Attacks On Our Climate Are Attacks On Our Democracy
In this installment, we will focus on the anti-democratic campaign to undermine the fight against climate change. From the fossil fuel industry pushing to criminalize free speech, to officials using climate disasters to block voter registration, to Project 2025’s clear plans for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of the environmental administrative state, we can see the link between the fight for our planet and for our democracy.
This edition will be our last newsletter before the election. But no matter who wins, anti-democratic movements will not disappear. The fight against them will never be futile. It will remain, as it always has, a moral imperative. And so we will be here, too.
Fossil Fuel Corporations Are Hijacking Democracy
Fossil Fuel Money Funds National Push to Criminalize Peaceful Protest:
- According to a recent Guardian investigation, oil and gas companies are behind a flood of anti-protest laws seeking increased penalties and prison time for peaceful protestors of gas and oil expansion. The Guardian, through freedom of information act requests, found emails showing that fossil fuel lobbyists have coordinated with state legislators to pass these anti-democratic laws.
- Oklahoma, the first state to enact laws punishing individuals and organizations for trespassing on “critical infrastructure” (aka pipelines), inspired the fossil-fuel funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push similar legislation nationwide. Emails obtained by The Guardian found that groups like ALEC, Marathon Petroleum, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have lobbied hard for these anti-protest laws, which states have used to prosecute activists across the country, and prosecute a journalist in Louisiana. These corporations are using their enormous financial resources to criminalize the act of peacefully protesting fossil fuel expansion.
Lawmakers Are Trying To Outlaw Banks Assessing Climate Risk:
- Investors use environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) criteria to screen investments. Many financial institutions have started accounting for climate risk as a part of their general financial risk analysis.
- Last year, lawmakers in 37 states introduced 165 bills to require government funds, public investments, and pensions to divest from financial companies that take climate risk seriously and use ESG criteria. Most of these bills failed. Unsurprisingly, architects of this legislation include ALEC and the Heritage Foundation, the proud authors of Project 2025.
- Anti-ESG legislation is blatantly anti-free market, so opponents are not just environmental advocacy organizations and labor unions, but also corporations and investment firms. Residents of states that successfully pass anti-ESG legislation, like Texas did in 2021, could lose out on millions of dollars in retirement funds.
Climate Change Disrupts Elections:
- As recent record-breaking and tragic hurricanes made clear, the fossil fuel-caused climate crisis is impacting elections. In the swing state of North Carolina, 1.2 million registered voters live in areas devastated by Hurricane Helene.
- Florida Governor DeSantis has seized this opportunity to disenfranchise voters by refusing to extend voter registration deadlines despite massive damage from back-to-back hurricanes. A federal judge flatly rejected a lawsuit brought by plaintiffs trying to reopen voter registration in Florida, saying “[i]f they had evacuated, they still could have registered while evacuating.” Because climate disasters disproportionately impact communities of color and lower-income communities, voting inequities and disenfranchisement will continue to worsen as the climate warms.
An Intentional Misinformation Campaign in the Wake of Two Devastating Storms
“I have been doing disaster work for nearly 20 years, and I cannot think of another acute disaster where there has been this much misinformation.”
–A veteran disaster relief expert
Preventing citizens from accessing crucial government services during a crisis, because of a political agenda, is a direct attack on democracy. And yet that’s exactly what happened in the wake of two severe hurricanes–Helene and Milton–that brought devastation to communities from Florida to North Carolina.
Last month, Hurricane Helene slammed the southeastern United States, killing over 200 people. Yet as federal, state, and local agencies dealt with the crisis and prepared for Hurricane Milton to make landfall in Florida, a cadre of anti-democratic politicians and conspiracy theorists sought to hinder the relief effort for political gain.
They propagated a host of unhinged and false claims. A sitting congresswoman claimed that “they can control the weather.” Others pedaled the neo-nazi conspiracy that the storms were manufactured by Jews, along with the brazenly false claim that FEMA’s disaster relief fund had no money and the agency was refusing to help desperate citizens because it had spent its funds on housing immigrants. The leader of a major political party spread that latter claim, and the wealthiest person in the world–a noted conspiracy theorist and right-wing political mega donor–amplified it.
These outright lies, that FEMA has no money to help or actively blocked aid and stole land, have already led to people who need assistance failing to seek it. They have also led to unprecedented death threats and armed confrontations targeting FEMA workers who are just trying to do their jobs. FEMA crews in hard-hit Rutherford County, NC, for example, had to relocate due to the death threats. And days later in Tennessee, armed residents who were enflamed by the conspiracy theories surrounded these same workers. These efforts are ongoing and aid workers, volunteers, and local officials are in danger because of the shameless lies of the anti-democratic right. Beyond lying about the current climate disasters, they have also made clear that future disaster aid would only be given in exchange for political concessions.
The bottom line: a growing political core’s willingness to foment and spread outright lies for perceived political gain, has had real human cost as we recover from two climate disasters.
Project 2025 Spotlight
Project 2025’s Plot to Undermine the Fight Against Climate Change
“The climate agenda is ending the American Dream…I enjoy my high carbon lifestyle.”
–Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and key architect of Project 2025 at The New York Times’ 2024 Climate Forward conference
Project 2025 calls for a “whole-of-government unwinding” to combat the “climate change alarm industry” (p.675), which it accuses of “acting as a damper on social and economic life” (p.582) and threatening “future U.S. prosperity” (p.675). As part of this “unwinding” mission, the Project prescribes defunding climate research, radically reshaping key environmental agencies, and cutting industry regulations–all while the earth reels from severe droughts, heatwaves, and storms.
- Eroding Our Power to Respond to Weather Events. According to Project 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)–an agency in charge of the nation’s ocean, climate, space, and weather policies–should be “broken up and downsized” (p.675). This includes “disband[ing]” “climate-change research” (p. 676), “fully commercializ[ing]…forecasting operations” (p.675), and ensuring that the agency is staffed by loyalists who are “wholly in sync with Administration policy” (p.677). Many worry that the Project’s plan to privatize weather information would disenfranchise millions of the ability to even know about, let alone prepare for, weather crises.
- Abandoning Victims of Weather Events. Under Project 2025, misinformation about the lack of federal disaster assistance would become a dark reality. The Project vows to shift the brunt of emergency preparedness and response costs to the states (p.153), wind down disaster loan programs (p.750-4), and replace the National Flood Insurance Program with private insurance (p.135), even as the country suffers an unabating home insurance crisis.
- Gutting the EPA. The NOAA is not the only agency in flux. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), already much reviled and attacked by conservatives, is on the Project’s list of agencies that “should be greatly circumscribed,” “restructur[ed],” and “streamlin[ed]” (p. 420). As it stands, the Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision striking down Chevron will likely unravel many of EPA’s environmental regulations and Project 2025 would be the final death knell.
- Among its other anti-environment goals, the Project attacks everything from air quality standards (p.424) to greenhouse emission regulations (pp.424; 521; 606) and aims to dismantle the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the division dedicated to protecting vulnerable communities from industrial pollution. Ultimately, the Project’s agenda to radically reorganize the EPA, dramatically “cut…” its “size and scope” (p.445), and scuttle many of its initiatives would finish the war on the EPA that was started in 2016-2020, when over 100 environmental rules were rolled back and more than 1500 employees fled the agency, only to be replaced with non-scientist political appointees. The Project’s proposals “would essentially eviscerate the EPA…[and] turn it into a shell of what its true mission is,” says a former EPA deputy administrator.
- Derailing International Efforts to Combat Climate Change. “Rescind all climate policies from…foreign aid programs,” Project 2025 urges (p.257), which also means skipping out on the Paris Agreement and withdrawing from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) (p.709)–all but killing international attempts to save the planet, including curbing carbon emissions.
Perhaps the plan is best summed up like this: “In some ways…the particulars aren’t all that crucial—or not as crucial as what they collectively add up to: giving the oil industry absolutely anything it wants.” Indeed, many of Project 2025’s proposals dovetail precisely with the very plan written by a group of 30 oil and gas producers who are now aggressively lobbying for the next administration to dismantle key climate change policies in favor of fossil fuel production. But unlike other political battles, climate change is “a timed test; past a certain point, we can’t repair the damage.”
Fighting Back: What’s Working
A judge has blocked Florida from censoring ads for an abortion rights ballot measure, after successful litigation from activists. The general counsel to Florida’s Department of Health sent letters to television stations threatening criminal charges for airing ads in favor of a reproductive rights amendment. That official has now resigned and claims he was forced to send the letters by the administration. The lawsuit essentially blocked the self-styled free speech advocate–the Governor of Florida–from banning a television ad simply because he disagrees with the message, and using the criminal legal system to intimidate the media into compliance.
The Nebraska Supreme Court rejected an end run around the constitution, reversing the unilateral actions of the state attorney general and secretary of state that disenfranchised tens of thousands of citizens who, under clear state law, had regained their right to vote after a conviction.
As early voting began in the Peach State, district judges ruled that the Georgia Board of Elections, which has recently been taken over by anti-democratic conspiracy theorists, cannot unilaterally refuse to certify the results of the upcoming election, just because they disagree with the outcome. Moreover, the courts made clear that last minute changes to election procedure fueled by false, repetitive accusations of voter fraud were invalid. The rulings were upheld by the state supreme court.