The current Republican search for a presidential candidate has been singularly uninformative for the public. There has been no real debate over issues since all of the contestants have chosen to defer to the views of Donald Trump. There’s been no talk of formulating new, or refining old, planks in the party’s platform, because the Republican Party has officially chosen to retain the platform that it created for the 2016 presidential contest. A personality has taken the place of policies.

There is, however, another source for details about Republican principles. It’s a document entitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, usually referred to as “Project 2025.” While it has no official recognition by the Republican Party, there is reason to regard it as a trustworthy guide to what a second Trump administration would seek to accomplish once installed in office.

Project 2025 is a detailed, 900-some-page account of how the federal government should be re-made to accord with conservative principles. It was put together by the hyper-reactionary Heritage Foundation and written by over 300 contributors, many of whom were employed by Trump during his administration. It’s organized into 30 chapters, each of which deals with a federal department and how that department’s structure and policies should be altered.

Let’s look at what Project 2025 has to say about an issue that many of us have been concerned about for decades: climate change. We are now experiencing the real-world global effects that bear out the predictions of climate science, and it’s all too apparent that things will only get worse if there isn’t an extraordinary multi-national effort to remove the known cause of these changes.

What does Project 2025 tell us about the Republican attitude toward global warming? Basically, it tells us that most right-wing, MAGA Republicans either hold that the scientific account of how climate change has come about is wrong, or, if they are willing to acknowledge that humans have produced such change, they don’t regard it as a serious problem.

A recent poll, while it did show that 56% of those polled saw climate change as a “major threat,” also showed that about 70% of Republicans thought it was a minor threat or no threat at all.

Republicans seem to have chosen to ignore not only the obvious weather changes in this country — drought, higher average temperatures, heavy rains, sea-level rise, more hurricanes and tornadoes, etc. — but also the economic impact of those changes. A New York Times news story tells us that “The United States experienced 28 weather disasters last year that each cost at least $1 billion, the highest number on record and the latest measure of the growing toll of climate change.” Apparently, the prospect of multi-billion-dollar losses due to global warming hasn’t moved the Grand Old Party to take climate change seriously.

The Biden administration, as we all know, takes global warming and its dangers very seriously. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes a number of measures intended to encourage less greenhouse gas production. It makes available some $370 billion for wind, solar, nuclear, green hydrogen, and electric vehicle technology, encourage industry and citizens to make investments in “clean” energy sources, seeks to improve overall energy efficiency, and curbs emissions from oil and gas wells.

The Project 2025 policy proposals, by contrast, seem to make these three basic assumptions: 1)There is no scientific consensus about global warming and its causes, and the harm that warming is alleged to produce is much exaggerated; 2) Government policies that subsidize “clean” energy do so only for political reasons and have the effect of “distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.” 3) The United States has many enemies and must be alert to the threats that they pose. In dangerous times like these, America must be as strong, vigilant, and self-sufficient as possible, and, above all, it must protect its energy resources from disruption.

Not surprisingly, when Project 2025 discusses the Department of Energy, it recommends that a new Trump administration should seek to repeal Biden’s “extreme green…ideologically driven policies” for those policies are “making America dependent on adversaries like China for energy”. America must “stop the war on oil and natural gas” and “end the focus on climate change and green subsidies.”

The Grid Deployment Office of the Dept. of Energy, instead of “planning for the benefit of renewable developers” [e.g., homeowners who buy solar panels], should become part of a new “reformed Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response;” and deal with “ a growing problem with the electric grid’s reliability because of the increasing growth of subsidized intermittent renewable generation (like wind and solar)”.

When Project 2025 considers the Environmental Protection Agency, it alleges that the EPA has “long been amenable to being co-opted by the Left for political ends” The new Trump administration will attempt to reverse the 2009 court finding that carbon dioxide emissions are, directly or indirectly, a danger to public health, for it was that finding that enabled the EPA to take responsibility for regulating those emissions.

The author of Project 2025’s section on the EPA, incidentally, was a woman who was chief of staff at that agency during the Trump presidency. It was she — so she claims — who persuaded President Trump to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Project 2025 goes beyond condemning efforts to promote electric vehicles; it calls for the government to make it illegal for other states to adopt California’s stringent gas-fueled vehicle pollution standards.

Moreover, Project 2025 urges increased production of oil and gas. It declares that the United States has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on America’s public lands; it would open the Arctic Wilderness to drilling. Natural gas, according to Project 2025, is what should become the country’s primary fuel, and it recommends that other countries should be encouraged to buy and use more fossil fuels rather than depend upon renewable energy resources.

End notes: 1) Right-wingers seek to nurture fears that America is weak, insecure, and threatened by enemies. Abandoning fossil fuels, they assert, exacerbates the country’s vulnerability; 2) Project 2025’s devotion to fossil fuels has an unmentioned cause: the fossil fuel industry is a major donor to Republican political candidates; 3) Project 2025’s charge that current government policies distort market forces by subsidizing clean energy sources ignores the fact that the fossil fuel industry has also, for many years, benefited from massive federal tax exemptions.