By John Feffer* – Foreign Policy In Focus
Trump‘s domestic policies will have catastrophic impacts, to be sure. But his environmental moves threaten the entire planet and the future of life on it.
A storm system is gathering off the coast of Maryland and is set to make landfall on January 20. Those of a more optimistic bent predict that the storm, puffed up by hot air, will dissipate considerably when it hits the shore. The rest of us are in full disaster preparation mode.
Past experience, after all, suggests that Hurricane Donald will wreak “catastrophic damage.”
Trump 2.0 will certainly destroy hundreds of thousands of lives in immigrant communities. Along with his promised tariffs, the deportations will cut a destructive path right through the U.S. economy. But while President Trump‘s policies on border security, the economy, and democratic practice are worrisome to be sure, they will affect mostly the United States or, with their global consequences, have a half-life of only four years or so.
Trump’s environmental moves, on the other hand, threaten the entire planet and the future of life on it.
Sacking the Government
When the Vandals stormed the gates of Rome in 455, they delighted in stealing all the fruits of a civilization that had accumulated wealth and power over many centuries. They stripped Rome of its gold, its silver, even its furniture. Those actions live on in the word “vandalism.”
A new band of Vandals stand ready to storm the capital of the American empire. The rich inhabitants of Washington, DC, however, have little to fear from these marauders. Trump and his crew are going after not private fortunes but rather the big piggy bank of the federal government. They view the $6 trillion annual expenditures of the federal government as just so much loot to be divvied up by means of tax cuts, deregulation, and lucrative government contracts.
That’s also how the incoming Trump crowd views Biden’s climate policies. The Inflation Reduction Act has not disbursed anywhere near the total amount of money allocated to it by Congress. As of last September, $33 billion in climate funds were unspent, and the Internal Revenue Service had over $70 billion in unused funds.
Instead of those funds going toward their intended purpose of shifting the United States away from fossil fuels, Trump wants to use them to pay for tax cuts, increases in military expenditures, and the huge costs of deporting undocumented immigrants.
Reducing the size of government, through such dubious ventures as the DOGE initiative led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is another form of looting. On the climate side, Trump plans to cut the Environmental Protection Agency, among other regulatory agencies. During the first budget of his last term, he proposed cutting EPA funding by 31 percent (which actually didn’t happen). This time around, Trump will go after the EPA’s chunk of the Inflation Reduction Act and follow through on his earlier promise to drastically reduce staffing. A more compliant Congress will be more likely to give him what he wants.
Also certain to be eliminated is the Justice40 initiative, by which the Biden administration directed 40 percent of all climate and clean energy spending to underserved communities. Eliminating this program will not save a lot of money. Rather, it will exact a high symbolic cost. Justice40 is probably the most important reparations effort the United States has officially undertaken in this country to compensate Black and Brown communities for decades of excessive pollution, lack of green space, and high energy costs. Trump’s elimination of the landmark initiative will feel like the climate equivalent of the end of the Reconstruction era.
Going Global
Everyone knows about Trump’s hostility not only to climate science but to the international institutions tasked with implementing the recommendations flowing from that science. Right out of the gate, the next president will take the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change, which will thrust America into a select quartet of outliers that includes Iran, Libya, and Yemen.
The last time Trump terminated U.S. participation in the Paris agreement, the United States was only out in the wilderness for a matter of months, because of certain technicalities attached to withdrawal. This time around, the withdrawal process will take only a year, so the United States will be out of the agreement for at least three years.
Worse is the possibility that Trump will take the United States out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This is the governing body of the Conference of Parties, the yearly meeting that attempts to achieve a unified global response to climate change (of which the Paris agreement is one part).
It’s easy to dump on the UNFCCC, given the anemic global commitment to addressing climate change. But forging global consensus between, for instance, carbon-rich Saudi Arabia and land-poor Palau is no easy task. The United States is the leading funder of the UNFCCC at 20 percent. If Trump initiates divorce proceedings, China will become the top backer. Further, if a two-thirds Senate vote is necessary to get back into the UNFCC—the procedure remains unclear—then the divorce could be irrevocable.
The key focus of the last COP was climate finance—how to ensure that the whole world, not just the rich countries, has enough resources to address climate change and make the transition to a clean-energy future. The numbers discussed in Baku were both more than what was pledged before ($300 billion a year versus $100 billion) and woefully inadequate (the Global South was pushing for the more realistic $1.3 trillion).
Trump’s contribution to this debate? Most likely nothing: both intellectually and financially. Those billions pledged to climate finance by previous administrations? Just another pot of money to divert, for instance, to expand U.S. fossil fuel production.
Pump It Up
It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves oil, gas, and coal. They represent American power—in all senses of the word. And the return president obviously wants more power, individually and collectively. That means more drilling for more oil and gas in more locations. It means reversing the Biden administration’s recent decision to ban oil and gas drilling in most federal waters.
The challenge for Trump, of course, is that the United States is already the leading oil and gas producer in the world. The Biden administration contributed to this trend by granting a huge number of new permits for oil and gas drilling (that was before the recent ban) and, after Russia invaded Ukraine, by helping to meet the energy needs of countries trying to wean themselves off Russian sources. Trump has never been one to scale back in the face of saturated demand (he who built more hotels in Manhattan, opened more casinos in Atlantic City, and introduced more education scams in a field crowded with all three). So, expect big concessions to Big Oil and Gas.
Trump will be part of a returning wave of fossil fuel enthusiasm. Look at the tax benefits that Javier Milei has introduced for fossil fuels in Argentina. In Brazil, Lula talks a good game about renewable energy, but he is similarly pushing an expansion of the country’s fossil fuel sector. India and Indonesia are boosting both their coal output and their coal-fired energy production by significant margins, but it’s really China that’s outpacing everyone by adding two-thirds of all the new coal plants around the world.
If you add all this to Putin’s petromania and OPEC’s refusal to entertain any self-imposed limits, the world is heading toward (or has already passed) a tipping point in terms of the amount of carbon that the atmosphere can absorb from fossil fuels without creating an irreversible feedback loop.
Silver Linings?
Optimists like to point to the prevailing winds, into which Trump is preparing to spit. Take a look at Texas, they say. It is the leading state in producing wind power (for nearly two decades) and the second leading producer of solar power (behind California).
Red-state, oil-obsessed Texas!
Trump can say or do whatever he likes, but he still must reckon with the logic of the market (something this bankruptcy-prone businessman has always been reluctant to do). Optimists point out, correctly, that it’s just cheaper to go with solar ($60 per megawatt) than with oil ($80 per megawatt), and getting cheaper every year. The same holds true for electric vehicles, which are now less expensive to buy and maintain than their conventional counterparts.
The market alone doesn’t produce these results. The federal government has helped shape the market through incentives (like the Inflation Reduction Act). And guess what, 82 percent of IRA funds have gone to districts controlled by Republicans. It’s tough to claw back pork-barrel benefits. So, the MAGA crowd in Congress faces both political and economic headwinds in their effort to unravel the clean energy agenda.
There are other opportunities for bipartisan action over the next four years. Both parties are interested in exploring geothermal energy. Heavy industry is onboard efforts to decarbonize such products as concrete and cement (in order to stay competitive). Even the MAGA crowd is concerned about supply chains for critical raw materials (that are necessary not only for clean energy transition but military products as well).
So, what’s it going to be: Category 6 hurricane or, like some Aesopian fable, the sun and the wind winning out in the end? When it comes to climate action, the sad truth is that, even if the optimists aren’t completely wrong, time is not on their side—or the side of humanity. With the politics of Trumpism set for at least four more years in the White House, the world’s biggest fossil fuel producer and per capita polluter is doubling down at huge costs to planet Earth.
Originally published in LSE Blogs.
*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.