Trump's environmental assault begins
Climate protesters pose during a demonstration against Trump on June 4, 2019. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP vis Getty Images.
Here's how activists envision the fight ahead.
by Emily Atkin
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.”
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.”