Unleashing Fossil-Fuel Pollution: Trump’s Plan for the Apocalypse
A six-post series explaining what Trump is doing to your world. #2: “Drill Baby, Drill!”
Within hours of his inauguration, Donald Trump began issuing a blizzard of orders that would, if carried out, amount to a devastating series of blows for much of the ecosystem we all rely upon for our survival—starting with the poor and powerless of course, but eventually sweeping away people and ecosystems indiscriminately.
Those orders have since been translated into hundreds of Federal agency actions and policies, as well as Congressional budget bills. The damage is too reckless and widespread to fully assess in a summary article. But the big picture becomes clearer when we group those actions by their five major purposes:
Supercharging and deregulating fossil fuel industries by running roughshod over environmental safeguards.
Abandoning international environmental cooperation, leaving the rest of the world to struggle onward while the biggest and richest economy pollutes at will.
Overtly undermining sustainable, clean energy, effectively reversing incentives for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Suppressing and silencing scientific research, concealing from the American people the impact of polluting policies.
Hobbling and defunding institutions tasked with protecting the environment and public health, inviting pollution with impunity.
In this second of six posts, we focus on the first of these: Supercharging and deregulating extractive industries. While virtually every nation in the world—including the United States—has offered commitments to transition their economies away from climate-polluting fossil fuel energy sources, Trump’s orders amount to exactly the opposite: transitioning the U.S. economy back to the old days of unregulated oil, gas and coal pollution. This is not hyperbole: The rhetoric in these orders betrays their intent; under Trump, the U.S. now intends to remove all obstacles to “fossil-energy dominance,” casting off the “climate change religion,” and “maximizing extraction.” If “Drill baby, drill!” was once merely an infantile campaign slogan, it has now become the official policy of the world’s largest economy.
Within hours of taking the oath of office, the President sat before the cameras with stacks of ready-to-go executive orders to reward fossil fuel interests that contributed an estimated $445 million to his election. First out of the gate was a series of orders revoking Biden Administration policies protecting portions of the Outer Continental Shelf from oil & gas leasing, policies addressing issues of environmental justice for historically marginalized communities, and policies that strengthened pollution and efficiency standards for cars and trucks. Those were followed by a devastating order opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil & gas industry, bypassing the protections imbedded in the permitting process, allowing the building of pipelines through the refuge, building LNG infrastructure, and rescinding previous environmental impact statements governing these activities—all for the purpose of “maximizing extraction.” Right out of the blocks, Trump unleashed polluters onto the U.S. coastal waters and treasured wildlife refuges, snuffed out efforts at justice toward those poisoned by nearby pollution, and stopped in its tracks efforts to free the transport sector from the oil industry.
A week later, Trump ordered the heads of all agencies to weed out any regulation that imposed an “undue burden” on fossil fuel extraction, and to suspend or rescind them—thereby “unleashing American energy.” In mid-February, he ordered the establishment of an “Energy Dominance Council” consisting of eight cabinet secretaries and ten other top-level agency directors to set policy for extracting more fossil energy through deregulation and all-of-government coordination. In April, the Interior Department began implementing these policies by fast-tracking approvals for coal, oil, gas and other resources on public lands, reducing environmental reviews that normally take a year’s work to a mere 14 days. In less than three months in office, the American government had reversed course from a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030, and instead to produce as much planet-warming fuel as it possibly can as quickly as possible.
Trump’s new extractive regime, however, goes far beyond oil, gas and coal. In March, the President ordered massive fast-track increases in logging on Federal lands, bypassing protections for forest health, endangered species and the rights of indigenous tribes; and subordinating all forest management directions to timber production. In April, the USDA bypassed environmental reviews and public engagement to open more than 100 million acres of national forests to accelerated logging. Like fossil fuels and timber, mineral mining was also fast-tracked under the provisions of an order issued in late March, conveniently justified by concerns over the scarcity of rare earth and other critical minerals. Scarcely a week later, however, the President almost farcically declared “America’s beautiful, clean coal” to be a “mineral,” thereby shoe-horning coal mining into the fast-track emergency provisions for critical minerals.
And the frenzy to exploit any resource without regard to environmental impacts would not stop at the water’s edge either. In April, the President directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to fast-track permits for companies to mine the ocean floor in both U.S. and international waters, a move opposed by nearly all other nations, which consider international sea beds off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The order circumvented a decades-old treaty that every major coastal nation except the United States has ratified, and set off an alarmed scramble among nations with interest in deep-sea resources.
The pattern is now clear: all of the United States government is dedicated to the maximum extraction of resources—especially fossil fuels—from the earth. Safeguards are generally derided as undue regulation and damaging red tape. The right of the American people to understand the impacts on the air, water and lands, on their health, on endangered species, and on indigenous treaty rights is trampled under the guise of a national emergency.
It is hard to imagine in history any more lucrative investment than Big Oil’s $445 million bet on Donald Trump. In the short run, they will be printing money from all this unconstrained extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal. However, it’s getting harder and harder to imagine a survivable long term—for them and for the rest of us as well.
Next up: Abandoning international environmental cooperation, in detail. Watch this space. And please subscribe. It’s free.