This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich, a researcher, was finishing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children, renting a house in New Orleans to begin his first-ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was abuzz in late August as students moved into their dormitories and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching.

He never made it to campus. Twelve feet of water had turned his house, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp, destroying everything he owned, including his car, and sending his life in a totally new direction. 

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 storm the morning of August 29, 2005, leading to more than 1,500 deaths in three Southern states and causing $300 billion in damages. In New Orleans, poor city planning and lack of flood resilience made a bad situation worse. Some 80 percent of the city was underwater 48 hours after Katrina hit. It would take many months for the people who evacuated to come back. A portion of the population never returned, and the city still bears the scars of Katrina’s impact, and the recovery process—botched by bad politics, racism, and lack of foresight—that followed. 

The Aldriches evacuated to Texas first, then moved back to Boston, where they stayed in an apartment rented for them by sympathetic friends and family. They watched on television as thousands of people, trapped in the Louisiana Superdome, begged for water and medical supplies. One close friend was evacuated from his rooftop by helicopter and dropped off at the airport, where there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“Either people are really pissed, like me, because they didn’t get what they wanted. They want to punish the government. Or they’re thrilled.”

Aldrich and his family didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the on-the-ground horrors,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his house uptown to Tulane, little springs of water would shoot up out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwater had crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was next to impossible. Grocery stores weren’t stocked. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job offer in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood had tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwater and post-hurricane demolition had sent the lead in the paint coating many of the houses in the city swirling into the environment. 

Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life, and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disasters and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and becoming one of America’s foremost disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina are radicalizing—often representing an individual’s first interactions with the federal government. That experience, his research has found, can end up dictating political preferences and voter behavior. 

Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically engaged post-disaster: They run for office, start community groups, and show up at town meetings. Aldrich, used to sitting outside of the research he was conducting, realized that he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned,” he said. “For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”

Grist spoke with Aldrich, now a professor of political science at Northeastern University, about his post-disaster experience, how climate shocks like hurricanes affect voters, and how Americans’ expectations of how the federal government should respond to a disaster have changed over time. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What happens, politically, to voters after a disaster? How does their behavior change?

There’s a lot of interesting research on this question. I think there are two things we have to think about. One is, what happens in terms of voting itself? Do people turn out to vote more than they would have in a normal year, not a disaster year or month? 

Some people argue that civic engagement as a whole increases for survivors of disasters. They’re more likely to vote, more likely to run for office, more likely to contact a congressperson, more likely to get involved in a meeting. There’s really interesting before-and-after studies of survivors themselves.

“When Katrina flooded my house, I was very angry. We had to fax our FEMA application in, and we were on the road…I cannot tell you how frustrating that process was.”

But then, the second question is: When they do that, whom do they vote for, and what happens then?

Typically, most of us don’t really encounter the government, except in moments like getting our driver’s license or passport renewed. But during a disaster, the vast majority of us begin to, because we’re applying for some kind of aid. Rather than being some abstract entity, now there actually is an agency in the government you’re interacting with. You think, ”Oh my God, I’ve been paying taxes since I was 22 or 23. Here’s my chance to get my money back.”

This is the funny thing about being both a survivor of a disaster and a scholar involved in studying disasters. My FEMA application was rejected in the first six months after Katrina. So that did not go well for me, but for other people who it goes well for, you can get thousands of dollars. So either people are really pissed, like me, because they didn’t get what they wanted. They want to punish the government. Or they’re thrilled. They got something. The government actually came through.

Given that spectrum of sentiment around disaster relief—where some victims get what they want, and others hit brick walls—what are the repercussions for politicians?

A lot of data has shown that in flooded areas, people tend to show up to vote in higher numbers for the incumbent party. Why is that? The party in power, if they’re smart, begins pumping a lot of extra stuff in. They pump extra personnel assistance and assistance to businesses, to schools, or just road infrastructure. The levers of power allow the incumbent party to begin showering all kinds of, as we call them, pork barrel politics, or electoral goods, back into those communities. 

If you look at the number of disaster declarations in an election year, they’re statistically higher than in non-election years. Even a small disaster—a tanker truck overturns and blocks I-40, there’s a fire in someone’s backyard and six people are made homeless—the party in power can take even this small thing and turn into a bigger one again, to get more aid, get more systems going, specifically, more disaster declarations. It feeds back to this idea that the party in power is using those levers of power during that short period to try to attract voters.

This is very deliberate. And you can say, “I’m really helping everybody,” and that it’s nonpartisan to defend yourself. You can say, “Well, look, I’ve got Democrats, some Republicans in my district. I want to make sure everyone is safe.”

There are also people who have argued—using flooding again, because flooding is very common—that there’s as much likelihood of people punishing the party in power as there is supporting the party. When Katrina flooded my house, I was very angry. We had to fax our FEMA application in, and we were on the road to Houston stopping in, like, Kinkos, trying to fax it in. I cannot tell you how frustrating that process was, and then it got rejected. 

Can we talk about FEMA? For many people, belief in or mistrust of FEMA almost comprises its own political affiliation. The agency tends to bear the brunt of people’s anger, right?

We envision FEMA as a white knight: FEMA guys in tents handing out food. That’s not what they do. And there’s very few FEMA employees to begin with. Their job is literally to say to a state or local representative, “Nice job, you built a hospital, now we’re writing a check to reimburse you.” That’s what they are, they’re a check-writing organization. But the expectations we had as a nation used to be very different. 

More than 100 years ago in Boston, we had the Great Molasses Flood that killed nearly two dozen people. A huge molasses tank broke and all that molasses went through the downtown, picked up people, and they drowned, because you can’t breathe it, you can’t swim out of it. The bottom line is that when that happened, even though you’d think, “OK, this is a great time for the national government,” no one got involved besides local organizations. It was all like churches, synagogues, and mosques, and the local Boston city office got involved, and the expectation that disasters were a local problem continued really until World War II.  

And then by the 1950s and ’60s, when we had this whole “nuclear bombs are coming” Cold War thing, we went from Americans expecting the federal government to do nothing to now expecting a lot from the government. And that gap between expectation and reality began to put pressure on FEMA. It’s not really FEMA’s job to rebuild, that’s not what they do. 

It seems like a bad situation—that FEMA wasn’t built for what people expect it to do, and also that climate change is making these extreme-weather events happen more often and with more intensity. 

The number of shocks that we have, the number of disasters that we have, are happening more often, and the shocks that are happening are more impactful. We have this data going back 100 years. If you look at things like hurricanes, and other meteorological disasters, they’re increasing in magnitude, so their damage is increasing. And also the frequency is increasing, meaning the gap between them is getting shorter so that local governments have less capacity. They [might be] dealing with Disaster 1 and Disaster 2 at the same time. So that’s absolutely true. 

We need a new 21st century structure for handling these new, more regular and stronger disasters. How will we handle the costs of climate change? We spend way too much money after the fact and not enough money before the fact. The idea that we should be building resistance to a shock is a very powerful one that we don’t do very well. Typically, we spend all the money, again, in election years and after the disaster.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the spring of 2005, Daniel Aldrich, a researcher, was finishing his doctorate in Japanese energy politics at Harvard University. That summer, he moved to Louisiana with his wife and two young children, renting a house in New Orleans to begin his first-ever job in academia at Tulane University. The campus was abuzz in late August as students moved into their dormitories and teachers prepared for the first day of classes. The last Monday of that month was supposed to be Aldrich’s first day of teaching.

He never made it to campus. Twelve feet of water had turned his house, eight blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, into a swamp, destroying everything he owned, including his car, and sending his life in a totally new direction. 

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 storm the morning of August 29, 2005, leading to more than 1,500 deaths in three Southern states and causing $300 billion in damages. In New Orleans, poor city planning and lack of flood resilience made a bad situation worse. Some 80 percent of the city was underwater 48 hours after Katrina hit. It would take many months for the people who evacuated to come back. A portion of the population never returned, and the city still bears the scars of Katrina’s impact, and the recovery process—botched by bad politics, racism, and lack of foresight—that followed. 

The Aldriches evacuated to Texas first, then moved back to Boston, where they stayed in an apartment rented for them by sympathetic friends and family. They watched on television as thousands of people, trapped in the Louisiana Superdome, begged for water and medical supplies. One close friend was evacuated from his rooftop by helicopter and dropped off at the airport, where there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“Either people are really pissed, like me, because they didn’t get what they wanted. They want to punish the government. Or they’re thrilled.”

Aldrich and his family didn’t go back to New Orleans for months, until that January. “That’s when we saw the on-the-ground horrors,” Aldrich said. On the walk from his house uptown to Tulane, little springs of water would shoot up out of the ground every few steps. The weight of the floodwater had crushed the city’s underground infrastructure. Finding a doctor was next to impossible. Grocery stores weren’t stocked. Abandoned boats blocked the streets. They didn’t last more than half a year. Aldrich got a job offer in Massachusetts, and the family went north again. In Boston, Aldrich’s children were tested for lead, a city requirement. Levels of the toxic metal in their blood had tripled while they were in New Orleans, where floodwater and post-hurricane demolition had sent the lead in the paint coating many of the houses in the city swirling into the environment. 

Katrina marked a turning point in Aldrich’s life, and in his professional trajectory. He would spend the next two and a half decades researching the politics of disasters and disaster resilience, writing three books on the subject and becoming one of America’s foremost disaster resilience experts. And he would soon find that epochal disasters like Katrina are radicalizing—often representing an individual’s first interactions with the federal government. That experience, his research has found, can end up dictating political preferences and voter behavior. 

Most importantly, Aldrich learned that survivors tend to become more civically engaged post-disaster: They run for office, start community groups, and show up at town meetings. Aldrich, used to sitting outside of the research he was conducting, realized that he had become a data point himself. “Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home, my car, and everything that I owned,” he said. “For me, it certainly changed my perspective.”

Grist spoke with Aldrich, now a professor of political science at Northeastern University, about his post-disaster experience, how climate shocks like hurricanes affect voters, and how Americans’ expectations of how the federal government should respond to a disaster have changed over time. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What happens, politically, to voters after a disaster? How does their behavior change?

There’s a lot of interesting research on this question. I think there are two things we have to think about. One is, what happens in terms of voting itself? Do people turn out to vote more than they would have in a normal year, not a disaster year or month? 

Some people argue that civic engagement as a whole increases for survivors of disasters. They’re more likely to vote, more likely to run for office, more likely to contact a congressperson, more likely to get involved in a meeting. There’s really interesting before-and-after studies of survivors themselves.

“When Katrina flooded my house, I was very angry. We had to fax our FEMA application in, and we were on the road…I cannot tell you how frustrating that process was.”

But then, the second question is: When they do that, whom do they vote for, and what happens then?

Typically, most of us don’t really encounter the government, except in moments like getting our driver’s license or passport renewed. But during a disaster, the vast majority of us begin to, because we’re applying for some kind of aid. Rather than being some abstract entity, now there actually is an agency in the government you’re interacting with. You think, ”Oh my God, I’ve been paying taxes since I was 22 or 23. Here’s my chance to get my money back.”

This is the funny thing about being both a survivor of a disaster and a scholar involved in studying disasters. My FEMA application was rejected in the first six months after Katrina. So that did not go well for me, but for other people who it goes well for, you can get thousands of dollars. So either people are really pissed, like me, because they didn’t get what they wanted. They want to punish the government. Or they’re thrilled. They got something. The government actually came through.

Given that spectrum of sentiment around disaster relief—where some victims get what they want, and others hit brick walls—what are the repercussions for politicians?

A lot of data has shown that in flooded areas, people tend to show up to vote in higher numbers for the incumbent party. Why is that? The party in power, if they’re smart, begins pumping a lot of extra stuff in. They pump extra personnel assistance and assistance to businesses, to schools, or just road infrastructure. The levers of power allow the incumbent party to begin showering all kinds of, as we call them, pork barrel politics, or electoral goods, back into those communities. 

If you look at the number of disaster declarations in an election year, they’re statistically higher than in non-election years. Even a small disaster—a tanker truck overturns and blocks I-40, there’s a fire in someone’s backyard and six people are made homeless—the party in power can take even this small thing and turn into a bigger one again, to get more aid, get more systems going, specifically, more disaster declarations. It feeds back to this idea that the party in power is using those levers of power during that short period to try to attract voters.

This is very deliberate. And you can say, “I’m really helping everybody,” and that it’s nonpartisan to defend yourself. You can say, “Well, look, I’ve got Democrats, some Republicans in my district. I want to make sure everyone is safe.”

There are also people who have argued—using flooding again, because flooding is very common—that there’s as much likelihood of people punishing the party in power as there is supporting the party. When Katrina flooded my house, I was very angry. We had to fax our FEMA application in, and we were on the road to Houston stopping in, like, Kinkos, trying to fax it in. I cannot tell you how frustrating that process was, and then it got rejected. 

Can we talk about FEMA? For many people, belief in or mistrust of FEMA almost comprises its own political affiliation. The agency tends to bear the brunt of people’s anger, right?

We envision FEMA as a white knight: FEMA guys in tents handing out food. That’s not what they do. And there’s very few FEMA employees to begin with. Their job is literally to say to a state or local representative, “Nice job, you built a hospital, now we’re writing a check to reimburse you.” That’s what they are, they’re a check-writing organization. But the expectations we had as a nation used to be very different. 

More than 100 years ago in Boston, we had the Great Molasses Flood that killed nearly two dozen people. A huge molasses tank broke and all that molasses went through the downtown, picked up people, and they drowned, because you can’t breathe it, you can’t swim out of it. The bottom line is that when that happened, even though you’d think, “OK, this is a great time for the national government,” no one got involved besides local organizations. It was all like churches, synagogues, and mosques, and the local Boston city office got involved, and the expectation that disasters were a local problem continued really until World War II.  

And then by the 1950s and ’60s, when we had this whole “nuclear bombs are coming” Cold War thing, we went from Americans expecting the federal government to do nothing to now expecting a lot from the government. And that gap between expectation and reality began to put pressure on FEMA. It’s not really FEMA’s job to rebuild, that’s not what they do. 

It seems like a bad situation—that FEMA wasn’t built for what people expect it to do, and also that climate change is making these extreme-weather events happen more often and with more intensity. 

The number of shocks that we have, the number of disasters that we have, are happening more often, and the shocks that are happening are more impactful. We have this data going back 100 years. If you look at things like hurricanes, and other meteorological disasters, they’re increasing in magnitude, so their damage is increasing. And also the frequency is increasing, meaning the gap between them is getting shorter so that local governments have less capacity. They [might be] dealing with Disaster 1 and Disaster 2 at the same time. So that’s absolutely true. 

We need a new 21st century structure for handling these new, more regular and stronger disasters. How will we handle the costs of climate change? We spend way too much money after the fact and not enough money before the fact. The idea that we should be building resistance to a shock is a very powerful one that we don’t do very well. Typically, we spend all the money, again, in election years and after the disaster.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever reach a goal she set out to achieve as a presidential hopeful in 2019. But at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia—five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race—Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.

Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense. 

That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change.

Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire-and-flood-prone states like California and Florida.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”

While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change. 

Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.

Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it. 

Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.

Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.

Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future. 

Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever reach a goal she set out to achieve as a presidential hopeful in 2019. But at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia—five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race—Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.

Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense. 

That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change.

Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire-and-flood-prone states like California and Florida.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”

While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change. 

Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.

Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it. 

Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.

Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.

Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future. 

Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government. 

Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies—from the Department of Defense to the Department of Interior to the Federal Reserve. Although it has largely garnered attention for its proposed crackdowns on human rights and individual liberties, the blueprint would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice. 

“This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically…dismantle the government in service of private industry.”  

Under President Joe Biden’s direction, the majority of the federal government’s vast system of departments, agencies, and commissions have belatedly undertaken the arduous task of incorporating climate change into their operations and procedures. Two summers ago, Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history with the potential to help drive greenhouse gas emissions down 42 percent below 2005 levels. 

Project 2025 seeks to undo much of that progress by slashing funding for government programs across the board, weakening federal oversight and policymaking capabilities, rolling back legislation passed during Biden’s first term, and eliminating career personnel. The policy changes it suggests—which include executive orders that Trump could implement single-handedly, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and legislation that would require congressional approval—would make it extremely difficult for the United States to fulfill the climate goals it has committed to under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

“It’s real bad,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Environmental Voters. “This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically take over, take away rights and freedoms, and dismantle the government in service of private industry.”  

Trump has sought to distance himself from the blueprint. “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote in a social media post last week. 

However, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to Project 2025, and policy experts and environmental advocates fear Project 2025 will play an influential role in shaping GOP policy if Trump is reelected in November. Some of the blueprint’s recommendations are echoed in the Republican National Convention’s official party platform, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says he is “good friends” with Trump’s new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Previous Heritage Foundation roadmaps have successfully dictated presidential agendas; 64 percent of the policy recommendations the foundation put out in 2016 had been implemented or considered under Trump one year into his term. The Heritage Foundation declined to provide a comment for this story.  

Broadly speaking, Project 2025 proposals aim to scale down the federal government and empower states. The document calls for “unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political advocacy group Evergreen Action. 

Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research. 

“There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.”

In addition to these major overhauls, Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding—the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality. 

“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.” 

Other proposals would wreak havoc on the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service housed therein and replacing those organizations with private companies. The blueprint appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s preposterous,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund. “There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.” 

“You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build.”

The document also advocates moving the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which marshals federal disaster response, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, where it has been housed for more than 20 years, and into the Department of the Interior or the Department of Transportation. “All of the agencies within the Department of Interior are federal land management agencies that own lots of land and manage those resources on behalf of the federal government,” Moore said. “Why would you put FEMA there? I can’t even fathom why that is a starting point.” 

The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and moving flood insurance to private insurers. That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes—long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market. 

Despite the alarming implications of most of Project 2025’s climate-related proposals, it also recommends a small number of policies that climate experts said are worth considering. Its authors call for shifting the costs of natural disasters from the federal government to states. That’s not a bad conversation to have, Moore pointed out. “I think there’s people within FEMA who feel the same way,” he said.

The federal government currently shoulders at least 75 percent of the costs of national disaster recovery, paving the way for development and rebuilding in risky areas. “You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build because they know the federal government is going to pick up the tab for whatever mistake they make,” Moore said.  

Quillan Robinson, a senior advisor with ConservAmerica who has worked with Republicans in Washington, DC, on crafting emissions policies, was heartened by the authors’ call for an end to what they termed “unfair bias against the nuclear industry.” Nuclear energy is a reliable source of carbon-free energy, but it has been plagued by security and public health concerns, as well as staunch opposition from some environmental activists. “We know it’s a crucial technology for decarbonization,” Robinson said, noting that there’s growing bipartisan interest in the energy source among lawmakers in Congress. 

An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030—the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.

Above all else, Segall, from Evergreen Action, is worried about the effect Project 2025 would have on the personnel who make up the federal government. Much of the way the administrative state works is safeguarded in the minds of career staff who pass their knowledge on to the next cadre of federal workers. When this institutional knowledge is curbed, as it was by budget cuts and hostile management during Trump’s first term, the government loses crucial information that helps it run. The personnel “scatter,” he said, disrupts bottom-line operations and grinds the government to a halt. 

Although Project 2025’s proposals are radical, Segall said that its effect on public servants would echo a pattern that has been playing out for decades. “This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.”