, a clear window into what lies behind the door on the right.

One thing that’s important to note is that once again we see that those pushing against climate action are not just aligned with those attacking trans rights, racial justice, labor rights and reproductive rights, but are in the same organizations, being funded by the same universe of backers.

The complete Project 2025 manifesto is 900 pages (?!!), which might explain why it sometimes feels like we're hearing about this thing all the time yet don't know much about it. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I have managed to get to page 500, including Chapter 13, in which the plan for the Environmental Protection Agency is laid out.

The first thing I noticed is the chapter's author: Mandy Gunasekara. Today, Gunasekara is a visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and senior policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's organization funded by the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Koch-backed donor-advised fund Donors Trust. A lawyer by training, 

 been a member of the CO2 Coalition (you might recognize her as the Republican witness during Rep Jamie Raskin's 2019 Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties' 

 on "The Oil Industry's Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change"), worked for Trump's EPA (first as principal deputy assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation and then as chief of staff to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler), where she claims to have been "the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan", and was famously the Senator James Inhofe staffer who handed him a snowball during a 2015 hearing in which he claimed the existence of snow meant global warming wasn't a problem. She was Majority Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works when Inhofe chaired it from 2015-2017, and led committee actions and policy development on Clean Air Act and climate change issues.

It would not be remotely surprising to see Gunasekara tapped as EPA chief in a second Trump administration. Following is a rundown of her key proposals. It's a long read, but not 32-pages long, so...you're welcome? 

First, the broad strokes. A Trump EPA would:

Cut any program focused on climate (including climate czars);

Limit the agency's ability to regulate under both the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act;

"Pause for review" (aka cut) anything that references "environmental justice" (because "reverse racism") and eliminate the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights;

 that didn't quite make it last time around, which specifically targets the long-term epidemiological studies that linked air pollution to shorter lives and were used to justify air-quality regulations;

Repeal or curtail the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes the energy transition
and has led to a renewable energy boom in the US.

Incorporate "a diversity of scientific viewpoints" in decision-making (including those with no real scientific basis, a la climate denial)

Curtail consideration of the social cost of carbon

Politicize the agency, giving all authority to political appointees over scientists;

Cut EPA funding of university research and Support repeal of the Global Change Research Act, which supports research into the impact of climate change.

Move away from anything supporting energy transition

Move away from regulating pesticides and agrichemcials

Revisit the designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA.

Climate and Air Pollution Go Hand in Hand

I've written before about Steve Milloy, the tobacco and coal lobbyist, and his longtime war on 

. This proposal has his fingerprints all over it. Which makes sense for a few reasons: First, Gunasekara has no scientific background whatsoever, so she'd need someone like Milloy to outline a plan like this. Milloy got a BA in natural sciences and then a masters in biostastics from Johns Hopkins University. Although he's never actually worked as a scientist, those qualifications still make him uniquely science-y in the climate denier-sphere. Milloy went to Georgetown law school after Johns Hopkins, had a brief stint at the Securities Exchange Commission and then got a job with infamous industry lobbyist Jim Tozzi after he “ran into” him one day. “He had an unusual lobbying practice where he lobbied regulatory agencies, so he hired me to work on risk issues because of my background in biostatistics and law,” Milloy told me.

Gunasekara and Milloy have both been visiting fellows at the Heritage Foundation, and Milloy was on the Trump EPA transition team when Gunasekara was an early appointee for the agency. "I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” Milloy told me in 2020.

That "background in EPA science" came during the 90s, when Milloy was between stints as the science policy director for the National Environmental Policy Institute, a lobbying group funded by Occidental Petroleum and a handful of other oil companies that aimed to roll back EPA Superfund rules, and working as the director of the The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), an organization Tozzi worked with PR firm APCO to create for Philip Morris that aimed to poke holes in the science linking smoking, and particularly secondhand smoke, to cancer.

In between those gigs, “I got a big contract from DOE to study whether EPA science was based on science or politics,” Milloy said. That was the DOE's Regulatory Impact Project, Inc., which had hired Milloy to work on 

 too. “I got the contract under Bush and finished under Clinton, and when the report was done and I sent it up the line to DOE, which was now all Clinton appointees. They said I couldn’t publish it, because I said regulations were based on politics and not science. So, I decided to cut my contract and publish it on my own. It got picked up in the Wall Street Journal and that’s what sort of launched me into whatever I am today.”

He’s never stopped trying to reshape the EPA the way he initially recommended in that report, back in the mid-1990s. And he's never stopped fighting air pollution regulations either, or warning conservatives and fossil fuel executives that regulating air pollution “is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions,” as he put it to me. Both of these crusades factor heavily into Gunasekara's Project 2025 EPA chapter.

In it, she proposes that the EPA embrace “true transparency” and “open-source science,” clear nods to Milloy’s “secret science” proposals for anyone who’s ever read them. To accomplish this, Gunasekara says the EPA must:

“Shift responsibility for evaluating misconduct away from its Office of Scientific Integrity, which has been overseen by environmental activists, and toward an independent body.”

“Work (including with Congress) to provide incentives similar to those under the False Claims Act for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct, thereby saving taxpayers from having to bear the costs involved in expending unnecessary resources.”

Avoid proprietary, black box models for key regulations. Nearly all major EPA regulations are based on nontransparent models for which the public lacks access or for which significant costs prevent the public from understanding agency analysis.

She goes after air pollution regulations from multiple angles too (all while proclaiming that a “conservative EPA” will provide cleaner air, water and soil, mind you), proposing reforms for the Office of Air and Radiation—where she once worked, during the Trump administration—as well as changes to National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee that helps to set them, and proposing limits to the application of the Clean Air Act.

 Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions, It Will Work to Make it Impossible for 

It's not at all surprising that this proposal aims to cut any EPA program focused on dealing with climate change. Nor is it shocking that the chapter on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) suggests getting rid of the Atmospheric part altogether, and effectively shutting NOAA down apart from a few bits and bobs tucked into other agencies. Lines that sound like they were lifted from an early aughts climate denial blog swimming in Tea Party memes are common too, like this gem: “Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs."

Where Project 2025 takes things a step further than one might expect is in its proposals to hamstring any future efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, too.

Gunasekara wants to "notify Congress that EPA will not conduct any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization," for a start, calling to mind the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v EPA, when justices invoked the "major questions doctrine," arguing that unless Congress explicitly moves to regulate greenhouse gases, and gives the power to do so to the EPA, the agency shouldn't even think about it.

She also wants to "eliminate the use of unauthorized regulatory inputs like the social cost of carbon, black box and proprietary models, and unrealistic climate scenarios, including those based on Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5."

RCP 8.5 is one of the projected future scenarios mapped out by climate scientists in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While those in favor of increasing development of fossil fuels, like Gunasekara, dismiss it as "unrealistic" or a "worst-case scenario," actual scientists debate the details but generally take the projection seriously. 

 future concentrations of atmospheric carbon on the business-as-usual path. 

 describe RCP 8.5 concentrations as unlikely, yet plausible, on the business-as-usual path and note that RCP 8.5 is consistent with the current pace of global emissions. And 

 think the anthropogenic emissions associated with RCP 8.5 are unlikely, but only because they say increased coal energy usage would run counter to current energy transition trends. The 

Scenarios without additional efforts to constrain emissions (‘baseline scenarios’) lead to pathways ranging between RCP6.0 and RCP8.5.”

An interesting conundrum here: Gunasekara wants to eliminate the idea of a "social cost of carbon," but one of the fossil fuel industry's most promising lifelines at the moment is carbon capture, the financial viability of which hinges on a high cost for carbon. The price per metric tonne that the government has agreed to pay, via the 45Q tax credit increase that Senator Joe Manchin negotiated in the Inflation Reduction Act, is $85, already far higher than the EPA's social cost of carbon, at $51 per metric tonne. Seems like it would be hard to justify the tax credit if there's no social cost of carbon, but cognitive dissonance has never gotten in the way of passing policy.

Elsewhere in the chapter, Gunasekara writes about wanting to "limit EPA’s reliance on Clean Air Act section 30121 general rulemaking authority to ensure that it is not abused to issue regulations for which EPA lacks substantive authority elsewhere in the statute," another clear attempt to block the agency's ability to do anything about greenhouse gas emissions. In other sections she's more explicit, writing that the agency should "remove the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for any source category that is not currently being regulated," calling it a "significant burden" on small businesses. She also suggests the agency "update the 2009 endangerment finding," referring to the agency's finding under Clean Air Act section 202(a) that 

greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endanger both the public health and the environment for current and future generations

. The chapter also recommends repealing some of the regulations on hydrofluorocarbons, and changing course on how transportation emissions are dealt with, proposing a lifecycle analysis of electric vehicles; integrating cost, choice and other non-environmental concerns into the agency's greenhouse gas car standards; and walking back efforts to monitor or regulate air travel and truck emissions.

The EPA Is Too Political! Put Political Appointees In Charge of Everything

For all its squawking about how the EPA has been politicized, P2025 recommends putting political appointees in charge of:

the Office of Transportation and Air Quality (OTAQ);

the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS);

a newly elevated American Indian Office (AIO), to be headquartered in an oil and gas region (Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado are recommended);

the Office of Research & Development, where Gunasekara recommends appointing and empowering a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (

no fewer than six senior political appointees

) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities. "Qualifications for these positions should emphasize management, oversight, and execution skills (including in leading state environmental agencies) as opposed to personal scientific output." Yes, god forbid we put scientists in charge of the science.

establishing a political Chief of Staff to oversee the air office in general and requiring regional offices to receive approval from them for enforcement actions;

pulling the Renewable Fuel Standard out of the OTAQ into its own sub-office, run by a political appointee; (and establish a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy to work together to establish RFS programs. Hello, ethanol!)

Also throughout this chapter, Gunasekara suggests cutting the federal EPA budget and giving the states more power, while also mapping out a system in which state and regional EPAs are entirely under the control of political appointees. The section on the EPA's legal counsel, for example, recommends that the agency  “establish a policy of legally speaking with one voice,” and notes: “Some EPA offices (for example, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance and the Offices of Regional Counsel) assert legal positions and interpretations of the law that conflict with an Administration’s interpretation as articulated by the Office of General Counsel with input from program offices." These "inconsistent legal positions"are deemed unacceptable, and it's recommended that all attorneys with authority to represent the EPA be housed at the federal level (under a political appointee) in the Office of General Counsel.

If ever there was a crystal-clear example of why it's important for anyone concerned about acting on climate to tune in to and join social justice fights, the intersection between efforts to push against diversity and inclusion and those to block climate policy is it. Over the past year or so, a slew of court cases have argued that initiatives meant to support diversity—in the workplace, at universities, in investments—discriminate against white people. A dozen or so of these cases have been brought by many of the same groups that are on Project 2025's advisory board, organizations like America First Legal Foundation, which is led by former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Funding for the litigation comes from various other Project 2025 organizations, many of which also fed the original attempt to create a legal basis for “reverse racism” claims in the 90s: the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network, and Pacific Legal Foundation (which is 

 of libertarian think tanks), now joined by 

, who’s former Federalist Society president and longtime conservative legal activist Leonard Leo's new benefactor. Their collective pockets contain more than enough to, as Leo 

 last year, “flood the zone with cases.”

Over the past year, the fight against diversity and the fight against climate policy have joined forces in the fight against the most boring of all opponents: investment risk disclosure. Specifically, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk disclosure, which spent its first 20 or so years of existence being at worst ignored, and often embraced by companies that used social responsibility reports to boost their brands and unlock capital from do-gooder investors.

The various segments on environmental justice in Project 2025's EPA chapter echo the same arguments in the anti-ESG fight against "woke capital" and the anti-DEI cases crying "reverse racism." It recommends pausing or cutting all environmental justice-focused programs that were established or expanded under Biden and emphasizes the need to make sure they are being based on “neutral constitutional principles.”

It specifically cites cases various Project 2025 organizations have brought or participated in “The next Administration should pause and review all ongoing EJ and Title VI actions to ensure that they are consistent with any forthcoming SCOTUS decision.”

All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men (and Women)

Although Project2025 has been attributed in most mainstream media to The Heritage Foundation, more than 100 organizations have contributed to it. Many of them share funders, several are led or staffed by former Trump administration officials, and still more have swapped staff amongst themselves. And, of course, no surprise, several are partners of the

, or otherwise affiliated with the group. 

 is our attempt to capture it all, including which organizations seem to be in violation of their tax-exempt status: 

Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

 Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last week was Climate Week in New York, and I went for the first time, actually.

The main reason I was there was to do a panel with with Bill McKibben and Kendra Pierre Louis, moderated by Genevieve Gunther on the language of climate politics, which is also the subject and title of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it down to six key words that just keep showing up over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one of those words and offers a deep dive into how that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant, how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what kind of messaging you could use to combat it.

I got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as well and talk about the book, why it's made some people so mad on the internet, and a lot more. After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit of the book, and then we're going to have that conversation. That's coming up after this quick message.

 Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this "yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need keep using them and with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, america should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China."

This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't be that destructive or in some versions of the story because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

 Yes. Awesome. Okay. I want to have you start by talking a little bit about where the idea from the book came in general and then how you whittled it down to these six key words that I do feel like really capture the essence of the sort of discourse that we're hearing

 so glad to hear Yeah. Yeah, because the book started out being much bigger. It was sprawling. I had like, you know, I don't know, almost almost 27 words that I was thinking about writing about. So definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning. But I conceived of this book in 2017, after the New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens away from the Wall Street journal. favorite voice at the Times.

At the time though, Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier. Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know, climate change a religion or climate change science a religion, um, presided over by like, Singularly unattractive hairfans, which I just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right?

 And, you know, his hiring generated a ton of controversy, many climate scientists and activists tried to get the Times to rescind their offer to him because they just thought it was outrageous that someone who, you know, was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at the sort of paper of record. But, of course, the Times didn't want to... 

 respond to outside pressure very often or really ever so Stephens took his position and he wrote, arrogantly enough, his first column about climate change. And it was called the column was called a climate of complete certainty And what this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel talking point that had been kind of dominant in the discourse . And that talking point as you know yourself You Was that the science of climate change is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of policy moves that we would need to make, or the behavior changes we would need to make in order to halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis because the climate crisis might not even be a thing.

 Now, I had just taken level course in climate science. so while I was reading this column, was like, wait a minute. this man is using the word uncertainty in a kind common sense, colloquial way. He's using the of word to say uncertainty means not enough information or knowing enough come to some sort of decision or judgment. Right. But this is actually the way that climate scientists use the word research. So in...

 or that scientists in general, like this is the language of science in which uncertainty means something very different.

 Exactly. And what it means is the range of outcomes you can project out of a model with confidence. I mean confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval. So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research, they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results were correct or that what they were studying was real. What they were saying was there's a range of possible outcomes from bad to really bad that they project confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel interests put this sort other meaning of uncertainty out into the public discourse through the mediasphere, anytime a climate scientist in his or her public communications would talk about uncertainty of their research, seem to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change was real or not.

What fossil fuel interests had done was appropriate, weaponize, and kind of distort the meaning of the scientific term order kind manipulate scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So I saw this dynamic uncertainty, I started see everywhere.

 So I like, you know, I got all these folder files because I'm very old school. And I, you know, made files email and I started research into the words that seemed to have salience for me connected climate change. And I was doing sort of database academic style research. I was reading, research in the social sciences, in rhetoric, um, in climate science. But I was also sort of pulling news articles and like press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of, high and low discourse, um, news media and I was dumping it all into files.

And after about 18 months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way of doing research, I noticed that the files for these words were much thicker than the other ones.

 And that in these files were often, um, you know, language that had been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves in oil and gas advertisements, like all the things that we sort of centered and focused on. What we're going to do to try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, okay, these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics.

And I need to focus the book on these words. So that's what I decided to do.

 And they all kind of relate to each other in this way too, that I think is really interesting to create this, well, I think of it as like a narrowing of climate solutions too, it sort of puts these parameters on how we're allowed to even talk about or think about this issue that's very limiting.

 Well, it's interesting you say that because, you know, for the chapter on growth, it took a long time to write this chapter because, you know, first I had to sort of really get my head around kind of neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns the climate crisis in order to understand you counter voices might be arguing

 And then I read all the degrowth literature. Um, and I sort of first thought to myself, well, am I going to try to talk about the language of growth in in degrowth framework?

What am I going to do here? And then I realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about degrowth, I don't think, while everybody universally believes that growth itself is a climate solution. Like, as long as you believe that being rich will protect you from climate devastation, why would anyone embrace degrowth? And so I thought, okay, this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that will be available to us. even if the planet sort of heats up three degrees or more

 and that will be available to everyone infinitely

 A hundred percent. Exactly. Like growth will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because as you said, I felt like it was really kind limiting our imagination of how we might need to transform the world in order to halt global heating. Yeah, and I discovered as I say in the chapter that belief growth will just Yeah. no matter what we do to the planet is based on absolutely nothing. It's based on beliefs that have no empirical foundation whatsoever.

 It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one of these beliefs is that human beings will be able to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets. And you know, humans are pretty ingenious. we are adaptable, but in fact, there is no research showing that any country, including developed nations in the global north, have to date adapted to climate change. And It's just going to get harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these climate change impacts. So, you know, if you have a seawall, it'll keep the water out until the day that the water gets so high that it won't keep the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks that we're facing and none this sort of lack of historical evidence that 

 going to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, make it into economic models. In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look at sort of historical relationships between say heat and GDP growth And try to project those out into the future. And then they adjust their results by using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to downplay or adjust the dangers that they project. by at the past and... And drawing it out into the future, by using this mathematical variable that they give value to, simply based on the economist's belief in how much we're going to be able to adapt in the future. So at the bottom, it's just about the individual economist's trust that adaptation is possible, and it's something that we're going to do. Not based any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And that's just one of the fantasies or the, the ephemeral beliefs that support, or at least, um, justify this fundamental belief of the entire planet, that growth will just continue even if we ruin our climate system.

 It's so interesting because a lot of the things in here had me also thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted in very gendered terms too, or even just science versus humanities kind of language too, where it's like, oh, economists are, , hard science, objective measurement, whatever.

But climate activists don't understand that or certain technologies. It's like, oh, well, you just don't understand the engineering behind it or whatever. I've had this experience of digging into an economic model and realizing that it's just based on, yeah, one person's assumptions or beliefs or whatever.

And being like, no, I must be wrong. It can't be that. You know, I must not be understanding the numbers or whatever. And like...

 I had that experience too, but let me be clear. Every single chapter in this book. Yeah. chapters on economics were read by some of the, Most respected climate economists working today and the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned out in climate discourse to be, code for carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration. So CDR and CCS. So in that chapter I had. not only one of the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter But I had two other climate scientists read this chapter. So I also thought is this possible like it it as flimsy as I think it is? Exactly. in fact It is. And it's hard to tell because very often when we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized or just sort of touch on one thing. But they marshal these like ideological beliefs that I try to sort of disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how this ideology is very often based no information like in the growth case or false information like in the CDR case.

 So once you compile all the information and put it together, it becomes easier to show how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil fuel propaganda themselves.

 Yes, totally. One of the very compelling things about this book is that you see it. You're just like, Oh, thank That's

 like how that has shaped. Um, okay. I want to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute cause they, they've been very mad about your book and also, you mentioned them in the book and they have been, quite, adamant proponents of some of these ideas and particularly in the vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking about growth in the right way or innovation in the right way.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you about just kind of your thoughts on how much they have shaped the public discourse and how they have been able to do that.

 I mean, i, you know, I got the climate movement, as I said, in 2017. so I perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse. I do see them kind of, um, exemplifying a a kind of centrist position, center position climate crisis, which is why they're very with many centrist journalists, and leaders because they put the of imprimatur of environmentalism on this centrist position. Right. And the problem with this position, in my view, is not that it's, you know, advocating for developing new technologies. Clearly, we will need that. Like, I am a proponent of lab grown meat, To me, it is not that they are pushing for nuclear. I actually also think that nuclear energy would be an excellent alternative thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with solar or wind, for example.

You know, like 8 million people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right? And the number of people, that we can trace, of course, who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot smaller than that. So if you want to just judge two different forms of energy based on the number of people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins, right? problem with the Breakthrough Institute is they promote expanding fossil fuels.

That is my problem with them because this is to me, the belief, the false belief that is really preventing our politics, our, business leaders, even our, climate advocacy from Solving problem or even really knowing there is this idea we can do We can develop clean energy and we can support expanding fossil fuel extract extraction. We can have more evermore. more and gas and ever more clean energy. And somehow we're gonna deal with climate change anyway. So this is the false belief that is not just coming from fossil fuel interests on the right. It's also coming these center left groups, which give a permission structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They say that coal plants in the global south, quote, save lives.

Let's be clear, it's electricity that saves

that electricity does not need to be generated by coal, which is killing. Millions of people a year, mostly in the global south. And for them, they justify their argument for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that with CDR, um, which is something that they, support.

It's a position that they support, and they platform people who do make that argument. But really, the reason they say we can to expand our fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will never be that bad, right?

It's never gonna be worse than I think Nordhaus called it a case of planetary right? Um, that you can just sort of manage with with what he calls, you know, medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now, climate scientists like Joelle Gerges, the Australian climate scientist, who's one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report. She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease in our planetary body has been established and is now getting worse and that we have to cure cut out. Before it metastasizes out of control. but Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute are very often um, on the opposite side of that. They would call her an alarmist, and they would claim that actually, People who think that climate change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous as the planet continues to heat up are emotional, hysterical, very often women in the climate movement people who aren't serious.

 And their kind of, um, lukewarmer position that, Oh, climate change isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the serious position. But what I try to argue in the book is that in fact, it is. a dishonest position. It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our planet and will happen if not phase out fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero , and halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually a falsehood that they are advancing

 it's fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. I do find it really interesting that Nordhaus in particular takes these really strong stances on science when he has no scientific background. You know, He was a PR guy forever and then

 I know. I love that he was a that he's a PR guy.

 Yeah. And then started the breakthrough and like, you know, now kind of does PR for their ideas.

 Right? Right. Exactly. But like, um, I mean, I just say that. They've been coming after me for couple of weeks now, at the point we are recording this. They've been coming after for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write this book.

 And then I thought, wait a minute, I'm go look at his academic credentials. I have a Ph. D. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and he has a B. A. in history

 from UC Berkeley. So I don't understand how he's, you know, just on that metric, more credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than I am.

And I'm talking about the rhetoric that leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been studying since I went to graduate school, because that was what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like, it's not a different topic for me. It's just a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But it's interesting because other ways, so, so once I sort of like disabused him of that strategy.

Then they started to suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there were some, you know, sloppy errors in the footnotes. Um, they found what I would claim are two errors among 300 in three chapters.

The book has 600 footnotes and it's been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single book in the world will have one or two details that are are wrong,

What they're doing is they're trying to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious I'm all vibes. I don't have research credentials, because they don't want to engage with my arguments they have never defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use.

They have never explained why they believe that economic growth will just continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They have never engaged any of the arguments that I make in the book and defended them. They have only come after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact, Nordhaus on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it these days-- he got mad at me because I quoted him as having said that the agenda to phase out fossil fuels was impossible. And so I said, Okay, does that mean right here that you're gonna say that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels and he he sputtered and fulminated But then reiterated that the climate movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next decade is impossible And then I like tweeted a screenshot of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing and I was like, what? Dude, what is your problem?

 Their problem is, is that they're scared of what I say in the book because I honestly think, and not to be arrogant about this, but I think this is the first book that ties what we think of as traditional climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem, too, but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.

 Yes, I have been seeing this in the last couple of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah, we need to phase out fossil fuels and almost a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance

 Well, there's comms, I mean, it's a, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. Because there is comms research that shows that people don't like it when you tell them they can't use something they're already using, right?

So that, I mean, it's, it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I don't want to downplay that. And so I think people shy away from saying it because it does seem like like tricky or radical. Um, and it has radical implications for our whole world. economic system for sure. but if you believe that climate change is real, if you understand what the science is saying about what's going to happen to our climate system and our, the links between our planet and our economy, if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions. get to net zero or real zero, then, you know, every scientist will tell you that we need to stop using coal, oil, and gas. It's really not up for debate anymore.

 Including like, you know, the IEA, the IPCC, like it's,

 So this is what I quote in the, this is what I quote, In the introduction to the book In 2023, in synthesis report, IPCC said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure. Because that infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for two degrees Celsius, which means that we actually have to like strand some that infrastructure, strand some of those assets, because the total carbon budget has to include like agriculture right and wildfires and other things. So people, so to me, you can say yes climate change is bad, yes I believe in climate change until the cows come home.

But if you are denying that fact, you are a climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic. Right. You're drinking a lot of booze. Your liver is about to croak and your doctor says to you, you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking. And you say, okay, yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.

Like we all know that that person is still in denial. If you say climate change is real, I want to help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact that we already have too many fossil fuels to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry. You are a climate denier.

 I want to talk about the innovation chapter in more detail because we've been doing this series too on like on CDR and carbon capture and we'll eventually get to like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too.

 Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is like, um, I find it interesting how the industry and then like people who are kind of carrying water for them do really. mess with the building blocks of information in this way of like because I feel like there's been um there has been like this real focus on on disinformation, which I almost see as like The end result of all of this stuff, right?

You know, it's like yeah, like that's what we end up with but like that gets built by very strategic investments in particular types of research or white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is, you know, it's like it gets built in that way. So, um, I'm curious how you honed in on CDR and, um, CCS as like the things that you wanted to focus on in that chapter.

 Yeah. I really, didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular, at all. I was just like, why are people talking about innovation in this way? Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution? What does this word mean? That's so vague. And usually when you drill down, this was often in sort of, you know, climate journalism or, um, even just political journalism or business journalism. and you would drill down and it would be about these that would either capture or remove emissions. And then I started to see Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling down into that. I was like, Oh, for them, innovation also means carbon capture.

And, yeah, to some degree, also carbon dioxide removal. I was like, wow, this word is actually code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I think that oil and gas companies were really Greenwashing themselves with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2018 and the rise of the global climate movement, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all came out with net zero, um, targets. They, you know, and they

 but partly because of all of this rhetoric that

 We can... it's fine because we can decarbonize oil and gas

 Exactly. Thank you. That's exactly the point. So what happened was around this question of innovation, oil and gas companies started to claim that they were going to turn themselves into carbon management companies. they were going to be able to either capture the emissions of their products, or they going be able decarbonize their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, carbon from the atmosphere after their products have been used and combusted.

So, you know, usually I don't start with the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the fact that most, I mean, if not all carbon capture projects, which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at the source, most, if not all carbon capture products, to date have failed.

 a very large scale. They have captured nothing close to their targets. And very often they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to power the technology, which if you do a full life cycle assessment, they're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral. neutral.

 That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on that in particular.

 So insofar as you use methane gas as a kind of, you know, firm generation instead of batteries or something else, you might want to slap CCS on that, but it would be very challenging to do it in a way that would actually be carbon neutral and it would be much, much more expensive, even potentially than building out a system of redundancy and lots of storage. or a nuclear or something else. So, and even if the economics pencil out better for CCS, CCS just doesn't work. So that's really what you need to come back to.

 And. The technology has been around for a really long time. Like exactly. It's it doesn't mean it's impossible that it will improve at some point, whatever. But yeah, there are a lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.

 You know what's so interesting? So the rhetoric And I'll get to CDR in a minute. But the rhetoric about CCS from oil and gas companies and from advocates um, trade advocates, is that CCS is a proven technology, right? That's what they say. Because it's been around for so long, right? And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades. This is great. And so now, The EPA has come up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS

 And then in their public comments, they're all like, but it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's

 So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a review copy of my book because he said he wanted to write a review about it. I don't know if he's actually going to write a

Transcription

Guenther digs into six key rhetorical devices that are being used to slow or block climate action. For an academic book, it's made some folks on the Internet awfully mad. In this episode we talk about why, what went into her research, and what it tells us about the coming months.

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Although Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the plans laid out in Project 2025, several of the authors of the blueprint previously served in his administration and have already been floated as agency heads for a second presidency, so it’s hard to imagine the ideas they’ve presented are too far off what another Trump administration would bring. The plans are so extreme, though, that it might be difficult for Americans to imagine their government going that far. But some of the 

 that are part of Project 2025 in the U.S. have weighed in on similar plans in Latin America. For a preview of environmental policy during a second Trump term, Americans need look no further than Argentina.

On the eve of the Argentinian presidential election in 2023, conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson—who recently gave the first campaign rally speech of his career, at a Trump rally —met with then-candidate Javier Milei.

“Do you see climate change as part of a socialist agenda?” Carlson 

 a spirited Milei. “Yes,” he replied without hesitation. “In fact, given the failure in the economic realm evident with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, post-Marxists moved class struggles to other aspects of life (…) For example, the agenda of man against nature, where man harms nature, when the truth is that the world has had other temperature spikes in the past. It is a cycle that exists regardless of man.”

to climate change as a “hoax invented by the Chinese,” the current president of Argentina has been 

 about his belief that climate change is a hoax. “Hello defenders of the idea of climate change

 read his tweet from October 2021, followed by a graph (from an unknown source) showcasing temperature fluctuations from the Paleolithic up to Medieval times, apparently reinforcing his argument that humans are not the cause of rising temperatures.

However, whether it’s man-made or not, climate change is happening and Milei and every other government leader is having to adjust accordingly. Milei’s approach, like Trump’s, has been to say the market will deal with it.

“Milei is not alone in his conceptualization of climate change as an economic externality or something that can be solved with market mechanisms,” said Daniel Ryan, former Director of Investigations at the Environmental and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN) in Argentina. “What makes him an environmental hazard is his lack of proactivity in 

 said market mechanisms. If climate regulation is a cost, the most rational thing would be to find  ways of making it less ‘costly’ to his idea of ‘freedom’.” But for Milei, that freedom is “wrongly tied to the idea that the expansion of extractivist activities will bring economic freedom to a country that has been sinking in an extractivist model and in an international context of advancing towards more climate resilience economic activities,” Ryan said.

From the outset of his presidential campaign, Javier Milei has forged close ties with right-wing leaders like Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary, and Bukele in El Salvador, signaling his ambition to become Trump’s ally in Latin America. He has even earned the nickname "

" both on social media and in news outlets. Right now, no other alt-right leader outside the U.S. is rising 

 to eliminate climate programs, roll back federal commitments to climate action, pull the U.S. out of global climate treaties (again), and dismantle initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act. Proponents argue that climate regulations hinder business freedom and wealth creation.

Milei’s strategy is closely aligned to the Project 2025 plan, and he wasted no time taking the first step: withdrawing from the United Nations' 2030 Agenda shortly after he was elected in December 2023. The immediate consequences are concerning and indicative of a broader trend within government agencies. In July of this year, the Association of Personnel of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) 

 that INTA has restricted staff from using terms associated with sustainability, such as 

 in official communications. In response to this, Ana Vidal de Lamas, the Undersecretary of Environment emphasized that the government and its agencies now prefer more neutral terms like 

. Vidal de Lamas contends that rising temperatures are “undeniable” yet “natural and cyclical” and that under the new administration, environmental policy will be deprioritized with a government not intending to be “super proactive” in addressing climate issues.

Adding to the politicization that the new administration brings to climate regulation, Javier Milei, in a memo sent to Foreign Minister Diana Mondino on December 18th, instructed all Argentine representatives abroad to align with his principles of “life, (financial) liberty and property”, making it clear that no projects, statements, or agreements that contradict these values will be supported by his administration. In this context, the need for responsibility and environmental action clashes with a vision that prioritizes short-term economic gain.

As Milei’s administration reshapes environmental language, it sets the stage for sweeping changes to Argentina’s environmental policy framework.

The first version of the Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentinians, commonly known as the Law of Bases, was sent to Congress on December 27th, 2023, mere weeks after Milei took office, with more than 600 articles and a clear blueprint.

First, it aimed to roll back protections under the Forest Law (Law 26.331), reducing native forest protections to just 20%, leaving the rest vulnerable to logging. This could lead to rampant deforestation and biodiversity loss in a country that already faces brutal diminishment of its forest coverage, undermining local livelihoods and contradicting Argentina's international conservation commitments. The draft also proposed changes to the Glaciers Law (Law N° 26.63), allowing mining in sensitive glacial areas, threatening vital freshwater sources. In the fishing sector, the bill suggested extending fishing permits to 20 years without oversight from the Federal Fishing Council, leading to overfishing, damaging marine populations and jeopardizing local fishers' livelihoods. For the hydrocarbon sector, the draft proposed extending concessions for unconventional oil and gas fields to 35 years, maintaining subsidies favoring large corporations and proposed tax incentives allowing mining companies to operate with retention rates as low as 4.5%, compared to the 15% applicable to other economic activities. This disparity would have created an unlevel playing field that favored mining over other sectors, exacerbating the extractive model that has long characterized Argentina's economy.

In terms of energy transition, the draft law proposed the introduction of carbon markets, but lacked a comprehensive strategy for moving toward renewable energy. While it proposed a system for trading greenhouse gas emissions, it offered no concrete measures to reduce emissions or transition to clean energy sources.

This first draft of the bill sparked strong reactions from civil society, including public opposition from more than 150 environmental and human rights organizations with a letter sent to the Congress in January of this year. “For Argentina to become a global powerhouse, it is crucial to build on what has already been achieved while avoiding the destruction of the progress made to date. The proposed changes to current regulations would lead to a reduction in the levels of environmental protection that have already been attained. Indeed, the principle of non-regression contained in the Escazú Agreement (Law 27.566) states that legislation cannot worsen the existing legal situation in terms of its scope and breadth,” expressed organizations such as FARN, FUNDERPS (Foundation for the Development of Sustainable Policies), the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, the Collective for Action on Ecosocial Justice, along with Alianza x el Clima, Aves Argentinas, the Association for the Conservation and Study of Nature (ACEN), and the Circle of Environmental Policies.

Fortunately, that original draft was not approved by Congress; after more than half of the bill’s articles were rejected, senators decided the text was not suitable for further debate in the Chamber and sent it back to the committees of the Chamber of Deputies (Argentina’s version of the U.S. House of Representatives). However, a second draft of the bill was sent back to the Senate on April 25th of 2024, this time without a clear direction for environmental policies, but still with plenty of deregulation.

The most striking aspect of the new (and now approved) bill, is Chapter III, which brought some changes to the Administrative Procedure Law (Law 19.549), particularly around public hearings. The bill suggested that instead of mandatory public hearings, “authorities could use a public consultation or any other method deemed technically or legally appropriate to ensure the best possible participation from those involved.” This very vague sentence gives politicians a lot of leeway to choose whether a public hearing actually happens, or if it gets replaced with some alternative approach. In environmental matters, public hearings are the most effective way to guarantee public involvement in safeguarding the constitutional right to a healthy and sustainable environment—a right that’s written into Argentina's Constitution under Article 41. This also ties into Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration, which emphasizes that access to information goes hand-in-hand with public participation. Public hearings, vital for a thorough and open discussion about environmental issues, are no longer a certainty in Argentina.

The consequences of this new regulation are apparent in a recent Supreme Court ruling. On October 22nd, the Supreme Court of Argentina officially concluded a historic legal battle over environmental restoration in the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, one of the most polluted rivers in Latin America. In a unanimous decision, the justices ended their oversight of compliance with a ruling issued on July 8, 2008, rejected a collective environmental damage claim, and ordered hundreds of cases related to this significant environmental megacause closed. Before the decision was announced, on June 17 representatives of the Collegiate Body, formed by the Ombudsman of Argentina and five Civil Society Organizations, requested the Supreme Court to convene a public hearing to discuss the compliance with judicial mandates. The Court never convened.

Although Americans are not guaranteed the right to a healthy environment, the ability for communities to weigh in on big development projects has been baked into the permitting process since the early 1970s; Project 2025 (not to mention the Manchin-Barasso “permitting reform” bill) aims to limit public comment in much the same way Milei’s government has.

Another core objective of Project 2025 is to halt the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This includes repealing incentives for renewable energy projects and reinvesting in coal, oil, and gas to ensure energy "independence."

 (similar to an Executive Order in the U.S.), issued only three weeks after he took office, curtails renewables. He repealed articles 16 to 37 of the Renewable Energy Distributed Generation Promotion Regime (Law 27.424) passed in 2017 (curiously by the administration of  former also liberal president Mauricio Macri, part of Milei’ support during his campaign). This law aimed to foster renewable energy integration into Argentina’s grid with a framework for distributed generation, where households could produce their own energy and feed their surplus into the national grid. By repealing the articles, Milei also dismantled the Fund for the Development of Distributed Generation, which promoted this small-scale renewable energy boost with financial support that posed no financial or fiscal strain on the government.

At the same time, Milei created new incentives for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Article 156 of the approved Law of Bases authorizes LNG volumes for a period of up to 30 years from the start-up of the liquefaction plant and enables permit holders “to export all volumes authorized under this status continuously and without interruptions, restrictions, reductions, or redirections for any reason during each day of the authorization period.”

Elsewhere in the law, article 161 describes the new version of the Regime for Incentives for Large Investments (RIGI), which seeks to bring "Strategic Long-Term Export Projects" to the country. Unlike the earlier draft, which explicitly listed sectors like agribusiness, infrastructure, forestry, mining, gas and oil, energy, and technology as potential beneficiaries, this version focuses purely on investment size, no matter the industry. Furthermore, none of the RIGI-specific sections of the law demand companies to submit Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for their projects, nor does it require any evaluation of cumulative impacts.

There's also no mention of any obligation to create jobs at the local, provincial, or national level, nor are there any plans for boosting value chains or sharing technology. And in true Trump fashion, no sanction is foreseen for violating environmental regulations. Projects will be able to maintain the benefits of RIGI even if they contaminate rivers, soils and aquifers, destroy glaciers, or cause the extinction of a species. It is simply a set of unrestricted extractivist policies aimed at increasing oil and gas projects in the country.

While RIGI presents itself as the child of deregulatory governments, according to Maria Eugenia Testa, Director of the organization Environmental Policy Circle, Milei fails to understand that “climate deregulation as a way of cost-cutting is a false idea. Clearly what regulation does, even for governments that deny climate change, is to regulate future conflicts which are going to be more and more frequent between local communities and polluting industries. No regulation means more conflict, delayed projects, investments that have no return for companies and overall chaos.”

In the U.S, Project 2025 wants to shrink the size of federal environmental agencies and slash their budgets, most notably the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The goal is to defund regulatory bodies that oversee environmental protection, particularly those having anything to do with climate policy, and to shift responsibility to the private sector. Milei’s administration has already undertaken similar measures by reducing the Ministry of Environment and Energy to an Undersecretariat under the Ministry of the Interior, and by cutting its budget 

FARN’s analysis of the federal budget also shows that the budget for Environment (a program within the Undersecretariat) for 2024 was 82,228 Argentinian pesos, roughly equivalent to 80 dollars, for activities such as Environmental Policy in Natural Resources (roughly 13 dollars), Environmental Control (53 dollars), and Sustainable Development (around two dollars and 20 cents). A grand total of 70,234 Argentinian pesos, equivalent to 72 dollars, will go toward covering the expenses of projects such as the Conservation and Management of Protected Natural Areas (39 dollars), the Marine Protected Areas System (less than a dollar), and Training and Capacity Building (a dollar an 86 cents).

In the first six months of Milei's presidency, approximately 59,557 hectares of native forest were deforested in northern Argentina, 

Greenpeace through satellite imagery analysis—almost three times the entire size of Buenos Aires or  San Jose, California. It’s an alarming rate for a country that has lost 8,000,000 hectares of its forest area in the last three decades due to deforestation and fires.

 from the Argentinian NGO Chequeado, Vaca Muerta—a geological formation and focal point for hydrocarbon extraction in the southern province of Rio Negro—is witnessing a sharp increase in waste production.

“Data indicates that waste generated from oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing grew by 35.2% from 2022 to 2023, resulting in 1,022,290 cubic meters of hazardous waste being treated, a stark increase from 756,230 cubic meters the previous year,” the report reads. This rise and the associated environmental risks could become even more pronounced with Milei's continued deregulation of the mining industry.

What none of us expect when a far-right president campaigns with an anti-environment platform is how quickly they’re able to cause large-scale and lasting harm. But in less than one year, Milei and his Latin version of Project 2025 have managed to roll back multiple environmental protections; obliterate the budget for environmental regulatory agencies; dissolve the Trust Fund for the Environmental Protection of Native Forests (Fobosques), leaving 80% of forest unprotected from deforestation and forest fires; 

 all provinces to exploit natural resources under the premises of Pacto de Mayo; and paved the way for mining and fossil fuel mega projects.

Milei and Trump embody the very essence of Tolstoy's insight: “Some people go through the forest seeing nothing but firewood.” Can we afford to let such shortsightedness define the future of our planet?

Dispatch: For a Preview of Project 2025, Look to Argentina

In 2013, the Hess Foundation—the charitable arm of oil and gas company the Hess Corporation—

Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Dispatch: For a Preview of Project 2025, Look to Argentina

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Records Show U.S. Steel Giant Nucor Retained Ties to a Honduran Mine as Assassinations of Opponents Mounted

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La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA

Dispatch: For a Preview of Project 2025, Look to Argentina

Fossil Fuels Fund Academia. Now What?

Records Show U.S. Steel Giant Nucor Retained Ties to a Honduran Mine as Assassinations of Opponents Mounted

In Australia, a New Way to Avoid Decommissioning Oil Fields: Call Them Carbon Capture Projects

La Lucha En La Jungla

Information Pollution

Denial to Delay

The Real Free Speech Threat

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Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world