Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
There are few better examples of recent generations’ malfeasance, indeed selfishness, than their failure to assume financial responsibilities. For most of my adult life, the federal government has run large deficits, but in recent decades those have ballooned to mind boggling heights — The New York Times reports that we will hit $56 trillion by 2034 given current trends.
Tolerating such as a normal way of doing business masks a simple and uncomfortable truth: We are passing the buck (and bill) to the next generations, who will be forced to pay for our profligacy. (Some call this borrowing from future generations, but I think the term “robbing” is more apropos.)
Yet there is an even more flagrant neglect of our responsibility that became evident in the last 40 years: the reckless, irreparable harm we’ve continued to perpetrate to our planet, long after the indicative data became irrefutable. This often manifests as a denial of the scientific relationship between carbon emissions and a warmer planet. The empirical evidence revealing our careless conduct with respect to the environment has only mounted over this period; yet climate change denialism remains a stubborn reality, especially within the lobbied interests of the fossil fuel sectors.
It is for this reason that Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Energy was so distressing. ( Here’s more on the Heritage Project’s plan for Donald Trump’s return.)
The gist of the 50-page blueprint for the DOE proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas.” Carbon reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and security. In an absurd twist of logic, the report blames the “new energy crisis … on extreme ‘green’ policies” even as U.S. oil production is at an all-time high. The Project 2025 report states:
The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme “green” policies. Under the rubrics of “combating climate change” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance), the Biden Administration, Congress, and various states, as well as Wall Street investors, international corporations, and progressive special-interest groups, are changing America’s energy landscape. These ideologically driven policies are also directing huge amounts of money to favored interests and making America dependent on adversaries like China for energy. In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a “problem” that government and special interests themselves created.
The irony is that the very capitalist model uniquely capable of stimulating the innovation required to promulgate solutions to the climate crisis is normally championed by Heritage.
As I recently wrote, businesses live by a simple equation: They grow profits (the margin between revenue and costs) to satisfy their shareholders. But these same firms wriggle out of bearing the costs of the carbon they emit, by instead deflecting those costs to society as a whole. Without correction, these externalities or social costs will not be calculated or accounted for in their costs of production.
The good news is that there are many corrective measures available, such as carbon pricing and trading mechanisms, that can ensure the producers assume responsibility for their carbon costs. The capitalist innovation machine can be directed through competitive incentives once the carbon costs are internalized and the profit motive can then be used to produce the same products and services whilst emitting less carbon. With proper regulation (which should not be construed to mean over-regulation), the market winners amongst rivals providing a good or service, ceteris paribus, would be the ones with the lowest carbon emissions.
It is so curious therefore, that Heritage, with a reputation for fostering innovative market solutions, fails to mention any of this in its discussion of the appropriate mandate for the DOE under a second Trump administration. Economists have published reams of research indicating that enforcing a mechanism to price carbon emissions would be a relatively low intrusion mechanism to foster the development of competitive alternate (and greener) energy sources.
At the same time, it is imperative that climate change activists understand the need for gradual introduction of such mechanisms given our current dependence on fossil fuels. It is precisely this balanced thinking that is lacking in Project 2025. Instead of denying that climate change is a problem, smart public policy can drive the fossil fuel industry itself to adapt and shift resources to developing greener energy sources, as the consumption of traditional fossil fuels moderates. (Fossil fuel production is unlikely to decline for some time, given the growth in energy consumption coming from third world countries; however, its growth could be slow).
Consequently, the genuine bipartisan approach here would be to cease climate change denial as a political movement, and agree to correct the externalities in ways that bring the fossil fuel industry onboard.
By completely omitting this pivotal discussion, Project 2025 demonstrates yet again how the partisan orthodoxy in promulgating climate change denialism crowds out rational solution development by more thoughtful and centrist problem-solvers.
Despite its geopolitical complexities both domestically and internationally, combating climate change should be the next generation’s calling. Since the establishment of our Enlightenment inheritance over 200 years ago, we have repeatedly opened up new chapters in which unleashed human potential has raised prosperity to new heights; in this next chapter, the benefit would not only further human prosperity, but the prosperity for all living things.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.