On the campaign trail, Trump’s standard stump speech reliably hit all the crowd-pleasers: build the wall, bring back the jobs, law and order, Crooked Hillary. Climate change denial usually didn’t make the list (though Trump would spout off if asked). But if the issue seemed peripheral during the campaign, that changed as soon as Trump began making appointments. And since his inauguration, taking aim at any and all climate protections has been a defining feature of the Trump administration. As if in a race against time, he and his team have set out to systematically tick off every single item on the fossil fuel industry’s wish list. His top appointments, his plans to make severe budget cuts and gut environmental regulations, his conspiratorial denials of climate change, and even his entanglements with Russia—they all point in the same direction: a deep and abiding determination to kick off a no-holds-barred fossil fuel frenzy. There are many plots and intrigues swirling around Washington, most notoriously claims about the Trump team conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election outcome—and these are being investigated, as they should be. But make no mistake: Trump’s collusion with the fossil fuel sector is the conspiracy hiding in plain sight.
Within days of taking office, he pushed through the Dakota Access pipeline, cutting off an environmental review and against the powerful opposition of the Standing Rock Sioux. He’s cleared the way to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, which Obama rejected in part because of the climate impacts. He has issued an executive order to roll back Obama’s moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, and has already announced plans to expand oil and gas drilling on the Gulf Coast. He’s also killing Obama’s Clean Power Plan. And as the administration rubber-stamps new fossil fuel projects, they’re getting rid of all kinds of environmental regulations that made digging up and processing this carbon less profitable for companies like ExxonMobil. As a result, these projects, already disastrous from a climate perspective, are more likely to lead to industrial accidents like the Deepwater Horizon disaster—because that’s what happens when regulators are missing in action.
As I write, it’s not yet clear whether the US will officially withdraw from the Paris Accord; there is some disagreement about this within the administration. But whether the country stays or leaves it’s undeniable that the Trump administration is shredding the commitments made under the accord.
In addition to Rex Tillerson, Trump has stacked his administration with fossil fuel executives and political figures with extensive ties to the industry—several of whom are opposed, or at best indifferent, to the mandates of the agencies they’re now in charge of running. Scott Pruitt is Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency—but, as attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the EPA multiple times and, perhaps not coincidentally, has received tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies. Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Rick Perry, had myriad ties to the oil industry, including serving on the boards of two of the companies behind the Dakota Access pipeline. Back in 2011, while running for the GOP nomination, Perry campaigned on eliminating the energy department entirely.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Together, this group of men is doing favors for oil, gas, and coal companies on multiple fronts. For instance, Trump has killed a new program that required oil and gas companies to report how much methane—a very powerful greenhouse gas—their operations were releasing, including from leaks. Industry hated the program, which was only finalized in the last weeks of Obama’s administration, in part because it was poised to blow the lid off the claim that natural gas is in any way a climate change solution. Trump is handing the industry a big gift by effectively saying: don’t tell us, we don’t want to know. From here on in, the rest of the world will have to guess the extent to which the US is a climate renegade, because a key piece of the data won’t exist.
By far the biggest threat this industry faces is the demand for real action on climate change being voiced by people around the world, and the mounting consensus that taking the crisis seriously means a halt on new fossil fuel projects. That prospect strikes terror in the hearts of fossil fuel executives and in the governments of petro-states (like Russia), because it means that trillions of dollars’ worth of proven reserves—currently propping up share prices—could become worthless overnight. This is sometimes referred to as “the carbon bubble,” and by 2016 it was already beginning to deflate. Think of Trump as the guy running to the rescue with a bicycle pump, signaling to the industry that he’s going to fill their bubble with a few more years’ worth of toxic air. How? Easy. By making climate change disappear.
We can see it all playing out with a kind of absurd clarity. On day one, the White House website was cleansed of many of the references to climate change. There are plans to cut the NASA program that uses satellites to accumulate basic data on how the earth is changing—including disappearing glaciers and rising seas. The White House’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was pretty blunt about all this: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward—we’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
They are so determined to erase the reality of climate change that they are even aiming to wipe out programs that help communities cope with its impacts. Trump proposed cutting a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association program that helps communities protect their coasts. He also wanted to slash the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency charged with responding to large-scale natural disasters, and cut entirely its key program designed to help communities prepare for future crises. His plan to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget by over 30 percent would lay off thousands of people and eliminate the entire environmental justice program. The latter helps low-income communities—overwhelmingly African-American, Latino, and Indigenous—deal with some of the impacts of having the most toxic industries in their backyards. And it’s worth noting that many of the measures—including cuts to programs dealing with lead poisoning from pipes—would disproportionately hurt children in marginalized communities. A Congressional budget deal has delayed the worst of the EPA cuts until 2018.
So Trump’s rescue plan for the fossil fuel sector is multipronged: bury the evidence that climate change is happening by stopping research and gagging agencies; cut the programs that are tasked with coping with the real-world impacts of climate disruption; and remove all barriers to an acceleration of the very activities that are fueling the crisis—drilling for more oil and gas, mining and burning more coal.
Some of this backsliding can be balanced out by bold action in large states such as California and New York, which are pledging to rapidly roll out renewables regardless of Trump’s pro—fossil fuel policies. But there is one other crucial factor that may determine whether the ExxonMobil subsidiary known as the Trump administration is able to unleash an irreversible catastrophe.
Price Is Everything