Trump's environmental assault begins

Here's how activists envision the fight ahead.

Climate protesters pose during a demonstration against Trump on June 4, 2019. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP vis Getty Images.

Ever since Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the agency’s singular mission has been “to protect human health and the environment.”

But on Monday, Trump’s choice to be the next EPA Administrator—Lee Zeldin, a former Republican Congressman from New York—tweeted that he intends to use the EPA to ”restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI”—three things that have nothing to do with human health or the environment. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water,” he tacked on, as if this were some secondary consideration.

Source: X

The phrase “access to” was also weirdly unnecessary, as if denoting some sort of caveat. “Yes, I promise to protect access to clean water,” it felt like. “But I never said I’d protect it in general.”

Zeldin also didn’t mention climate change is his statement, but that came as little surprise. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump has already established an EPA transition team led by two former fossil fuel lobbyists with “years of experience in dismantling environmental protections.” That transition team has “already prepared a slate of executive orders,” the Times reported, including “withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.”

Of course, mass environmental deregulation is to be expected from a Trump administration. As longtime readers will recall, I covered Trump’s first term for the New Republic from 2017 to 2019 and then at HEATED for its remainder. It was a brazenly pro-polluter administration. There’s no evidence indicating things will change. (And no, Elon Musk’s presence does not count as evidence).

What can change, though, is how people who care about human health and the planet can approach the second Trump administration and the political environment surrounding it. That’s why, following Trump’s re-election, I started calling activists who I think are smart, candid, and forward-looking about where climate-concerned people can go from here.

Here’s are some of the highlights of those conversations, which are ongoing. If you have someone you particularly want to hear from, let me know in the comments.

“We can be a little audacious right now”

The night after Trump’s election, more than 1,500 people joined a Zoom meeting held by the youth-led Sunrise Movement—the group that popularized climate activism and the Green New Deal during the first Trump administration via acts of civil disobedience.

On that call, the Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay called on climate- and environment-concerned citizens to become more even more bold in their activism than they were during the first Trump administration. ”I think we can be a little audacious right now,” Shiney-Ajay told me prior to the call. “I think the situation that we are in is so bleak that nothing but the most audacious plan could possibly get us out of it.”

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Related reading: Here’s the reality of the climate situation we’re in

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Part of Sunrise’s plan is to not only reignite, but further the schools strikes that grabbed the world’s attention in 2020—and eventually inspire a general worker strike if Trump’s anti-environment policies tilt to the extreme. The strategy is “a little more escalated and escalatory” than in 2020, Shiney-Ajay told me. “We are calling for people to walk out of school eventually, and maybe indefinitely walk out of school. It’s the type of thing that hasn’t been seen in U.S. society for years.”

Shiney-Ajay said she’s inspired by the 1970 student protests against the Vietnam War, during which 4 million students walked out of classes, universities, and colleges across the country. “I think there are levels of disruption and participation that we could aspire to that we weren’t really sketching out before,” she said.

Achieving that level of disruption and mass non-cooperation, however, will require buy-in from millions of people. And to achieve that amount of buy-in, Shiney-Ajay said, “We need to make climate action really popular again.”

“We gotta get used to talking to regular-ass people”

Making climate action really popular sounds great. But how can activists actually do that? Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network, believes the first step is releasing that the climate and environmental movement needs to try to reach a much broader coalition of people than it currently does.

“There’s a theory in progressive circles that if folks on the left and center-left come together, we’ll mobilize, and we can ignore the other side,” he said. “I think this election has shown us that’s not going to work. We’re not big enough.”

How, then, does the climate and environmental movement get broader and bigger? For Ing, the answer is simple: begin climate conversations with the problem of corporate capture. “When I talk about corporations having too much power over our communities, people almost always agree,” he said. “So I usually start there. Then I say ‘These Big Oil companies are polluting our air and water,’ and they also agree.” It’s only then that Ing says he usually brings up the fossil fuel industry’s contribution to climate change. And even then, he finds, people usually agree.

But really, Ing argues, the key to effective conversations about the environment is not so much the rhetoric, but the venue in which those conversations are held. Sure, online conversations can be powerful—but Ing believes more lasting change will happen in-person, at the hyper-local level.

”We gotta get used to talking to regular-ass people,” he said. ”We have to be creating campaigns that aren’t just getting people that agree with us to donate $5, but that are getting people out, knocking on doors and having the millions of conversations needed to actually bring new people into the movement.”

And “millions” is the operative word in that sentence—because more than anything, Ing argues, the climate movement needs scale. “At one point, organizations used to be making 60 calls a day,” he said. “That’s the level of rigor that’s needed right now. We only have a few years left, and we’re not acting like it.”

“How do we shift the mindset of the Democratic Party?”

To get more people on board with transformative climate action, activists also have to consider: Why isn’t climate action already more popular? After all, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which was hailed as the most consequential climate change legislation in history. Shouldn’t people have been motivated by that?

Brett Hartl, the chief political strategist at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, argues that the reason the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t inspire a mass movement of climate voters for Democrats is because it was focused far too much on corporate giveaways for renewable energy developers, and not directly on benefiting workers.

“With the Inflation Reduction Act, the idea was, if we just give tax credits to build wind turbines and gigascale battery factories and solar farms, that will trickle down to workers,” he said. “But it really didn't in sufficient numbers, and in a way that actually people noticed or cared about, because the benefits mostly just went to the corporations that get to take the tax credits.”

Hartl argued that Democrats were far too quick to abandon the concept of a Green New Deal, which focused on bringing people along during the renewable transition. And he argued Democrats were far too quick to approve fossil fuel giveaways in exchange for renewable energy gains. “Constantly conceding to [fossil fuels] has never helped them,” he said.

For Hartl, this is the core question that Democrats will have to answer before the next election if they want to be the party that inspires the broad coalition necessary to achieve transformative climate policy: “How do we shift the mindset of the Democratic Party establishment to re-center their vision on people and making everyone participate in a clean economy and fighting the climate crisis?”

If that mindset doesn’t shift, Hartl is worried about what’s to come. “If it's 2028 and the next Democratic alternative vision to Republicans is still basically, “Let's help the corporate class first,” then I think we're going to be in trouble long term.”

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Further reading:

• Meet the ‘great deregulator’ Trump chose to lead EPA. E&E News, November 12, 2024.

  Zeldin has little background in energy or environmental regulations but has long been critical of Democrats’ climate policy. … Zeldin was part of the Climate Solutions Caucus and Conservative Climate Caucus but put forth no policy that would have meaningfully cut carbon emissions.

• Lee Zeldin pledges to “pursue energy dominance” at EPA. Fox, November 11, 2024.

  “Through the EPA we have the ability to pursue energy dominance, to be able to make the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world, to bring back American jobs to the auto industry, and so much more.”

• Trump's reelection casts a shadow over the start of global climate negotiations. NPR, November 11, 2024.

  At the Baku summit, countries won't rely on U.S. leadership as they would have if Vice President Kamala Harris had won the election, says [Alden Meyer, senior associate at climate change think tank E3G]. "With Trump's victory, I think people will be looking to see other countries, other leaders pick up the slack," Meyer says. "Particularly the European Union and China."

• Biden and environmental groups try to protect climate policies from Trump. The New York Times, November 9, 2024.

  Biden administration aides are racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations in an effort to lock in President Biden’s climate agenda before Donald J. Trump enters the White House, said John Podesta, the president’s senior adviser on clean energy.

• States embrace climate leadership as Trump heads to White House. Bloomberg, November 12, 2024.

  States stepped up to fill gaps when Republican President-elect Donald Trump took office the first time, and they can do it again… But states might actually be in a better position to fight back this time around, Balik said.

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Catch of the day: Ruby thinks she’s a bolster, says reader Joanna. She’s trying to become one with the chair. Sounds very zen.