Advertisement

We need your help now

Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.

You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.

If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.

Donald Trump signed a significant number of executive orders on day one. Under his 'drill baby, drill' anti-climate rhetoric, many of those are part of his plan. Alamy Stock Photo

Opinion Under Trump 2.0, the planet is in big trouble

Sadhbh O’ Neill says if this grotesque climate denialism is normalised by the US, then every country can follow suit.

HE IS ONLY in office a short time, but it is already clear that US President Trump is hell bent on being a climate supervillain.

None of this should be a surprise. He announced his intentions quite clearly in advance of the 2024 election, as did the Republican strategists in Project 2025. It’s just that we (complacent European liberals) probably didn’t take him seriously. Bluff and bluster flow out of this convicted felon’s mouth just as fluently as his broadsides against political enemies, minorities and immigrants.

Trump 2.0 is not calling our bluff though. Looking back to his first term, during which his worst instincts were reined in by his own staffers, his administration nonetheless dismantled major climate policies and rolled back environmental regulations covering air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. Most notably, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, an act which he has repeated on day one of his second term.

According to a research project conducted by the Harvard and Columbia Law Schools over 100 environmental regulations were rescinded by Trump between 2017-2021. The effect was to increase greenhouse gas emissions, remove protections for wetlands, weaken rules on power plant and vehicular emissions, leading to a marked deterioration in some environmental indicators.

The Lancet published research in 2021 that estimated that Trump’s rollback of environmental policies resulted in 22,000 additional deaths in 2019 alone. Another analysis by the Rhodium group in 2020 found that his first term in office could lock in an additional 1.8 gigatonnes of cumulative carbon emissions by 2035.

Dark days

If that’s bad, Trump 2.0 already has much worse in store. On the day of his inauguration, he declared an ‘energy emergency’ to open up new areas of wilderness in Alaska and the Arctic for gas and oil exploration. Under both the Trump 1.0 and Biden administrations, the US has been producing oil and gas at the highest rate in history and is currently the largest energy producer in the world.

The real emergency is the urgency with which Trump is willing to sacrifice atmospheric stability so that the fossil fuel industry and its cronies can profit while the planet burns.

It would be folly not to take his irrational manoeuvres seriously. According to the Financial Times, Trump’s tariff threats are designed to extract more oil sales from the EU, and in the case of China, the threat is targeting TikTok to force China to sell a 50 per cent stake in the company to the US. In this world of transactional, hyper-selfish manoeuvres, trade wars are now a substitute for patient diplomacy and businesslike negotiations. Trump is trying to win a game of poker with a weak hand by wrestling his opponents to the ground instead.

While the US is no stranger to using economic and political muscle in its own interests, Trump’s trade policies reveal once again what an ignoramus he is. If introduced, tariffs on US imports would only drive up the cost of goods, leading to inflation for US consumers and retaliatory measures that benefit no one. Ending subsidies to support climate action will only drive up the cost of the (inevitable) technological transition and make US cars more costly to produce. More significantly, Trump’s intentions signal an end to a peaceful (if still destructive) period of neoliberal capitalism where at least everyone understood, and more or less played by, the rules of the game.

Distraction and denial worked the last time, but this time he is intent on punishing those working for the Federal government who do not implement his policies by firing them, suing them, eliminating the programmes they work on or removing their access to classified documents. The degree to which organised labour can resist these measures remains to be seen, though Biden did create a procedural bulwark against the mass reclassification of civil servants as political appointees under a Trump 1.0 initiative called ‘Schedule F’. With apologies to my American friends, President Trump is bad, bad news for us all. 

Clampdown on climate action

Trump’s biggest legacy however will be his impact on global climate action. Any objective reading of Trump’s first two days points to a villainous coalition of fossil fuel, tech and billionaire interests who have effectively taken over the democratic institutions of the US from the top. The effects on the environment are bad enough and may be irreversible.

The carbon pollution unleashed by more drilling and oil production will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It is hard to see where the initiative is going to come from in the talks leading to COP30 this year in Brazil, even though scientists are warning that we have overshot the 1.5 temperature goal already in 2024 and that global emissions have not even started to decline.

But Trump’s disavowal of international cooperation by withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement will do untold damage. This decision signals an end to the era of international cooperation, reciprocity and capacity building that is critical to solving global challenges. As Rory Stewart observed in The Rest is Politics podcast, this US is already lurching towards an extreme protectionist, isolationist and anti-science position. Once grotesque climate denialism is normalised by a country of the same global standing as the US, it will be acceptable for any country, or indeed industry, to follow suit. Why should any country curtail its pollution if the second biggest emitting country in the world after China is unwilling to do likewise?

Trump’s plans to deport migrants, end birthright citizenship and rescind measures that promote diversity and equality make it clear that he is also targeting the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in American society to satisfy the frustrations of low- and middle-income white Americans over their deteriorating life prospects. Focusing attention on punishing migrants at the Southern border helps to distract us from the raid that he is undertaking with his friends on the nation’s resources and its democratic traditions. The historian Timothy Snyder describes the kinds of support for Trump as variations on themes of fascism and oligarchy. I’m not sure which is worse.

Without a doubt, Trump will be on the wrong side of history. He is storing up more criminal charges, bad investments and stranded assets by recklessly prolonging the life of the fossil fuel industry. But I am beginning to wonder if I have been naïve in assuming the arc of world energy consumption will eventually bend towards justice and sanity in time to prevent climate catastrophe. It might not.

Sadhbh O’ Neill is a researcher in climate policy.

Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.

Close
JournalTv
News in 60 seconds