The Guardian reports:

Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution – study
Experts say climate policies contained within rightwing manifesto would wreck US climate targets and cost jobs

The impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 would result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs, a new analysis finds.

Should Trump retake the White House and pass the energy and environmental policies in the controversial Project 2025 document, the US’s planet-heating emissions will “significantly increase” by 2.7bn tonnes above the current trajectory by 2030, an amount comparable to the entire annual emissions of India, according to the report.

Such a burst of extra pollution would torpedo any chance the US could meet its goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, which scientists say is imperative to help the world avert disastrous climate change. It would also, the analysis found, result in 1.7m lost jobs in 2030, due to reduced clean energy deployment that is not offset by smaller gains in fossil fuel jobs, and a $320bn hit to US GDP as a wave of new domestic renewables and electric car manufacturing is reversed.

“The US faces a fork in the road starting in January of 2025 with two climate and energy policy pathways that are highly divergent,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy research at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy thinktank that conducted the modeling. “These future policy pathways result in stark differences for our health, our pocketbooks, the economy and climate.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian also reports:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.

Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.

“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.

Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war. [Continue reading…]