Trump vs. Earth
On Earth Day — and every day — the carbon-pilled nihilist in the White House is rampaging against the environment
For more than half a century, Earth Day has been a moment to mark progress.
This year is different.
Since the original Earth Day protests in 1970, the arc of history has appeared to be bending toward environmental justice. America has made massive — if at times halting — progress toward protecting the health of our people, our treasured land, and the animals that call it home. We’ve brought species back from the brink, cleaned up fetid rivers, halted acid rain, and closed a hole in the ozone. Humanity has pioneered the technologies, regulatory tools, and even the international frameworks necessary to head off catastrophic climate change.
But that story of environmental progress is now threatened with a profound reversal because of the malignant ignoramus in the White House, who views himself as a consigliere to Big Carbon and other extractive industries. On Earth Day, and every other day, the Trump administration has been a horror show for the environment — leaving our one and only spaceship Earth more vulnerable than it’s been in generations.
The danger posed by Trump begins with climate denial. On day one, the administration pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord — the international framework for lowering global greenhouse emissions. Not content to simply abdicate leadership, Trump has preached global warming denial on the (literal and proverbial) international stage. At the U.N. General Assembly in February, the president called climate change “the greatest con job perpetrated by the world.”
The administration has now made climate denial official U.S. policy. In February, the EPA jettisoned the “endangerment finding” that designated carbon dioxide as a pollutant, subject to limitations under the Clean Air Act. Administrator Lee Zeldin, whose EPA has been fully captured by fossil-fuel interests, touted the reversal as the “single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
Zeldin is part of a cabal of climate know-nothings in the cabinet that includes Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former governor of the fracking-fueled petro state of North Dakota. When the endangerment finding was reversed, Burgum echoed 1990s-era shills for Big Carbon by declaring that “CO2 was never a pollutant,” because “plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”
The move to rescind the endangerment finding was based in part on the findings of a “climate working group” that was secretly assembled by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, himself a former fracking executive. The group — which downplayed the dangers of climate change — was later found to have been operating illegally. Because, of course it was. But its work product was, egregiously, allowed to stand.
Trump is using the cover of a “national energy emergency” to pursue an agenda of dirty energy dominance.
To boost fossil fuel consumption, the administration is offering pollution exemptions to outdated coal plants that allow them to spew heavy metals and other neurotoxic particulates on downwind communities. The administration has even exercised state control to force coal plants to keep operating, well beyond their planned shutdown dates.
Burgum has made clear that ending “the whole endangerment thing” will not just benefit America’s oil producers but also create what he’s called “an opportunity for the revival of clean, beautiful, American coal.” The plan appears to be working — and the rest of us are paying the price. In 2025, American carbon emissions jumped by about 2.4 percent, reversing years of declines, with a 13 percent rise in coal generation identified as a key driver.
Beyond coal, the administration is also fighting to expand the frontiers of oil and gas exploration. Trump has called for renewed oil drilling in California coastal waters, and the administration recently gave the green light to a project by BP (of Deepwater Horizon infamy) to pursue ultradeepwater drilling on the Gulf Coast, at depths of more than 6,000 feet.
To keep Americans hooked on combustion engines, the administration is also seeking to jettison Biden-era fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, has axed consumer tax credits for electric vehicles, and is suing to block what it terms California’s “oppressive” electric vehicle mandates.
When it is not boosting Big Carbon, Trump is engaged in a full-scale assault on clean energy.
The administration has abolished tax credits for home solar panels and thrown up regulatory hurdles to siting new wind and solar farms on public lands. When several attempts to scuttle half-constructed offshore wind farms were blocked by the courts, Trump & Co. cut an absurd deal: The government agreed to pay one French company, TotalEnergies, $1 billion to abandon offshore wind projects in the Northeast, and to instead begin developing new fossil-fuel infrastructure in Texas.
This agenda appears to be driven by Trump’s personal, irrational hatred of wind energy. “My goal is to not let any windmill be built; they’re losers,” Trump said in a January White House meeting with oil executives. At the same reunion, he compared a massive wind farm near Palm Springs, California, to a “junkyard.” (That junkyard, in one of the windiest corridors in the country, generates nearly 600 million kilowatt-hours of clean energy annually.)
The Trump anti-environment agenda also includes a crusade against wildlife and wilderness. At the end of March, the administration again invoked national security to grant the oil and gas producers an exemption to the Endangered Species Act in the Gulf of Mexico. The decision was made by an advisory group known as the “God Squad” (although the “Death Panel” may be more appropriate). The move is likely to drive the extinction of the Rice’s whale, only 51 of which remain, all in the Gulf.
The administration has been equally reckless with pristine wilderness. It has opened parts of the Arctic National Wildlife refuge to drilling, and rescinded parts of the “roadless rule” that kept loggers and miners at bay in the nation’s untouched forests. Trump is currently gutting the Forest Service and seeking to relocate its headquarters to extraction-friendly Utah. Simultaneously, Trump loyalists in Congress have passed legislation to open the ecologically fragile Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota to copper mining. So much for America First: The key beneficiary is not even an American firm — but a Chilean mining conglomerate.
The Trump administration’s devotion to fossil fuels is rising at the same moment that artificial intelligence companies are building out massive data centers that require huge amounts of electricity. If Trump has his way, the AI revolution will be powered by dirty energy.
Elon Musk’s AI company, to name just one example, runs a pair of “Colossus” data center complexes near Memphis that have been rushed into operation and powered by onsite gas generators with piss-poor emissions controls — fouling the air for poor, largely minority communities nearby.
This is textbook environmental racism, which — as it happens — the Trump administration no longer recognizes, thanks to its DEI purges. Under Zeldin, EPA has also established, as one of its central “pillars,” the goal of making the United States the “Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World.” And it has looked the other way as AI firms power themselves with anything that burns. (The NAACP is now suing to get a court to enforce the Clean Air Act against Trump’s top megadonor Musk, on behalf of the people of Tennessee and Mississippi.)
In the meantime, the administration is working to fast-track data-center development, including by running roughshod over local and state communities that want to curb the industry’s worst impacts. A new “Trump National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” calls on Congress to “preempt state AI laws that impose undue burdens” on the industry.
Some of the damage that Trump is inflicting might be reversed in fairly short order by a competent, motivated Democratic administration. It’s simple enough to purge the foxes at the henhouse — the polluting industry insiders who are now crafting policy at EPA. Their ranks include former oil lobbyist, Aaron Szabo, who is now in charge of the agency’s air pollution office, and former asbestos booster David Fotouhi, who is now Zeldin’s top lieutenant.
But Trump & Co. are also doing deeper, more lasting damage by promoting a brain drain at the EPA and other environmental offices. Mass firings, begun in the DOGE days, have slashed at least 10 percent of the EPA workforce. Similarly, at the Department of Justice, nearly 140 lawyers have been forced out or quit from the Environment and Natural Resources Division.
On this Earth Day, the news is, indeed, bleak. But it is not hopeless.
Politically, if Democrats can recapture Congress in November, they can put the brakes on Trump’s assault on the environment, protect the budgets of key agencies, and use subpoena power to hold fossil fuel fanboys like Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright to account.
It’s important to recognize, too, that the administration’s reactionary agenda is an attempt to slow a green energy revolution that won’t easily be stopped. In 2025, renewable energy deployment jumped more than 15 percent globally. And technical advances in solar, wind, and battery storage are making renewables the cheapest energy option for most users anywhere on Earth.
In congressional testimony this week, Wright, the Energy Secretary, insisted the coal use was permanent and inevitable: “I’m pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production when I die,” he said. Wright’s faith in the dirty fuel is misguided. In the real world, renewables just overtook coal in global electricity output, and show no signs of relinquishing that crown.
Trump’s disastrous illegal war on Iran, meanwhile, is also imposing huge costs on consumers, whose pain at the pump may push many car buyers to opt for fuel-efficient or electric options — a phenomenon that’s already underway in Europe.
What’s perhaps most important to remember, today, is that Earth Day began as a protest movement and succeeded in changing the course of environmental history, in spite of what must have seemed impossible odds in the 1970s.
It’s incumbent on all of us who are dismayed and alarmed by the MAGA administration’s wanton disregard for science and the planet to know that we’re in good company. And that we all have power to push back in solidarity, with our votes, our purchases, our consumption patterns — and our boots in the street. Click here to find an Earth Day event near you.
Tim Dickinson is the senior political writer for The Contrarian.
I clicked 'like' but I just wanted to 'agree' because only idiots 'like' what drump is doing to the US and the world.
"Burgum echoed 1990s-era shills for Big Carbon by declaring that 'CO2 was never a pollutant,' because 'plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.'..."
"Hmmmm, yes," Master Yoda say. "Ask how much plants on Venus like atmosphere of 96% carbon dioxide at 900°. Dense it is! Like Burgum brains!....mmmm, yes!"