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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. And since the Republican National Convention kicked off in Milwaukee last night, we'll take a moment to look at both the climate and the energy platforms, which of course are related, of the Republican platform. As well as those set forth in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which some say will be the real blueprint for a second Trump presidency.

While former President Trump has recently tried to distance himself from that 900-page policy proposal, media reports show that many authors of that conservative wishlist were former Trump administration officials, including notably for this segment, his former EPA Chief of Staff. Joining us now from the Republican National Convention is Zack Colman, a reporter covering climate and energy at Politico. Zack, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Zack Colman: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I see the convention opened last night with a focus on energy. Can you give us a play-by-play of how it was talked about?

Zack Colman: You're going to hear a lot about energy dominance. That is what everyone is talking to me about. It's this idea that we're going to unleash a bunch of oil, coal, and gas. A lot of the people that I talk to here in Milwaukee say they're not against clean energy, but they think that the current administration's policies have restrained oil and gas and that's their opinion, but the US has never pumped more oil and gas than it is now. No country in history has pumped more oil and gas than it is right now, and we are the world's top producer. You definitely see this vision for more fossil fuels without much talk about climate change.

Brian Lehrer: This notion of energy dominance that you said was heard from the stage last night, and we'll hear a lot energy dominance. I'm going to read a little bit from the official Republican platform that was approved last week. It says, "Common sense tells us clearly that we must unleash American energy if we want to destroy inflation and rapidly bring down prices, build the greatest economy in history, revive our defense and industrial base, fuel emerging industries, and establish the United States as the manufacturing superpower of the world." It continues. "We will Drill, Baby Drill," and those words are capitalized, "Drill, Baby drill," and we will become energy independent and even dominant again. How would Trump ensure energy dominance? Any concrete proposals discussed last night?

Zack Colman: What you're going to see is a lot of proposals to deregulate, to remove a lot of the regulations that President Joe Biden has put in place. First and foremost, it would be rolling back vehicle emission tailpipe standards. These are rules that the easiest way to achieve what you would have to do for an economy-wide environmental goal is to make sure two-thirds of all new vehicle sales are electric vehicles by 2032. Now, this is the easiest way to achieve it. It doesn't say that it must be electric vehicles, but that's how it's been interpreted. That is something that a future Trump administration, if they win, would like to roll back.

There are also rules on power plant emissions. Those would likely be ditched for a more circumscribed rule, but you're just going to see a lot more oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico in other federal lands. Again, the Biden administration has tried to restrict that in federal lands to some degree, but they have also approved projects that are controversial with their base, like the Willow Oil project in Alaska. You're going to see a lot of efforts to deregulate pump more oil and gas. President Trump, if he were to win, is not going to talk about solar wind. He doesn't like those forms of energy, but I'm not suspecting that they would die on the vine. You would still see that it's just the policy actions that he would take would be designed to unmoor the oil and gas production in the country.

Brian Lehrer: The big announcement yesterday that Trump has chosen Ohio Senator, J. D. Vance as his running mate. Bloomberg News reports that Vance has received at least $352,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industry since 2019. Bloomberg writes, in 2020, he was unequivocal in acknowledging global warming, but apparently has since walked that stance back and derided the Democratic agenda as a, "Green energy fantasy." Do we know anything about his stance or maybe how invested the state of Ohio is in green energy or fossil fuels?

Zack Colman: I'm very interested in learning more about what J. D. Vance actually thinks here, because you can see him being supportive of some of the industrial policy, the ideas that we're going to favor certain industries to bring manufacturing back to the heartland. This is kind of his worldview. A lot of the Reaganite free market type people in the conservative movement, that's not what they do. They don't love J. D. Vance because he is for a more muscular, federal approach to economic development. You could actually see, I think, him supporting some of the investments that have gone toward battery manufacturing or even electric vehicle production in the heartland.

Now, EVs are a little bit of a cultural lightning rod right now, but you certainly see money from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law, which were signed under President Biden flowing to places like Ohio. In fact, overwhelmingly to red districts in red states. It'll be interesting to see when and if the Trump administration comes into office, how they navigate a lot of the subsidies and incentives passed by Democrats and President Biden, because they are benefiting a lot of red districts. It might be tough to roll some of that back.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if anybody has a comment or a question for Zack Colman reporter covering climate and energy for Politico at the Republican National Convention this week in our climate story of the week. we can take them at 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Now, to the extent that Trump has talked about climate change, he has a common refrain. He says he likes clean air, which really refers to conventional air pollution, not climate pollution and clean water. Let's listen to a clip of Trump at the debate with President Biden on June 27th. You'll hear CNN's Dana Bash, ask the question.

Dana Bash: President Trump, will you take any action as president to slow the climate crisis?

Donald Trump: I want absolutely immaculate clean water, and I want absolutely clean air and we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever, and we did -- we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. Yet during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.

Brian Lehrer: He answered that question in what, to my ear sounds like conventional environmental, clean air, clean water terms, and didn't really address the question that Dana Bash asked about climate at all. How did you hear it?

Zack Colman: Yes, that's right. What candidate for office is going to say they want polluted air? He stuck to something that was familiar to him and he thought he was avoiding what would be a divisive political commentary on climate change. The fact of the matter is, when Donald Trump was president, he did take a lot of action to subvert the independent scientific boards at the EPA to ignore their findings. Again, this happens in Democratic and Republican administrations too.

These scientific body bodies that advise agencies offer their recommendations on what is the best defensible scientific policy, but they're not always followed. Even the Obama administration decided not to follow more stringent findings for reducing soot, smog pollution. You do see this happen, but he took it to a pretty amped-up degree, former President Trump when he placed a lot of industry allies on some of these committees and at agencies. He of course doesn't want polluted water and polluted air, but he did not act in ways that would've prevented the maximum amount of pollution from happening.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, during his presidency, Trump rolled back many environmental protections. Brookings puts that number at 70, a more recent New York Times analysis says 100, though many were challenged in state courts and overruled. When Trump talks about clean water and clean air and wanting those things, is there also a record that we can say with any accuracy points to him actually working against those things? Again, not climate but traditional clean air and clean water rules.

Zack Colman: Sure. Environmental groups and states sued former President Trump dozens of times. The environmental groups that did sue him had a pretty good track record of defeating agency actions that would've rolled a lot of environmental protections back. He did have a record, but at the same time, he's going to come in if he wins in November with a lot more experience and people who know exactly how these agencies operate. A lot of the environmental activists that I talk to are prepared for them a second Trump administration to be much more experienced and much more effective than they were the first time around.

Brian Lehrer: What might they do? I see you've been reporting on climate activists getting ready for a second Trump presidency.

Zack Colman: One of the biggest things is the legal strategy here. They're going to sue a lot. We're also in a world in which the Supreme Court last month ended what was four decades worth of what's known as Chevron deference, which allowed agencies to interpret ambiguous laws in a way that they see fit. That was aligned with what their best interpretation of the law was for this current moment in time. That's where a lot of EPA climate rules came into play. They used that deference to write and interpret regulations, and that deference no longer exists.

It's unclear exactly how that will shake out, but there is an assumption that this will allow for more deregulatory interpretations in the second Trump administration. He's also now backed by a much more conservative Supreme Court with the six three conservative majority. The Legal Avenue might not be as fortuitous for environmental activists going forward. What they are trying to do is also shift resources to the state level to talk about all the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act that are creating jobs in red districts to try to pressure lawmakers who might be entertaining, repealing a lot of the IRA and instead trying to convince them to uphold parts of it.

They're also starting to reach out to corporate allies. You saw automakers end up being quite for electric vehicles after they had initially opposed some of the Obama-era CAFE standards, the fuel economy standards for the vehicle fleet. They actually joined President Trump and now have flipped on him again by supporting electric vehicles. Trying to reach out to some of those corporate allies to also say these are investments that are helping us and we'd like to preserve them.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Frank in Astoria, who says he grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, so that's not too far from where J. D. Vance comes from. Frank, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Frank: Hi, how are you? I just wanted to point out, I'm certainly a proponent of green energy and protecting the environment, but when I travel back to Ohio, if you're given an electric rental car, which the rental companies are just trying to-- they want to give it to you because no one else wants them. When I drive from, say, the Pittsburgh Airport or Cleveland Airport to my hometown, there is no infrastructure, or I would say very little infrastructure for charging those cars. There was one charging station that was within 15 minutes of where I was staying. It takes a really long time to charge the car and the rental car companies, as you know, want you to return the car full.

It's very frustrating and my brothers who still live there are definitely against electric vehicles because of that. They said they can't be sold. Even the rental car company when I returned it said, yes, we don't want these because no one wants them.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. I guess the other way to potentially look at it in a place like Youngstown, though, I can't say that people are looking at it like that based on your description. But another potential way to look at it is here's a massive opportunity for industrial development manufacturing jobs in the United States to get those charging stations placed everywhere and develop all these new technologies to replace some of the industries that have left Youngstown, Ohio. Does anybody talk about it like that as far as you could tell?

Frank: It's funny. I think you're exactly right. Again, I haven't lived there since the mid-'80s, so I can't pretend that that's the way they're thinking. In terms of my family, I think there's a long-held cynicism about that and just in terms of any governmental attempts or even private industry attempts to bring that industry to the city. Youngstown also has a large history of corruption, and I think that colors it as well.

Brian Lehrer: Frank, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. In our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show this week with Zack Colman reporter covering climate and energy for Politico. He's at the Republican National Convention this week as we're talking about Republican platform and Project 2025 climate positions. Though Trump has recently taken to social media to say he has no idea who is behind Project 2025, the EPA chapter from that proposed policy document from the Heritage Foundation was written by Mandy Gunasekara, if I'm saying that right, the former EPA Chief of staff in the Trump administration.

The New York Times reports that, "Much of the plan was written by people who were top advisors during his first term and could serve in prominent roles if he wins in November." Where policy proposals are more fleshed out than the Republican platform is the 2025 presidential transition project from Heritage, and they single out the EPA for a 30-page chapter. Where would you start in saying what project 2025 is advocating for Donald Trump regarding climate?

Zack Colman: Well, I think that they're taking on climate science as a bit of a institution of itself. Just from being here in Milwaukee and talking to not just the people that I normally encounter in Washington, DC where I live and work, but just talking to delegates from around the country, there is deep skepticism about climate science still. Which I would've thought maybe we're past that, but no, it still exists. There's this idea that climate science is going to dictate our choices and that there's some fealty to the science that is guiding all of our actions and choices in the private economy and all of these things.

I think it starts from there of the Trump administration, if it were to win, would have to confront this orthodoxy around climate science. To do that, you need to fundamentally dismantle all the things that start to put that science together. Whether it's the scientific advisory committees at EPA or even the science underpinning it that's conducted by the 13 federal agencies as part of the US Climate Change research program. That research is done every four years, published every four years, and ends up becoming a legal underpinning in a lot of cases that shows that the federal government is studying climate science and takes it very seriously. Project 2025 would take an ax to that.

It would also include unraveling what's known as the endangerment finding, which is a very fundamental scientific and regulatory finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger our public health. It is the linchpin for why we regulate greenhouse gas emissions. By unraveling that you actually could, in theory, remove any reason to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all. It's really cutting down climate science to the bone. That's what they're trying to do.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play one soundbite of the aforementioned Mandy Gunasekara, who was Trump's CPA Chief of Staff, because Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of offices at the Department of Energy that are currently dedicated to developing wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources. This is Gunasekara on Fox Business on April 22nd this year.

Mandy Gunasekara: You know what would make sense is letting the market determine which technology should actually take off. They keep subsidizing inferior technologies, which undermines the development of the very technologies and the resources that we know how to use. We know how to use quite well, and we need. We are in a country of growth and opportunity, so we need to create a future of energy growth, and dominance, not one of energy scarcity. Unfortunately, team Biden is so committed to propping up these inferior technologies. It's causing all sorts of havoc on the national security front, but also the economic development front, and it is limiting the development of the very energy resources that we need more of.

Brian Lehrer: Zack, do you want to fact check any of that, or if it's just opinion, what does she even mean by inferior technologies?

Zack Colman: It is true that some sources of power are better at providing firm, stable, long duration power, like base load power, as we call it. Nuclear power does this, gas does this, coal does this. Sources of renewable power, like wind and solar are intermittent. They don't run all the time, but there is an imperative with climate change to try to figure out how to make them run longer. This is why the Biden administration has invested in battery storage technology. There are ways in which you can use batteries to store that power. When you're turning out a lot of wind power and solar and store it for later so you can keep powering things without fossil fuels.

I wouldn't call them inferior. They, at this point, serve a lot of the same purposes, but there are certainly things in our economy that need that stable, long-term, dependable power. You see now with power outages and the electric good being strained when we have these heat waves. There are people who worry about, if you were going to go to renewable power only, would you have that firm dependable power. A lot of these grid managers should be accounting for that and making sure they have stable supplies and capacity and a lot of them do do that. We've seen our grid be amazingly reliable during these enormous heat waves when people are running their air conditioning. I get what she's saying. It's just not true that these are inferior technologies, it's just that they, in some cases, serve different purposes.

Brian Lehrer: Kind of to that point, we have a call from Oliver in Redding, Connecticut. You're on WNYC, Oliver. Hello.

Oliver: Hello. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Oliver: I think your guest just really addressed my comment I guess, more than anything else, is that when the gas station infrastructure was built out, it was so much easier from an environmental regulation standpoint to book put stations on every corner, if you like. To do that with electric charging station, in my view, given where we have come and I totally support it in terms of environmental regulations, is just going to be so much more difficult to do. Because if you're putting potentially solar or batteries on site, then that's going to require a large amount of land. If you're going to run large electric lines from different places, then you're going to run into legitimate environmental issues. That's my comment.

Brian Lehrer: Oliver, thank you very much. Any last thought on that? The barriers, or for that matter lack thereof, to building out the EV in particular infrastructure as well as energy lines from wind and solar installations?

Zack Colman: I think that is a great point that Oliver brought up. This is something that both parties recognize that we can't build things nearly as fast as we'd like. Transmission lines, these are the big electrical infrastructure lines that carry enormous amounts of power over long distances, is very tough to get that permitted. That's the type of thing you need for an enormous build out of clean energy. This is a real problem that has to be addressed. On the electric vehicle charging infrastructure, yes, this is chicken and egg. Would we have more EV adoption if we had more chargers, or is it vice versa? This is something that really needs to get figured out.

Brian Lehrer: A couple of quickies as we end. One, does the Republican platform, if you've read it through, mention the word climate at all? Do they have any goals for reducing carbon emissions?

Zack Colman: No. It is interesting that climate change is not in there. However, it is an improvement, believe it or not, over the last time they adopted a new platform, which is in 2016, where they basically roundly dismissed that climate science was settled.

Brian Lehrer: Settled, meaning it was a hoax.

Zack Colman: They said it should not be treated as some unquestionable institution. It didn't go as far as saying hoax, but it didn't go as far as saying, we believe this lock, stock and barrel.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. We're getting a number of texts to this effect. I'll read one of them that puts it well. It's just a question. It says, "If Elon Musk is committing to such strong Trump backing, and for listeners who haven't heard yet, Musk committed yesterday to $45 million a month till the election for the Trump campaign. If Elon Musk is committing to such strong Trump backing, could Trump become a supporter for EVs like Tesla?

Zack Colman: He could. The interesting thing with Elon Musk is, his company is not a union company. A lot of the auto companies, the US-based ones have a pretty strong union foothold. It would be interesting to see how Donald Trump would navigate those issues as well if he were to become the EV president.

Brian Lehrer: Any indication that that's even something that Musk wants for his money, support for his company Tesla? Or is he just interested in culture war items?

Zack Colman: I think that it's really, really a dangerous place for me to try to get into Elon Musk's head. I really have no idea, but you could see him being okay with Donald Trump supporting EVs. Why not?

Brian Lehrer: We always appreciate guests who are honest enough to say I don't know when they don't know. We leave it there with Zack Colman, reporter covering climate and energy for Politico. He is covering it at the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee. Zack, thank you very much for joining us today.

Zack Colman: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: That's our climate story of the week.

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