One weird trick to help you understand Project 2025

It’s just like fortune cookies

Project 2025

Most people know the trick about reading fortune cookies: you add “between the sheets” to the end in order to get your real fortune. So “You have an active mind and keen imagination” becomes the far superior, “You have an active mind and keen imagination between the sheets.”

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You’ve probably also heard of Project 2025. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary:

Project 2025 promotes a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals published by the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power … Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Many legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

It’s full of really unpopular proposals, like privatizing the National Weather Service, and Trump and the GOP have been taking a deserved beating because of it. Trump was so mad about it that he forced the Heritage Foundation to stop promoting the document and claims he disagrees with the policies articulated in it.

But, of course, this is just theater. Project 2025 is exactly what the GOP will try to do if Trump is elected. So I’ve spent some time looking at the energy policy in it. What I find is that the key to understanding it is to use the fortune-cookie trick: just add “which forces us to use more fossil fuels” to the end of every policy prescription.

To demonstrate, here’s one Project 2025 policy:

Eliminate ARPA-E. The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate ARPA–E. The agency is unnecessary, risks taxpayer dollars, and interferes with risk-benefit decisions that should be made by the private sector.

ARPA-E is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and they describe themselves as:

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. ARPA-E awardees are unique because they are developing entirely new ways to generate, store, and use energy.

Why in the world would you want to close this effort? Do we really need to stop research on high-impact energy technologies? Really? Let me ask again, really?

But, it makes perfect sense if we use the fortune cookie trick:

Eliminate ARPA-E which forces us to use more fossil fuels.

By eliminating research on energy technology, they slow down the development of technologies that could speed up the replacement of fossil fuels.

Time and again, Project 2025’s goal is to keep us hooked on fossil fuels. Once you understand that, everything in the report actually makes a lot of (perverted) sense.

Vineyard wind

This happened last month, but just recently caught my eye. As reported in the New York times, one of the wind turbines in the Vineyard Wind project suffered a catastrophic failure of a turbine blade:

Debris from a damaged wind turbine blade has been washing up on the shores of Nantucket, Mass., prompting the closure of several beaches to swimmers and spurring an investigation into what caused the mishap.

Photo published in the New Bedford Light

To be honest, I was shocked at the absolute devastation this caused. Reports are that this disaster produced 17 cubic yards of debris.

Let me repeat: 17 cubic yards! Oh the humanity!

So I looked around for some more photos of the destruction at the wind farm. Here are a few of them:

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A few hours later:

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Turns out solar energy isn’t much better. Here’s a photo of a nearby solar farm that exploded:

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Obviously, I’m joking. Whatever the wind turbine did to the environment, it is a pittance compared to the environmental destruction from fossil fuels.

Just compare 17 cubic yards of turbine debris with the 100 million tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere on that same day, which adds up to around 40 billion tons every year. And don’t forget about the air pollution spewed along with carbon dioxide, which kills millions of people every year.

And this is what happens when everything is operating as designed. When things go wrong, it gets worse. Think Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon.

The people complaining about the turbine destruction are strangely silent about these fossil-fuel disasters, which tells you everything you need to know about how earnestly they care about the environment.

One last thing

From a loyal reader:

If you've been looking for a way to talk about the climate with friends and family — then check this out. 

From now until late October, climate activist and best-selling author Anne Therese Gennari is launching a campaign to spark as many conversations about the climate crisis as possible, to move folks towards stubborn optimism and joy-filled action.

She’s doing this by inviting folks to go through The Week, which is this group experience that sparks real, emotional conversations about the climate crisis, and what we can do about it. Anyone can do The Week by getting together with a group of people you know three times, each time to watch an hour-long documentary, and have a brave guided conversation. It's super easy to use, and 60,000 people have already done it!

I think we all have people in our lives who kind of understand that the environment is breaking down, but haven't actually gotten engaged yet. Getting them to take that first step can feel like a real challenge, since even talking about the climate can be overwhelming or polarizing for so many of us. If you have friends or loved ones like this, then I'd definitely recommend joining Anne, and organizing your own screening of The Week!

They'll give you everything you need to get started, and in October, everyone will come together to talk about how it went, and what actions were taken!

If you want get involved, or just learn more, you can sign up here.