Tanner Flynn stands in shallow water near crashing waves as Hurricane Helene passes offshore on Thursday in St. Petersburg, Fla. Were “Project 2025” alreadt in effect, Helene might have caught Floridians by surprise. On stage at the New York Times’ Climate Forward summit on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts boldly declared that “the climate agenda is ending the American dream.” It’s a sentiment that should strike any thinking person as absurd on its face: What could be more devastating to human life, let alone the American dream, than spikes in extreme weather and disasters like floods and wildfires, lethal heat levels and water and food shortages? And yet the words of a man with incredible influence over conservative politicians are worth taking seriously. Throughout the text of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s Cheesecake Factory-like menu of hopes for the next conservative president, the idea of climate change is repeatedly denigrated as “anti-human”: the ideology of “environmental extremists” eager to sacrifice the American way of life “to the god of nature.” In practice, the recommendations in its text would worsen many of the environmental rollbacks of former president Trump, whose modus operandi was to plug his ears and sing, “Drill, baby, drill!” And the planet would be screwed, to say the least. When I spoke to David Kieve, president of Environmental Defense Fund Action, he rightfully critiqued Project 2025 as “a grab bag and a wishlist written by polluters for their short-term economic benefit, to the detriment of all of the rest of us.” I thought he was exaggerating until I dug into the list of Project 2025’s advisory board. On the board are several major think tanks devoted to climate denial. There’s the Heartland Institute (most famous for helping Phillip Morris push the idea […]