Project 2025, a controversial conservative roadmap that aims to guide the next Republican administration, calls for the elimination of multiple energy- and environment-related offices and rules — moves that would restrict the government’s ability to combat climate change and pollution.
Policies promoted under the plan would place political personnel in positions to oversee science at major federal agencies and reduce such agencies’ limitations on polluting industries.
The project additionally proposes chopping up several agencies. It called for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s oceans, weather, climate and fisheries science agency, to be “dismantled.”
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Project 2025 has sparked concerns among environmental advocates. Climate activist Jamie Henn said what alarms him about the project is not necessarily that it’s more extreme than Trump’s proposals, but that it’s more specific.
“Trump would frack the National Mall if he thought it would make a couple of bucks for donors and Big Oil,” said Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit that supports ending fossil fuel use.
But he said “Trump tends to speak in slogans,” while “this is a plan that really gets into the details.”
“We’re not only going agency by agency, we’re going into every single agency program,” Henn said. “They’re coming in with sledgehammers and scalpels to try and dismantle any barriers to the fossil fuel industries.”
Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, on GB News. Credit: GB News / YouTube
It’s “a scandal” that the party continues to support Graham Stringer, campaigners say.
The Labour Party has been criticised by campaigners after a board member of the UK’s leading climate science denial group was reselected as a candidate at the upcoming general election.
Graham Stringer, a Labour MP since 1997, has been reselected as the party’s candidate for Blackley and Broughton in Greater Manchester. Since 2015, Stringer has been a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group founded to contradict established climate science and advocate against policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The GWPF has in the past expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. GWPF director Benny Peiser has said “it’s extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis”.
Staff members at the GWPF and its sister group Net Zero Watch have been given a regular platform on the right-wing broadcaster GB News in recent months, during which they have claimed that the climate emergency is simply “scaremongering”, that “net zero is doing enormous damage to the economy”, and that “the lights will go out” if we divest from fossil fuels.
“It’s a scandal that Labour is allowing Graham Stringer to stand again,” said Carys Boughton of the Fossil Free Parliament campaign group. “To keep a forthright, prominent climate denier in the fold is to suggest that the party doesn’t understand the urgency of the crisis we are facing. We need Labour to actively stand against the forces that are compromising good climate policy, be they external or within their own ranks.”
The GWPF is based in 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, which has housed a number of libertarian groups that are opposed to clean energy policies and climate science.
Stringer has vocally questioned climate science and policies to achieve net zero emissions. At a Battle of Ideas event in 2023, he said that the policies adopted by the UK to address emissions “make China stronger, make us vulnerable to supply chains that we have no control over, and cost large amounts of money.”
In 2014, Stringer was one of only two MPs on Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee to vote against accepting the conclusion of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that humans are the dominant cause of global warming.
Stringer and Conservative MP Peter Lilley said that they did “not dispute the science of the greenhouse effect”, but that “there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation to versus prevention of global warming.”
Stringer also planned to join Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Richard Tice for their launch of a net zero referendum campaign in 2022 (though he later pulled out of the event). Reform wants to scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero target, while both Farage and Tice are critics of climate science. Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison. It’s plant food”.
Speaking on GB News about his initial decision to campaign alongside Farage and Tice, Stringer said that “I’ve argued for a long time against the extra costs being placed on people to achieve net zero.”
Energy price rises triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were exacerbated in the UK – the worst hit country in western Europe – due to its over-reliance on gas. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent spending watchdog, has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Conservative peer Lord David Frost is a director of the GWPF alongside Stringer. Tory and Reform donor Terence Mordaunt is also a director of the GWPF, while Conservative politician Andrea Jenkyns is a director of Net Zero Watch.
“Labour can claim a serious commitment to environmental and climate policy. Or it can select as an MP a candidate who is on the board of a Tufton Street climate science denial think tank. But it can’t do both,” said Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project.
Labour and Climate Change
The Labour Party has this week been finalising its list of candidates for the general election, with its full slate set to be submitted on Friday (7 June) ahead of the 4 July vote.
The party has been campaigning prominently on the issue of clean power, pledging to create a state-owned renewable energy investment vehicle, GB Energy, that it says will help to “speed up and scale the deployment of new technologies”.
Labour has also said that it plans to remove fossil fuels from UK electricity production by 2030, five years earlier than current government plans, and to ban new North Sea oil and gas licences.
Reports suggest that the party views climate change as a key dividing line of the election campaign, with Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government having overseen the watering down of several net zero policies over the last year. Sunak launched the election campaign by claiming that he had “prioritised energy security and your family finances over environmental dogma”.
However, Labour has been criticised for dropping its plan to invest £28 billion a year in green infrastructure to reach net zero. On announcing that the policy would be scaled down, Labour leader Keir Starmer said that “fiscal rules come first”, adding that higher interest rates meant that financing the plan would be more expensive. The pledged investment has now been reduced to £15 billion a year.
Labour did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment, but a spokesperson previously told The Guardian: “The choice at this election is clear: a Conservative government that pollutes our rivers with record levels of toxic sewage, is led by and funded by climate deniers and fails to meet our climate and nature targets; or a Labour government that will restore nature, deliver the largest investment in clean energy in our history so we can cut bills for families, make Britain energy independent and tackle the climate crisis to protect our home for our children and grandchildren.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage campaigning in Clacton, Essex. Credit: Nigel Farage / X
Scientific modelling indicates that areas of Clacton could be submerged annually by rising sea levels and flooding.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who is a vocal critic of green policies and climate science, is standing in a constituency threatened by rising sea levels and flooding due to global warming.
Mapping from the science-based visualisation platform Climate Central suggests that substantial parts of Clacton, Essex, will be at risk of yearly flooding even by 2030. These include Seawick and Jaywick on the west of the seaside town, and the area between Holland-on-Sea and Frinton-on-Sea.
Farage yesterday announced that he would be taking over as Reform leader and standing in Clacton at the general election on 4 July.
Climate Central’s projection of which areas of Clacton will be below the annual flood level in 2030. The annual flood level is the water level at shoreline that local coastal floods exceed on average at least once per year.The constituency boundary of Clacton.
The international journal Oceans and Coastal Management also produced a study in 2022 suggesting that the Tendring area, which encompasses Clacton, is at risk of sea level rises – potentially affecting hundreds of homes.
The study’s lead author Paul Sayers, an engineering consultant who works with the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre, said: “Significant sea level rise is now inevitable. We need a serious national debate about the scale of the threat.”
The Environment Agency last year upgraded Clacton’s flood defences as part of a £10 million project to protect more than 3,000 properties and businesses in the area from “climate change and sea level rise”.
However, Farage is actively campaigning to scrap the green policies that may help to limit local flooding. Farage, who is projected to win the seat, is a vocal critic of the UK’s goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. He has claimed that the policy is an “act of self harm” and has called for it to be dropped.
Clacton is already ranked ninth in the county in terms of properties at risk of surface water flooding. Scientists at the World Weather Attribution group found that the UK’s wet weather in the winter of 2023/24 was made 10 times more likely and 20 percent wetter due to climate change.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has estimated that global mean sea levels will most likely rise between 0.95 feet (0.29 metres) and 3.61 feet (1.1 metres) by the end of the century.
Rising levels could directly affect more than 1 billion people worldwide by 2050, and require up to $14 trillion worth of coastal infrastructure by 2100. Rising sea levels could cost the British economy alone more than £100 billion by the end of the century, according to research published by the journal Scientific Reports.
Reform’s Fossil Fuel Donations
Despite the global warming risks posed in the area, Farage is hoping to win support for his anti-green views when he stands in Clacton on 4 July.
Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”
The IPCC has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Reform has also spread climate falsehoods while supporting the reversal of green measures.
The party’s manifesto claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
According to climate journalist Simon Evans, Reform’s 500 word plan on energy and the environment contains 30 false or misleading statements about the climate crisis and green policies.
Reform wants to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, open onshore fracking sites across the country, end the windfall tax on fossil fuel companies, and “restart opencast coal mines using the latest cleanest techniques”.
The party has campaigned for a referendum on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target, and like Farage supports scrapping the policy entirely.
As revealed by DeSmog, Reform has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of its donations since the last general election.
“Reform is in the business of toxic propaganda,” Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer told DeSmog. “Farage and his party have a track record of misleading voters and I hope the good people of Clacton make clear to him on 4 July that his distortions and lies on migration and climate won’t wash.”
Climate Central’s projections are based on peer-reviewed science in leading journals, though it warns that these are large datasets that always include some error and local variations.
In response to previous reporting on Climate Central’s sea level projections, the Environment Agency said that its data “does not take into account extensive efforts taken to prevent such severe incidents in the future, including the presence of sea defences, which protect communities from flooding”.
Reform did not respond to DeSmog’s request for comment, but has previously said that: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it. We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.
“The deniers are those who continually gaslight the public into thinking you can stop these powerful natural forces. We must use the energy under our feet, rather than send our money and jobs abroad.”
A new report by the Senate Committee on the Budget details how fossil fuel companies have avoided tackling the climate crisis.
Last week, US Democrats released a report three years in the making detailing the ways that large fossil fuel producers including Shell, BP and Exxon have sought to avoid responsibility for the climate crisis.
The 65 page-long report, jointly authored by the Democrats House Committee On Oversight And Accountability and the Senate Committee on the Budget, contains files subpoenaed from big oil companies that “demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.
Previous documentation has shown that companies including Exxon knew about human-made climate change since at least 1981, and files released earlier this year suggest it may have been known since the 1950s. The importance of this report lies in proving that fossil fuel companies not only knew, but privately believed the science despite public rejection.
The files also show the tactics used by major fossil companies to discredit climate activism, the report says, among them “pivot[ing] from outright climate denial to a new strategy of deception. Instead of misrepresenting the science and the consequences of climate change, they pivoted to misrepresenting their business plans, their investments in low carbon technologies, the alleged safety of natural gas, and their support for various climate policies and emission reduction targets”.
