Trump’s Election Is a Disaster for the Climate—and an Opportunity
It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 6. The baby growing inside me kicked hard
as yet another set of electoral college votes flashed red on the TV screen for
Trump. I couldn’t help but wonder if the kicking was her own act of protest in
the waning hours of the 2024 election. After all, this child is the progeny of
two environmental activists who have spent decades fighting the climate
emergency, particularly federal fossil fuel production. It’s difficult to
describe how grim that work looks right now.
But this is also the moment to radically reimagine and
rebuild our political system into one more responsive to people’s needs. That’s
the potential of the next four years. It’s the transformation we need to meet
the climate catastrophes ahead, far more powerful than Trump himself.
Today’s reality is harsh: The U.S. is the world’s largest
oil and gas producer and liquified natural gas exporter, and fossil fuels are
the dominant cause of climate chaos. Both the Trump and Biden administrations
reached record
oil and gas production during their successive terms.
The Biden administration had a complex relationship with the
climate crisis, embracing both clean and dirty energy as part of an
all-of-the-above approach that contradicts
scientists’ recommendations to safeguard the planet. Biden passed historic
clean energy investments with his signature climate law, the Inflation
Reduction Act. But that act also included additional
oil and gas leasing on our public lands and waters. The administration then approved
ConocoPhillips’ devastating Willow Project in Alaska, the nation’s largest oil
drilling operation. In response to pressure from environmental justice
communities and climate advocates, Biden also imposed a moratorium on new
federal oil and gas leases in 2021 and paused approvals for new liquified
natural gas terminals in 2024—bold moves that were eventually blocked
by federal
judges.
Now we face the unfettered Trump 2.0 era, led by a man who shamelessly
cheered “drill, baby, drill” and called climate change a “hoax” at his
political rallies and appointed an ExxonMobil CEO to his first cabinet. All
signs suggest this administration will focus on gutting environmental
protections and padding the bloated pockets of fossil fuel corporations and
their billionaire executives and shareholders.
For climate activists, Trump’s ascent means federal avenues to
fight fossil fuels will be mostly blocked. Our three branches of government, designed
to check one another and thwart abusive power, are now at risk of being monopolized
by a climate-denying fascist.
Trump has vowed
to ditch virtually all Biden administration regulations intended to cut carbon
emissions and move away from fossil fuels. He will seek to slash
positions of federal employees who have spent their careers trying to
protect our air, water and wildlife.
While the House of Representatives election results aren’t
yet final, it’s clear that a Republican Senate will block any climate-fighting legislation.
And the Supreme Court is severely compromised by its radical right wing. Trump
has promised to replace Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas with
younger judges who could
secure a radical right majority at the highest court until my unborn
daughter is in her 30s. Without material reform to expand the court, this doesn’t
bode well for multiple generations of women, as well as the working class, communities
of color, migrant families, transgender people and our imperiled ecosystems.
As many in the environmental movement have said this past
week, we will resist as we did the first time. Biden has committed to filling
the nearly 50 open judicial vacancies before leaving office. This move, if he
can accomplish it, will be a vital lifeline to ensuring integrity of the
judiciary at district and appeals court levels.
As a lawyer who was part of the record onslaught of lawsuits against Trump during his first term, I think it’s important to note that 90 percent of our lawsuits were successful. They acted as a crucial bulwark against Trump’s attacks on our
climate, health and safety.
But resistance alone, which maintains the status quo, is no
longer enough. The election rebuked that notion and the world’s environmental
chaos confirms it. Our current system has driven the planet to break 1.5
degrees Celsius of warming this year. The Paris Agreement set this threshold as
a dangerous tipping point for the world’s poorest communities, who disproportionately
bear the brunt of climate change’s horrific consequences while the wealthiest
disproportionately pollute.
We need to only look at the last year to see that when
climate chaos tested the country, the current system failed. The cataclysmic Hurricane
Helene, record heat waves, and relentless wildfires stole lives, demolished
homes, wiped out jobs, and left survivors in profound social, economic, and
emotional instability.
To survive and thrive during the next four years and beyond,
we have to build our political system anew. We need to reimagine how our
politics can be genuinely responsive to what people need—not under the hateful
rhetoric of the Republicans or the willful ignorance of the Democrats.
Building a responsive political system starts on the ground,
driving intersectional solutions to climate chaos that are both
community-focused and deeply resourced. The climate movement has to fully break
out of its silo and build real political power with youth, labor, working
families, migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and other rights-based groups to grow
a broad-based movement that centers justice at every step. Climate activists
within the movement have already made important inroads on this intersectional
organizing—including last year when hundreds of thousands around the world marched
in the first mass mobilization to end
fossil fuels—and we have many miles to go.
Faced with an intractable federal government, activists can
also take their battle to the states, for example fighting the detonation of
carbon bombs like the Permian Basin. My colleagues at the Center for Biological
Diversity, together with Indigenous, frontline and youth groups, recently filed
a landmark case challenging
the state of New Mexico for failing to uphold its constitutional duty to
control oil and gas pollution and protect the health of its residents.
Responding to pressure from local groups, the state also has created health
buffers aimed at preventing school children from being poisoned by the oil
industry as they sit in their classes.
The byzantine world of state public utility commissions is also
ground
zero for bucking the racist, fossil fuel-dependent electricity system and
designing democratic and affordable energy systems that serve the public’s
interest. These black-box commissions—long dominated by regulators captured by
fossil utilities and drowned in technical jargon to confuse the public—are the
frontline of deciding state energy policy.
Mass organizing of communities harmed
by predatory utility rates, shutoffs and fossil fuel pollution can force these
commissions to respond to people, not monopoly utility providers that have
stifled alternative distributed energy to protect their profits. State utility
commissions can ramp
up rooftop and community solar systems and other renewable energy sources
that displace polluting fossil fuels, loosen the death grip of corporate
utilities, and make electricity affordable, clean and democratic. This isn’t
just a fight against the climate emergency—which can feel abstract to some
people. It’s a fight against entrenched power that threatens people’s pocketbooks,
their health and their livelihoods.
While we are all trying to make
sense of what happened and why, our next steps are clear. The status quo needs
to change, and it’s up to us to organize a new, intersectional mass people’s
movement that can create the momentum for and help design the systems that will
get us there. It may be that my daughter’s strong kicks are her way of signaling
that she’s rearing to go. Fighting for a safe climate means fighting on every
front for a chance of something that looks like justice.
