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Arjun Singh
from the levers reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh. It's an election year that nobody seems excited about. But that doesn't mean it won't be consequential. Now that Donald Trump is officially a convicted felon, the media and political world have been abuzz about what that means for his campaign. But for Trump's allies, the question of him returning to power isn't if it's when, and they're starting to lay the groundwork for his new administration. As part of something called projects 2025 Trump's allies are sketching out the blueprint for his second term plans that can have disastrous consequences. Today on labor time, I'm gonna sit down with Guardian climate reporter Dharna Noor, who's been reporting on Trump's plans to gut key agencies studying climate research, we'll discuss his plans to expand drilling, and even sell off the National Weather Service, a critical tool to help people mitigate the worst impacts of hurricanes and other natural disasters. That's all coming up here on lever time.

Arjun Singh
So dharna Hello, how are you? I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's an interesting period to be having what I wanted to talk to you about because we're talking a little bit after Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts, which everybody seems to be talking about in the political and the media universe. But even though he did, he was found guilty on all of these charges. He still could be the president. And I think one area that a lot of people, at least I've spoken to are particularly curious and a little worried about are what Donald Trump's climate plans going to be going into a potential 2025 presidents. Yeah, he was president. You know, he was drill, baby drill. But you've done some interesting reporting on some of his plans coming from a group called Project 2025, which is a group of Trump allies and advisers, they're associated with a right wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation. And you reported that they had plans for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, otherwise called NOAA, right? What, what does Trump's allies want to do with this agency? And what does this agency do?

Dharna Noor
Ya, so I've reported quite a bit on the sort of plans in Project 2025. Again, this sort of like coalition of dozens of right wing groups, kind of put together by the Heritage Foundation, who listeners might be familiar with, I've reported on the climate stuff in that sort of big, big document quite a lot. But I feel like the sort of plans for NOAA are among the most, I don't know, I mean, at risk of like overstating this the most ridiculous. There's a lot of ridiculous stuff in there, which is hard with Trump, but that says something. I know, every time I'm like, this is the Wilder, this is the most ridiculous, I'm always reminded of the 50 million other things. But you know, I think this is a it's a pretty, pretty wild set of plans. But no one has a bunch of really important things. It, you know, it houses the,

Dharna Noor
like Oceanic and Atmospheric Research units. It also does weather forecasting. So it's like the reason that we have the National Weather Service, for instance. And, you know, it has also been a pretty huge leader on climate science, especially now under the Biden administration. And essentially, Trump's like, I mean, he hasn't talked very much about what he'd want to do with NOAA, but what we know from his allies and advisers, and from this sort of project 2025 document that he seems to be taking cues from us that he basically wants to dismantle the whole thing. And one of the most alarming parts of that is like he wants to dismantle it, and basically, like, have it be completely set to serve the interests of the business class, like, for instance, yeah, I know, it's great. It's really, really lovely thing to know that climate science will be made in the image of like private capital, and not like, you know, people who need to use the weather forecast to do things like drive to work or like plant crops, and

Arjun Singh
be on the lookout for blizzards and things like that, actually.

Dharna Noor
And I should say like, this is not all of this is not completely new, right? Like, for instance, there's a part of Project 2025 That's, that's specific He talks about the National Weather Service, which is like the part of the of NOAA that, you know, provides us with weather and climate forecasts and warnings. And project 2025 says that they plan to fully commercialize. And it's forecasting operations, which is something that like, there has already sort of been a big desire of the right wing for quite some time. You know, Trump once actually taps the former CEO of the private weather for AccuWeather, to lead NOAA AccuWeather has, for a long time kind of been beating this drum of trying to privatize weather forecasting resources, and the sort of National Operations altogether. So it all builds on this sort of bigger right wing project that we've been seeing. But what we've also heard from a lot of experts is like, if Trump's last term was characterized by really messy,

Dharna Noor
kind of disorganized climate policies, this time, they seem to be a little bit more prepared to enact some of their plans, which is pretty frightening. And so, you know, seeing what this could actually look like, for us in the White House, again, is pretty, pretty scary. Yeah.

Arjun Singh
You know, it is interesting, because Noah's very specific agency, it's not necessarily one that you see pop up in political discourse all the time. But what is it about this agency that you think that they wanted to zero in on why this particular agency that they want to dismantle what what is it that they're trying to stop?

Dharna Noor
Well, so I should say, Project 2025, has plans for basically every federal agency, it's really a giant guidebook for how to dismantle like the US regulatory state, altogether. But I think that part of what the sort of threat of NOAA is, is that its remit kind of includes working on the climate crisis by design, right, like, there's a clear scientific consensus, I don't even need to say this, I think at this point, but there's a clearest scientific consensus that, like human caused, and specifically fossil fuel, cause global warming is happening, you know, many experts sort of think that it's accelerating, and that it's affecting basically every facet of the economy and of human life, and NOAA in order to properly you know, create forecasts, in order to properly conduct marine research and things like this, it has to take all that into account, like it's pretty conservative, a conservative when it comes to actually talking about climate predictions and things like this, but it has to take the climate crisis into account by design, if it's going to be accurate. And the Trump administration, I think, recognizes that and sees that it could be a threat, really like a threat to, you know, the way that business is able to operate without any sort of,

Dharna Noor
like, without any sort of red tape or without any sort of limitations placed on it, including like the kind of real life economic or ecological implications of like existing in the world. The other thing is, like, I think that the history of weather forecasting is really one of like, kind of international cooperation, really one of like, kind of social enterprising for the private room for the public good, rather than the private good. You know, during the sort of post World War Two era, JFK called for a global weather forecasting system that relied on unprecedented levels of scientific exchange. You know, there's like, kind of free exchange of weather data among countries. And I think that the Trump administration sees that and realizes that like, first of all, that's something that can be privatized. And second of all, if you're not concerned about the accuracy of these things going down, and you're not concerned about, like people dying, for instance, by not being able to have accurate forecasting, like Yeah, of course, you can kind of make money off of those things. And there's quite a lot of quite a massive operation that you can privatize. So, you know, there's a huge operation, there's a huge kind of opportunity here for for the private sector credit to get into if you don't actually care about maintaining accuracy and maintaining safety.

Arjun Singh
Those are both very important things and you know, talking about weather predictions, so would that mean that if this was dismantled and possiblys handed over to a private company AccuWeather that we lose the ability as a government, the US government to be able to detect possible blizzards, hurricanes, storms, things that we can see in advance that would help people evacuate areas and not make those as damaging as possible. Is that what's at stake?

Dharna Noor
It's kind of a difficult question, because So right now there again, there are private weather forecasters like AccuWeather and others, that actually you know, they are kind of the You know, maybe sometimes you have to pay to use them. They're based on, in some ways, like private modelers, you know, kind of like use of data. But also, they're all kind of underpinned by public sector weather forecasting models. And so it's really difficult to know what it would actually look like to get rid of those public models altogether. Like, it's sort of a it's a nonsensical plan, in some ways, because it doesn't acknowledge that all of these private systems rely in some way on the existence of the public system. But I mean, what we can see I think, happening with this is like, the inability for people to be able to, first of all access this kind of really important data freely, and, and quickly. So that's something that's definitely at risk. And the other thing that's at risk is like, if we do not any longer facilitate the free sharing of information between different countries, then yes, we could definitely have less accurate models. It's not exactly clear what this would look like. But I think, you know, there are many opportunities for it to get a lot worse, I guess, is

Arjun Singh
what I would say. Yeah. And you had mentioned that there are plans for other agencies, what are some of the things that have stood out to you as particularly striking, that project 2025 is hinted at in terms of fossil fuels and climate for the other government agencies?

Dharna Noor
Oh, man, I mean, so many of them. And we've actually so at The Guardian, I've actually talked to some of the people who orchestrated or even wrote some of the chapters in Project 2025. Regarding, you know, climate science and environmental policy and environmental regulation. There were some pretty wild things in the chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency, which was written by Mandy Gouda Sakera, who led the EPA under Trump. She's very involved with like this something called the co2 coalition, which says that carbon is a vital nutrient for life. And it's like, it's super climate denying, and like a very old school way, is

Arjun Singh
there any science to back that? That unequivocal statement,

Dharna Noor
I mean, more carbon can make some plants grow, it can also be extremely bad for other plants. And it's all in the hole very, very bad for life of all kinds. So like, yes, plants do need it. And also, we need it to be limited to the, you know, the kind of atmospheric levels that we've seen before, like the industrial revolution. So yes, there's some basis for it, but it's definitely faltering. So that's, that's sort of like some background on who she is, I guess. And basically, the plans for the EPA include, like, cutting all of the agencies, environmental justice and public engagement functions, shrinking the EPA as a whole, terminating new hires and like what she calls low value programs, basically, anything that is either climate focused or environmental justice focus in the EPA, and especially the kinds of agencies that have been expanded under the Biden administration, they'd be gone. I mean, like it either either shrunk to the point of being useless or gone. There are other examples to the chapters on the Department of Energy are pretty wild, the Department of Interior proposals are pretty wild. I would I would recommend, I guess, like listeners, take a glance at the document overall, if you want something to be freaked out about,

Arjun Singh
you know, and I think one thing that's kind of important to put in context over here, too, is, you know, what have been the changes and the gains that have happened in terms of mitigating and dealing with climate change under the Biden administration, because you see, sort of two different arguments being proposed. Some have said this is the most climate friendly president in history, others have pointed to that, you know, there has been more domestic oil drilling coming out during his administration. But Donna, could you kind of help put that all in context and get the nuances in there? What has happened under Biden's administration? And, you know, what would trump want to reverse in that?

Dharna Noor
I mean, this is it's a really good question, because in some ways, like both of the answers that you just mentioned, are absolutely the case. This has been, I think, by the yardstick of American history. This has been the presidential administration that's done the most about the climate crisis. It has also paled in comparison to what we actually need to do. Like, in some ways, the yardstick of history is not particularly useful when we're measuring a crisis that requires the action on a scale that we've never seen in history before. But you know, I mean, that's not to discount some of the progress that has been made, you know, in terms of, like, for instance, boosting With the kind of low carbon energy economy and creating these incentives for the private sector to build more wind and solar, for people to buy more EVs, things like this. I mean, there are many problems, I think with not only the scale of those policies, which I think has been too small, and also the sort of theory of change behind them, which is like private sector led, and all carrot, no stick. And the other like kind of big criticism that many have raised in that I myself have raised a number of times, it's like, building out the new green economy is one thing, we also need to get rid of the old dirty economy, like we need to wind fossil fuels down, we can't just kind of be like, adding more energy to the grid. And on that the Biden administration has kind of done a pretty dismal job. The the theory, I think of like, just creating the new economy and doing nothing to actually wind down the old economy has not really worked to lower energy emissions. But all of that progress is still like it still is progress. It's something to build upon. And it's something that the Trump administration could undo, if it has its way. And so, I mean, I think it's complicated to like, kind of assess the legacy of the Biden administration. And especially I think, if you're an oil company, you're might not be too, too concerned about what a Biden administration, you know, another term that might administration could look like. However, I think that you might also realize that you could do even better under a second Trump administration.

Arjun Singh
Well, and Trump recently seems to say that directly to him, and he asked oil executives for a billion dollars to basically give them a more favorable administration. What, what is it exactly what I just described, he asked a bunch of executives and just said, Give me a billion dollars. And I will give you what you want, because knowing Donald Trump, honestly, I would not be shocked to hear that exact sentence just come out of his mouth. But what happened, actually?

Dharna Noor
Yeah, I mean, I wish that we should be a fly on the wall at that meeting. We don't know obviously, like exactly what was said, what we do know based on kind of original reporting from the Washington Post, where they talked to some sources who were present, is that last month, Trump had this meeting, this dinner meeting at Mar a Lago has sort of home and club, there was something like 20, fossil fuel bosses who were there. And we don't know exactly what like the specifics of this offer were. But what we do know is that he, one offered to dismantle dozens of Biden Naira environmental rules, and to requested a billion dollars in contributions to his presidential campaign. We don't know if he said, If you give me a billion dollars, then I will just mentally use regulations. But we know that he made the offer, and also made the request. And so there are a bunch of different investigations happening right now from Senate and House Democrats into the kind of specifics of this meeting. You know, there's been some sort of congressional watchdogs and some some kind of legal watchdogs that have posed some questions as well. So maybe we'll learn some more details, but either way, it does not sound does not sound particularly good. And, you know, could potentially even verge into the realm of illegal behavior when it comes to campaign finance.

Arjun Singh
Yeah, well, I mean, something that Donald Trump is clearly very familiar with now. But, you know, going back to something that you had said a little bit earlier, which is that oil companies might not be too afraid of a continuing Biden administration, you had a really interesting piece recently about Habitat for Humanity. And they are building what they say are Zero Net Energy Homes, but these homes still rely on gas and fossil fuels. What happened in that situation? And why was this able to get away with being called zero net energy if it's still relying on fossil fuels? This

Dharna Noor
was a pretty wild case that I kind of dug into. To be honest, before I started looking into these projects, maybe six months ago, I didn't really know what the term zero net energy was. None zero we know means like, you know, it's kind of a term for getting rid of emissions in like possibly a kind of bullshit way. Net Zero often means oh, we're not going to stop drilling for oil or using oil and coal and gas, but we are going to do is offset our emissions in ways that doesn't actually get rid of the emissions or, you know, a US like carbon capture technology that doesn't actually exist yet. So net zero is it's One thing, but zero net energy is kind of an even wilder idea wherein you're just supposed to create a home, or a building that produces as much energy as it uses. So in this case, they're building these homes with Habitat for Humanity. It's gas utilities that are building these homes with Habitat for Humanity that are outfitted with solar panels to produce energy. They're also kind of meticulously weatherized and insulated to make sure that they're not using very much energy. But then they're also outfitted with gas appliances, even though we know that, you know, gas stoves have recently been linked to childhood asthma and lots of other health issues. We know obviously, that gas is like a leading contributor to the climate crisis in the US. But there's still you know, it's a format or energy that can be kind of offset by the use of solar panels on your roof. And so it's means that it's compatible with a zero net energy model, which is pretty cool.

Arjun Singh
Is that really like a one to one sort of situation, though, if you take kind of the cumulative impacts of everything, like just because you use a certain amount of electricity, or gasoline? Because you've gotten a similar amount of energy from solar? Is that actually like a one to one like that logic seems to not totally add up? But maybe I'm wrong. And

Dharna Noor
no, I mean, you're, you're right, in that it's a really, if you are only concerned about energy efficiency? Sure. Like maybe it adds up if all you're worried about is the use of energy overall, the problem is like, nobody is just concerned about energy efficiency for no reason, right? Like there's people are concerned about energy efficiency for cost reasons, which, you know, these homes were created to be cost efficient. But also, we know that gas prices can be extremely volatile. So there's issues there. And people are also concerned about energy efficiency, because of the emissions that come from the production of energy. And putting solar panels on the top of a house does not cancel out the emissions that come from using gas in those homes. So either way, like, I think it's a pretty dubious model, whether it's whether it's, you know, efficiency that you care about, for price reasons, or for or for, for climate reasons, especially well,

Arjun Singh
and then you mentioned the health concerns of gas stoves earlier. But there seems to be something that, you know, for people who get Habitat for Humanity homes, they likely don't have a lot of choices in terms of housing. And so to put something like gas stoves in there and continue to use these energy, what are some of the health impacts that you discovered, for people who have to live in these homes?

Dharna Noor
I mean, so a lot of these homes are new, it's difficult to link any particular health effects to these homes specifically. We know that the way that both habitat and especially the utilities that have been partnering with habitat to create these homes are talking about them, they are not concerned about the health effects of gas at all. You know, in fact, they repeatedly have referred to gas as clean. During a dedication ceremony where one of these homes was unveiled in Louisiana, a record of a representative from the utility that created the home said that the air quality inside of the building was of the best quality breathing air that you can have, which is just baseless, basically, like

Arjun Singh
another of these very, like definitive statements. I always wonder why they were you know, like why people go for the most unequivocal thing not, it's pretty good for what you're getting. But you know, I'm also not an industry executive.

Dharna Noor
Well, they're, I mean, they're doing PR, right. And also, like, frankly, I don't really think that a lot of these people are particularly concerned about the health effects of gas, or even that familiar with them. Like, if you're just somebody who works for a nonprofit, or even somebody who just works for utility, you might not be up to date on all of the latest science, showing the dangers of your the fuel that you're kind of peddling, why would you be it's like not in your interest to be familiar with it. And also the stuff that you're getting from, like the trade groups that you're a part of, and things like that are definitely not going to be kind of sharing that information with you, at least in a way that you can kind of say is in good faith. And, you know, I think obviously, like, it's not as though the utilities are unfamiliar with the concerns around gas usage. But the trade groups have answers to all of these studies, like they all say, Oh, this has been disproven. This science is not based on a big enough data set, or this other study is, you know, it was disproven by this other by this other kind of piece of research. And so if you're an industry group, all of this stuff is debatable, right. So of course you're going to take a kind of definitive stance, what's the incentive not? You're just doing PR.

Arjun Singh
Yeah, you know, one other thing that I wanted to ask you about is, there's this potential merger between or merger or purchase between ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil. Tell me a little bit about what that would create. Because something we've talked a lot about on this show is that mega mergers tend to not be very good for the rest of people for the rest of the economy. But what exactly is going on here? And is there any sort of governmental oversight over this that's looking into this merger, are people saying that this could create another one of these too big to fail style companies,

Dharna Noor
it's interesting, this plan were essentially ConocoPhillips, this kind of oil major announced plans to buy a Marathon Oil. In this like $17 billion deal, in fact, even a little bit more than $17 million $17 billion dollars. It came as both Exxon and Chevron have have been sort of having their like annual shareholder meetings. And right after both Exxon and Chevron made these sort of deals, to to acquire a smaller energy companies also. So in October, Exxon agreed to buy pioneer natural resources. Chevron made a similar deal, also in October. And there's been quite a lot of concern about these kinds of things, for the reason that you said, because, you know, larger, giving more power and more capital to energy companies that have created the climate crisis, you know, all three of these companies ConocoPhillips, and especially Exxon and Chevron are among the top polluters in global history when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. And so giving them more capital, I think is probably not the right move when we're talking about companies that like knowingly got us into this mess. The other thing is, this comes after all of these companies have spent years making all these promises, these really flashy promises about how they're going to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and they're going to invest in low carbon energy. And it just makes it really clear that like, as soon as the market changed, they had no interest in doing any of that anymore. Like they didn't mean it. At the time, as all of those kinds of statements were being made. As all those kinds of promises were being made. A lot of experts said, hey, they're doing this as a way to try to evade regulation. They're doing this as a way to say, look, we're doing it ourselves, you don't need to tell us to decarbonize, we're already decarbonizing. The problem is that none of those plans are actually binding. And that's what we're seeing in the in the purchasing of more fossil fuel assets like, yeah, you can say all you want to that you're going to decarbonize until becomes a good idea for you economically, you think in the moment to purchase some more fossil fuel assets.

Arjun Singh
So we've been talking a lot about about wins for the fossil fuel industry. But I do want to end on on what seems like a win for the public and the people, which was in Vermont, Vermont recently passed a new law that says that it would hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for their role in the climate crisis. You had done some reporting on this before the law had actually passed. But what's kind of the context of this? And what would this law actually do?

Dharna Noor
Yeah, it's pretty exciting. And basically, this law is gonna make Vermont it seems the first state to hold oil companies financially responsible for climate damages. So listeners might know that over the past, like five years, there's been a bunch of lawsuits that have aimed to essentially levy charges against the fossil fuel industry for knowingly contributing to the climate crisis and forcing it to help pay for some of the impacts of the climate crisis. So things like, you know, the need to build new infrastructure, after floods, the need to protect, you know, the homes from incoming hurricanes or heat waves or other kinds of climate impacts that we're seeing increasingly, and we're seeing them become also more severe. Vermont is one of the most rapidly warming states, it's seen like billion dollar flood damages in recent years. So it's a pretty exciting thing for Vermont to be sort of leading the way on. And basically, under the legislation, the state will have until like the beginning of 2026, to round up all of the total costs from greenhouse gas emissions for the state going back to like 1995. And then they'll use federal data to determine how much of that individual polluting companies were responsible for. And then they will charge those individual polluting companies for them. And then they will use the funds that they obtained to prepare for the climate crisis. And to deal with the the past harms of the climate crisis. It's going to be a long road ahead. We know for a fact that oil companies are going to challenge this in court. So we'll have to see what implementation actually looks like. But the passage of it is a pretty big deal. Yeah.

Arjun Singh
And if successful, it sounds like a couple other states might pick up their own versions of this, right.

Dharna Noor
Yeah, exactly. So Maryland is considering a law like this. New York is also considering something like this one. Two sets, California recently considered something like this. And then maybe most excitingly, there's not quite the same level of momentum behind it, but Bernie Sanders and some other senators have actually submitted federal proposals to so we'll see where those go.

Arjun Singh
Yeah, well, we'll wait and see what happens. But Darn, it was great to talk to you. Thanks for stopping by lever time today. Thanks

Dharna Noor
so much ours and great to be here.

Arjun Singh
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun sang with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back later this week with more episodes of lever time.