At Climate Forward Event, an Architect of Project 2025 Dismisses Global Warming
Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which published a policy blueprint for the next Republican administration known as Project 2025, on Wednesday dismissed the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans were warming the planet.
At the New York Times Climate Forward event, he blasted the Biden administration’s climate policies and downplayed the consistent rise in average global temperatures that has triggered more severe drought, heat waves, floods and storms.
“It sounds like weather to me, a hot year,” Mr. Roberts said.
He also addressed Project 2025’s relationship with Mr. Trump, who has distanced himself from the policy blueprint. Thirty-one of the 38 authors of Project 2025 plan were top advisers to Mr. Trump during his first term, and many would most likely serve in prominent roles if he were to retake the White House in November.
But Mr. Roberts said the effort was “nonpartisan.”
The project, which has been a collaborative effort across the conservative ecosystem led by the Heritage Foundation, has become a lightning rod on the 2024 campaign trail. The group had spent months developing a 900-page plan to reshape the federal government. Among its many recommendations, the plan calls for replacing thousands of career scientists and other government employees with Trump loyalists.
Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, wrote the foreword for Mr. Roberts’s upcoming book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.”
Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, although there is overlap between the plan and Mr. Trump’s plans for a second term, including getting rid of environmental regulations and shuttering the agencies that do climate research.
Asked why Mr. Trump has disavowed Project 2025, Mr. Roberts said it was “because they exist in a political lane in a political season and we exist in a policy lane.” He also said that his organization “allowed the radical left to define the brand Project 2025 because we’re so focused on the policies and the personnel.”
“We should have, figuratively speaking, punched back,” he said. “Lesson learned.”
Mr. Roberts defended calls in Project 2025 to weaken pollution controls, saying they wouldn’t be necessary because “the United States has some of the cleanest air and water in the developed world.”
In fact, 15 countries have cleaner air than the United States, and 25 countries have cleaner water, according to the Environmental Performance Index, a global tracker run by Yale University.
Mr. Roberts also defended the prescription in Project 2025 to replace career government workers with political appointees and get rid of the scientific advisory boards that offer expertise to federal agencies like the E.P.A. He said doing so would take the politics out of government decisions.
For years, career scientists in agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have used peer-reviewed scientific research to document the impacts of climate change.
In seeking to replace those scientists with political appointees, Mr. Roberts said a Trump administration would end “the politicized agenda they have used to be a cudgel against the American people.”
Mr. Roberts dismissed the federal research that has detailed the catastrophic and deadly impacts that are likely to result from an increase in the heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution.
“In fact, there are many good studies from completely objective sources, including my colleagues, scholars at Heritage, to show there’s been a reduction in climate deaths,” he said.
A report this year by the World Economic Forum concluded that climate change may cause an additional 14.5 million deaths by 2050.
