Good morning, Happy Wednesday & Happy New Year, and welcome to the fifth installment of The Leaflet. This issue encapsulates no theme in particular, but discusses a few issues we’d like to bring to your attention. 

I would like first to introduce Ben Whealy, a junior at Creighton Prep, as an official writer for The Leaflet. Today, Ben will be discussing Project 2025, a conservative document as to what Trump’s agenda may include—and what challenges it poses for environmental progress.

We hope you enjoy this issue.

Liberal media has a historic tendency to be misleadingly alarmist about certain issues while simultaneously demonizing contradictory perspectives. This most clearly came into focus during the Covid-19 pandemic where topics like the lab leak hypothesis were labeled as “an attack on science” and the negative impacts of school closure on children were dismissed by saying, “ They’re just having different learning experiences.” Both of which were later given legitimate credence by government investigations and non-partisan experts. And these are just a few of the examples of the types of liberal alarmism in media reporting and dismissal of conflicting perspectives that causes such distrust of media sources.  This is a personal gripe that I, as well as many other people who are on the political left, have with media companies. They care more about profits than accurate reporting and will publish exaggerated accounts about issues that may actually pose a threat to people's well being (Covid, climate change, drug usage, etc). This leads to mass dismissal of claims about credible danger and the denial of unbiased science as “liberal hysteria.” This applied very heavily to human caused climate change, with only 23% of republicans viewing it as a “major threat” despite it being known by oil companies for decades and being an accepted fact by 97% of related scientific studies. The goal of this article is to convince you, the reader, regardless of your political views, of the danger that Project 2025 poses to the environmental well being of America and the world without resorting to the hyperbole and alarmism that is far too present in reporting on this document. Simply put, the people who I am writing to are those who distrust (and rightfully so) what they might call “mainstream media” (CNN, NBC, The New York Times, etc). If the Leadership Conference can not describe the contents of Project 2025 without calling it “Extreme Christian nationalist ideology,” I certainly can. I am evaluating as objectively as possible but I am, like every writer that has ever lived, biased. I highly encourage everyone to read the sources that I have linked, especially Project 2025 itself and the donation records for the organizations mentioned. This article will be focusing on the connections that the contributors to this document have to fossil fuel corporations and how policy proposals outlined will benefit these companies while setting green energy development and climate change solutions back decades. This is nowhere near close to an analysis of all of the contents of Project 2025 and if you have any specific concerns or curiosity about other topics such as abortion, LGBTQ+ issues or immigration, please read those segments of the document itself and form your own opinion of it. For this article I used the Berkeley Law guide, which provides commentary that, although biased, is useful to break down the dense writing. 

Project 2025 is one of the most controversial, misunderstood and important documents in the current American political sphere. The Mandate for Leadership, nicknamed Project 2025, is a book that “represents the best effort of the Conservative movement in 2023 - and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.” It was published by Turning Point USA, a conservative organization aimed at youth engagement which was founded by Charlie Kirk, a media personality and climate change denier who claimed that, “when scientists are looking into global warming, there was no factual data to back up their argument”, and Bill Montgomery, who passed away from Covid-19 related complications in 2020. Project 2025 is not an official policy outline for the Trump administration, it was not written by the Trump campaign and it has been repeatedly denounced by Trump himself. But while Trump has verbally distanced himself from Project 2025, he has tapped several people to hold high ranking positions in the new administration who have directly named as contributors to Project 2025 including John Ratcliffe for CIA director, Michael Anton for policy planning at the State Department, and Tom Homan who will be tasked to run Trump's sweeping immigration “reforms” as border czar. So while it is true that it is not affiliated with Trump himself, the roots of The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 run deep within the new administration and it is worth taking seriously the policy proposals that are described as potentially integral to the future of the nation.

To fully understand the intent behind the climate policies described in Project 2025, you must first look at the “Project 2025 Advisory Board” on pages XI and XII, before the policy proposals have even begun. There, amongst various conservative institutions such as the Evangelical college, Liberty University, and Republican political factory, The Leadership Institute (which was the training ground for conservative politicians like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnel), are the names of three organizations that are infamous for their work as front groups for fossil fuel companies, distributors of pro-oil propaganda and for knowingly causing environmental harm in the name of profits; The Institute for Energy Research, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Each of these organizations played a large role in the creation of Project 2025 and each of them have deep, inseparable connections with the fossil fuel industry which can be seen heavily throughout the pro-fossil fuel legislation that is promoted by The Mandate for Leadership.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is non-profit organization that was founded in 1989 by Robert L. Bradley Jr who worked as a public policy analyst at Enron (yikes) while still on the board of the IER. Since its founding, the IER has received $375,298 from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the donation arm of Charles Kochs’ private financial empire and another $110,000 from The Charles Koch Institute, a think tank that was also founded by Koch. He made his 65.7 billion dollar fortune with his brother, Bill Koch, in the oil and gas industry, eventually forming the 2nd largest privately owned company on earth. Since its founding the IER has also accepted $337,000 from ExxonMobil, one of the largest oil and gas companies on earth, and $160,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Along with the IER, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is another fossil fuel shell company that shares many donors with the IER. In 2019, the presentation given at a “Game of Thrones” themed fundraising gala (makes sense) was leaked to The New York Times. This leaked presentation, while not revealing the exact amounts donated, gave a detailed rankings list of donors and contained many recognizable names such T-Mobile, Amazon and Juul; as well as fossil fuel companies such as Marathon Oil, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and the Charles Koch Institute. Notice a pattern yet?  Publicly available tax records showed that the CEI received around over 8.5 million from DonorsTrust, (a libertarian grant giving organization that received over one million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2001 and 2017)  2.1 million from ExxonMobil between 1997 and 2006,  and $200,000 from David Koch himself, along with millions from other companies and conservative groups. The final member of this unholy trinity is the Texas Public Policy Foundation(TPPF). The TPPF is an Austin based think tank that was founded by one of the co-owners of the San Antonio Spurs, James Leininger. Its donor list contains very few surprises with (and say it with me now) Koch Industries donating $159,834 in 2010. 

Considering the amount of fossil fuel money involved in the creation of this document, it should be little wonder that the energy policies described in Project 2025 are so extremely anti-regulation that it would make John D. Rockefeller rise from the dead and shake Charlie Kirks’ hand himself.  The author of the “Department of Energy and Related Commissions” page is Bernard L. McNamee, the former Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commision from 2018 to 2020, a member of the Federalist Society and a former attorney for the previously mentioned Texas Public Policy Foundations. McNamee frames the deregulation of the energy industry as a way to combat the “extreme green policies” that were enacted by the Biden administration under the “rubric of ‘combating climate change’ and ’ESG’ (environmental, social and governance)”. A way of achieving this goal is by “Unleashing private sector energy innovation” and stopping “the war on oil and natural gas” through deregulation efforts. The Department of Energy (DOE) would be renamed the Department of Energy Security and Advanced Science (DESAS) and its efforts in subsidizing clean energy development like off-shore wind farms and solar power would be put to a swift end. The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) would be eliminated if possible by the new administration with an end put to all “carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) programs.” If it cannot be eliminated, the FECM would be renamed to the “Office of Fossil Energy” and would have the mission of “increasing energy security and supply through fossil fuels.” This will force the United States economy to be more reliant on fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron for energy while setting technological progress related to renewable energy back decades. Furthermore, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), whose duty is to conduct research on renewable energy projects with the goal of having a “net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions economy wide by no later than 2050,” would be entirely eliminated. Bernard L. McNamee says that the needed reforms for the EERE, the office that is dedicated to developing renewable energy and solving climate change, are to “End the focus on climate change and green subsidies” and to “eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances.”  With no reason given for why these environmentally necessary offices will be eliminated outside of the vague description of “efficiency”, it is absurd to see just how much Project 2025 is a document created to grow profits for the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our plant. 

Along with ending funding for renewable energy projects, the new DESAS would absorb the responsibilities of nuclear regulation and would “streamline the nuclear regulatory requirements and licensing process.” This is a thinly veiled euphemism for deregulating the nuclear power industry, an industry that historically should be very highly regulated. In the following section describing the new responsibilities of the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), one of the reforms listed is to “Substantially limit NEs’ size and scope,” limiting its responsibilities to “basic research, broadly applicable technology challenges and solving the nuclear waste management issue as it relates to the development and deployment of advanced next generation reactors.” The NEs’ role in the next administration contains no responsibility to ensure the safety of new nuclear facilities and essentially relegates the agency to writing checks to private companies without much regulatory oversight. Along with the deregulation of nuclear energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would be tasked with the “Continuing to develop new warheads for each branch of the triad (land, sea and air defenses)” and to bring bring back to the B83 Nuclear warhead despite the United States having a nuclear arsenal of 5,748 warheads already.

This is all before the chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The section of The Mandate for Leadership relating to the EPA was written by Mandy Gunasekara, a former senior policy advisor for the EPA during the Trump administration and a member of the CO2 Coalition, an organization that claims that “More CO2 helps to feed more people worldwide”  and has received (here we go again) $620,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2004. She was also a speaker at the Independent Petroleum Association of Americas’ Regulators’ Forum this past October. When describing the responsibilities of the administration of the EPA, Gunasekara would “return the enforcement and compliance function to the media offices (air, water, land and emergency management, etc.) and eliminate the stand alone Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance.” This would strip the EPA of many of its enforcement authority to pursue violators of environmental laws. The EPA would also be forced to remove the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program for “any source category that is not being currently regulated,” essentially preventing the study of the greenhouse gas that is produced by an industry that is not already being regulated by the EPA. Further, if the Inflation Reduction Act is repealed, programs that provided grants to the EPA to research solutions to man made climate change would be cut, preventing meaningful research that could bring about positive change in preserving the environment.  

This is just a sample of the policy changes laid out in Project 2025 that are related to the environment. Fossil fuel corporations have embedded themselves into the creation of this book so deeply that each and every one of the policy proposals about the environment should be viewed in the context of who it truly would benefit. The abolition of government offices responsible for ensuring the proper care of the environment would cause unmitigated harm to our planet, but bring billions of dollars in profit to the corporations that contributed to the authorship of Project 2025.

~ Benjamin Whealy

Artificial Intelligence & The Recycling Process

Artificial Intelligence has been quickly thrust into our lives in the past few years, forcing institutions to adapt rapidly to its potential. Companies are honing in on AI’s potential for productivity; schools are vigilant of its power; individuals are testing its boundaries and creative limits, and advertisers are trying to match public interest. 

Environmentalists are trying desperately to inform the public of its dangers to the environment. 

For good reason—according to National Geographic, for about every 10-50 text exchanges with ChatGPT, the servers behind ChatGPT will consume about 500 milliliters (roughly sixteen ounces) of water.

But, the environmental positives are seldom mentioned in the environmentalist debate over Artificial Intelligence. (That claim comes only from personal experience). One such positive is seen in the field of recycling and waste management. 

Waste management is hard. On both an individual level and as a government, it is not easy to properly manage our waste. There are many reasons for this, many to be explored in a future article, but the bottom line is that if even the smallest portion of a bin of recycling is contaminated or not recyclable, it can prohibit the rest of the “bin” from being recycled, and will have to be thrown out. Properly identifying materials is crucial to the recycling process. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes in.

Artificial Intelligence can accurately identify the types, weights, shapes, brand information, etc. of a material/object, with up to 95% accuracy (Forbes). Human sorting results in roughly 75% of materials being recycled (Reset). An example of how this sorting ability can best apply is with a pile of paper to be recycled. Plastic bags, being of similar shape and “fluidity” to paper, can end up in these piles of paper. Artificial Intelligence can identify these plastic bags and machines will remove them.

Landfills occupy land the size roughly of the State of Maryland in the United States alone. We can’t shy away from this fact. We also can’t shy away from the fact of the environmental degradation Artificial Intelligence causes. But Artificial Intelligence isn’t going away any time soon and neither are our landfills. Harnessing Artificial Intelligence’s enormous potential to help mitigate the size of our landfills is crucial to a ensuring the future of our planet Earth.

~ Seamus Haney

This article was guided by this article (Forbes).

Understanding the Plant-Based Meat Argument: a Three Part Analysis

In a previous issue of The Leaflet, we examined the environmental benefits of plant-based meat. In short, there are virtually no downsides to the environment as compared to animal-based meat. 

In this issue’s article, we will be examining plant-based meat’s promise to the well-being of animals. 

One of the primary arguments to the benefits of plant-based meat is as stated above—the protection of the well-being of animals. The logic is simple. Animal-based meat requires the cultivation of livestock, and eventually the killing of those animals for their meat. Plant-based meat comes from plants, eliminating animals, and therefore harm to animals, from the equation. 

While the logic as to why plant-based meat protects the well-being of animals may be simple, what actually happens to animals behind the scenes is not. While this article could end here, as I’ve effectively answered the question as to how plant based meat protects animals, I wanted to go further and discuss what is happening to these animals—what warrants our responsibility to try to protect them.

The most blatant and terminating effect of animal-based meat to animals is that the animals are ultimately slaughtered. But what comes before they are slaughtered is also worth mentioning. 

For cows, they are oftentimes forced to overproduce milk, forced to repeat impregnation, forced into a confined area to inhabit, and lack proper nutrition. Farmers are most concerned with producing the most cows, the most milk, and in the quickest and cheapest way possible. After all, this is their profession—this is how they get food on the table for their family. (The Humane Society of the United States).

Pigs are of a similar plight. Their conditions are no better. Pigs are forced to eat, and eat, and eat and often are victims of obesity and crippling leg disorders.

Once again, the farming of chickens gives rise to similarly appalling conditions for the animals. Chickens are overfed and often suffer from heart attacks as a result (Merck Manual).

For more detailed information and a further discussion about the harm caused to animals, click on the hyperlinks above to those articles. In summary, however, these animals are forced into condensed, crowded, filthy areas with no regard to the freedom, nutrition, and kindness that these animals arguably deserve. 

It’s hopefully not very easy to imagine ourselves in a similar situation, why should we force animals to experience it firsthand?

~ Seamus Haney

The Leaflet’s Simple Steps for Sustainability

New Year’s Resolutions are most likely a fairly recent thought in all of our minds right now. We all hold ambitions as to how we will improve ourselves and goals we have for the new year.

The Leaflet too has a goal.

The Leaflet’s goal this year is to grow our base. Our goal is to have 1000 subscribers by 2026. Currently, we have 126.

The math is fairly straightforward. If each person were to share this newsletter with 8 people, we’d hit our goal. Quite frankly, that number is a bit overwhelming. Few of us know 8 people who may be interested in reading this newsletter—myself included.

So today, we ask that you share this newsletter with one person. We benefit in no way financially from the creation of this newsletter. We don’t run ads, don’t track any of your information, and we don’t care to. We know, however, that one of the best ways to tackle our climate crisis is through education at a grassroots level. This is what this newsletter has set out to do from the very beginning.

This week, please consider helping us achieve our goal for the New Year. Even if you cannot, or choose not to, we thank you nevertheless for reading our newsletter.

This Week’s Waste Management Tip: Packing Peanuts

After coming back from a recent vacation, I was disheartened by a large package my family received packed with hundreds of packing peanuts. I, ignorantly, supposed the packing peanuts were made of styrofoam, perhaps the worst material for the environment.

I was delighted, however, to learn that they were biodegradable. They weren’t styrofoam after-all. These packing peanuts are actually plant-based. No, they are not made from peanuts, but rather corn starch and potato starch.

Not all packing peanuts are biodegradable, unfortunately. But, to test if your packing peanuts are, run them under water for a minute and see if they dissolve. To see what a dissolving packing peanut looks like, reference the image above.

According to the High Country Reservation Center, just keep the water running in your sink over the peanuts until they dissolve and let them run down the drain. This method is 100% safe for the environment.

You can also choose to use them for your personal compost. The only precaution with this method to make sure they are not able to blow away, as a general service to your neighbors and community.

The Leaflet’s 2025 Goal: Status

Helpful Links for Your Own Research

1. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

2. Omaha Recycling Guide

3. Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

Thank you for reading this issue of The Leaflet.

The Leaflet is not affiliated with any organization or school.

Newsletter produced primarily by Seamus Haney