The Project 2025 Promise: Worse Health and Climate Chaos

Climate change increasingly threatens health and financial well-being. Nearly 8 million acres in the U.S. have burned so far in 2024 in another season of historic fires; many Northeasterners and Midwesterners reel from yet another season of disastrous floods; and not a month after Hurricane Francine lashed the South, Hurricane Helene left hundreds dead and caused yet untold wreckage and human suffering in its wake.

This is not normal. Billion-dollar weather disasters multiply year over year, straining local, state, and federal budgets; costs over the coming decades will be determined by current climate mitigation and adaptation measures. Health insurance rates could rise in regions exposed to climate risks. The world is at a critical juncture where we must rapidly phase out fossil fuel use to avoid catastrophic climate tipping points that would cause untold human suffering. If you’ve heard the moniker “the decisive decade” for the 2020s, now you know why.

Despite this, Project 2025, the recently exposed right-wing diktat put forth by the influential Heritage Foundation for the “next conservative administration,” is loaded and ready to blow up U.S. climate action. This constitutes one of the greatest threats to the health of all Americans. Presidential candidate Donald Trump claims to know nothing about Project 2025; yet, the Heritage Foundation pointed out that within 1 year of taking office in 2017, Trump enacted two-thirds of its policy recommendations in the “Mandate for Leadership,” and several of the project’s authors served during his administration.

Whatever the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, the movement underlying Project 2025 will endure and await its next helmsman. So, what would be the environmental and health implications of adopting the plan’s recommendations?

The Fork in the Road: Continued U.S. Climate Leadership Versus Project 2025

In an analysis titled, Potential U.S. Pathways on Climate, Jobs, and Health, non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank Energy Innovation (EI) crunched the numbers to emphasize two vastly divergent scenarios.

Continued Climate Leadership

Recent U.S. actions, which EI refers to as continued climate leadership, inspire hope: we’ve made huge strides in tackling the mounting climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and associated health-damaging air pollution while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the renewable energy sector through federal legislation, recently finalized EPA rules, and major state policies. EI finds continued climate leadership would sustain this trend for health, the climate, and the economy.

Under continued climate leadership, the U.S. would be “within striking distance” of its Paris goals by 2030, which pledge to bring greenhouse gas emissions to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030 and to net zero in 2050. Decreasing fossil fuel use also reduces deadly air pollution, which is linked to myriad acute and chronic health problems and is the second leading cause of non-communicable diseases after tobacco, responsible for an estimated 6.7 million deaths in 2019. According to EI, continued climate leadership would prevent 3,900 deaths by 2030 and 20,600 by 2050 due to reductions in air pollution.

EI’s analysis shows that recent climate policy has boosted the U.S. economy, despite inflation. Public-private partnerships driven by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act have created more than 334,000 jobs since 2022, as well as $500 billion in private investment. Congruously, continued climate leadership would add 2.2 million jobs in 2030 and grow GDP by $450 billion. The renewable energy transition would be a near- and long-term boon to household budgets, saving $7.7 billion in energy costs in 2030 and $110 billion in 2050.

Project 2025

Project 2025, the alternative to continued climate leadership, refers to these job-creating, pollution-busting, climate- and health-protecting actions as “climate extremism” and “economy-killing climate programs.” It calls for the elimination of U.S. efforts to tackle the climate crisis on an international stage, and instead emphasizes U.S. oil and gas development. Referring to recent policies as “climate fanaticism” and a “war on oil and natural gas” that would “need a whole-of-government unwinding,” it proposes repealing the IRA and all clean energy subsidies.

Meanwhile, Project 2025 neglects to mention that fossil fuel subsidies soared to a record $7 trillion globally in 2022. Costs to U.S. taxpayers are an estimated $20 billion per year in direct subsidies, not including environmental damages and the costs borne in premature deaths and health conditions due to fossil fuel-driven air pollution. While stripping away all clean energy subsidies, Project 2025 would increase subsidies to oil and gas through leasing of publicly owned property on- and offshore and by leveraging the “Treasury’s tools and authority” to promote more investment in oil and gas.

According to EI, Project 2025 would lead to a loss of 1.7 million jobs in 2030, compared to the gain of 2.2 million under continued climate leadership. By shunning increasingly cheap green energy, Project 2025 would cost Americans $32 billion in energy and fuel costs and shrink GDP by $320 billion per year by 2030 (a difference of negative $770 billion total GDP compared to climate leadership). Project 2025’s cost to health would be 2,100 premature deaths by 2030. Despite pleading ignorance of Project 2025, the GOP nominee’s platform appears aligned with the plan’s energy policies, stating that the U.S. “has more liquid gold under our feet than any other Nation…The Republican Party will harness that potential to power our future.”

Finances are a major social determinant of health, with financial strife being a major driver of health disparities. Better employment opportunities translate to better health, a fact that was not included in EI’s model, perhaps resulting in an underestimate of the health consequences of Project 2025 — and an underestimate of the benefits of climate leadership.

To echo the renowned German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, “politics [is] nothing but medicine on a grand scale.” Health, climate, and the economy are closely intertwined. Our choices in November will have benefits — or consequences — for decades to come.

Beth Zigmund, MD, is an associate professor of clinical radiology at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health or its members.

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