Editorial

The Heritage Foundation’s total revenue in 2022 was over $106 million USD ($106,329,524).  As a non-profit, Heritage is not required by law to disclose all of its donors. Needless to say the Heritage foundation is politically powerful, financially powerful, and certainly influential with an audience of ideologically far-right supporters.

The organization’s most recent policy accomplishment is its political roadmap for Donald Trump and other Republican candidates of the 2024 election cycle entitled Project 2025.

Candidate Trump and many GOP party’s candidates for Federal office view Project 2025 as their guide or bible to policy.  What makes Project 2025 significant is the level of GOP attention and support garnered for the 920 page manifesto, with little intellectual engagement and investigation into to the public effects and assumptions contained within the document.

Overall, Project 2025 advocates a significant reduction and elimination of state and federal public and environmental protections. The manifesto effectively calls for the elimination of climate change mitigation policies and regulations.   The plan further targets environmental science and protections of Federal agencies currently charged with enforcement and management by e.g.,

• Abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Reducing and eliminating federally-funded climate research efforts
• Downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the goal of creating an operational state of ineffectiveness by eliminating and-or reducing both the agency’s effectiveness and ability to engage in enforcement activities supported by science and research, both essential the agency’s environmental protection mission.

Project 2025 further calls for increased government support of the fossil fuel industrial sector — a common theme throughout the foundation’s 2025 policy manifesto, and today’s Republican party at large.

Project 2025 is also a playbook calling for the wholesale retrenchment from a national climate policy and public protections. It is a retreat from policies supporting a national transformation into a clean energy economy, and the defunding of key government programs design to protect the public interest and health.

Project 2025 further ignores the reality of a global race to a net zero, and as the world advances, the need for the United States to lead by example in the global effort to reduce the harms of climate change.

Last year, the US alone saw a record 28 climate disasters that cost $1 billion or more while this year, searing heat waves and massive wildfires have delivered and offer a peek at an increasingly climate-dangerous future, unless the world adapts to changes already in the pipeline.  The world’s climate is changing and it will continue to change as we continue to emit more greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants.

President Biden’s signature climate and energy law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is fueling the growth of a unprecedented national clean energy transition. One which has been enabling the adoption of zero emissions and renewable wind and solar energy sources, battery storage, and other clean technologies reducing local and global emissions along with consumer energy costs.

The IRA is already lowering consumer costs in both the electric utility and ground transportation sectors of our economy — and that’s just the beginning of the IRA’s public and planetary benefits with a multiplier effect in the decades to come.

The threat Project 2025, if adopted, poses to clean energy is important to the economy of Hawaii, and the United States in whole, and by extension, the future in addressing a world of warming climate impacts.

Project 2025 is little more than a how-to guide to repealing the IRA’s policy pathway to a national clean-energy economy benefiting most, if not all Americans. Its adoption will represent a significant step backwards in saving a planet on which all humankind depends, regardless of political beliefs.