HEATED - Trump's environmental assault begins
Hi there—Emily here. Today I have some updates on the incoming Trump administration’s plans for the planet. But more importantly, I have some advice from smart people about where we go from here. I hope you find it useful. This is a critical time for independent, action-oriented climate journalism. So if you have the means, I hope you’ll consider joining the small but mighty subscriber community that keeps our reporting free for all. 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. 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.” 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-pollute 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. Related reading: Here’s the reality of the climate situation we’re in 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. “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. “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. 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.” Further reading:
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