05.12.2024

Let them drink dirty water

Eddie Ford looks at the environmental disaster that threatens with the appointment of climate deniers, cronies and billionaires committed to ending what they call ‘excessive regulations’

Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are unquestionably a bunch of freaks and weirdos, if not the positively unhinged - the name Robert F Kennedy Jr immediately springs to mind. But, though they are an eclectic - possibly combustible - bunch of characters with a cult-like devotion to the president-elect that matches many of those who voted for him on November 5, a unifying theme has emerged. That is, climate denialism and staunch support for fossil fuel industries, or Big Oil, that shows a chilling disregard for the natural environment.

We should not be surprised, of course, as Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill” and infamously said that climate change is a “hoax” just like the Covid virus. Three years ago he told the Fox Business Network that “you have a thing called weather, and you go up, and you go down” - saying that, if you go back to the 1920s, “they were talking about a global freezing” and “then they go global warming”, before coming to the inevitable conclusion that “the climate’s always been changing”.¹ The same logic that says if climate change is real, then why did I have to scrape ice off my car this morning?

Then there is a variation on that theme that denounces climate policies as a “green new scam” - something reflected in his selection of people to run major governmental departments relating to the environment. People like Lee Zeldin, chosen as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Chris Wright as energy secretary and Doug Burgum as interior secretary, which you could characterise as the victory of the far-right Christian-nationalist Project 2025 or even the blueprint for Trump administration 2.0.² Needless to say, Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025, despite the fact that in July a CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved - including more than half of those listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for leadership’, the project’s extensive 900-page manifesto for overhauling the executive branch. Indeed, about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff!

Rolling back

When P2025 is not rolling back the long march of “cultural Marxism” through US institutions, and taking on the federal government in general (a “behemoth weaponised against American citizens and conservative values”), it wants to eviscerate environmental and climate protections through a massive programme of deregulation - particularly public enemy number one, the EPA, which is undoubtedly regarded as a leftwing menace due to its role in enforcing and regulating laws on air, soil and water quality, among other crucial environmental and health issues. P2025 does not just want to scrap Joe Biden’s executive orders on climate change, as part of its campaign to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere”, on the grounds that it a sinister government plan to “control people”: rather, it proposes abandoning strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.

P2025 is especially gunning for the EPA’s office of environmental justice and external civil rights - which it wants completely closed down - and the organisation’s 7,000 staff, including the science advisory board, selected on the basis of “managerial skills” rather than scientific qualifications. If the project gets its way, states will be prevented from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions, as California has (and is already preparing to challenge Trump’s policies), and restrictions on oil drilling imposed by the Bureau of Land Management will be removed. Of course, last month Trump announced that he had chosen Elon Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, to co-lead the planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will make recommendations such as slashing “excess regulations” and cutting “wasteful expenditures”.

In a perverse parody of the Marxist notion of the withering away of the state, Musk declared that DOGE will “delete itself” when its work is complete - which apparently will happen by July 4 2026, which is undeniably ambitious.³ Scarily, the certifiably lunatic representative for Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has ranted about Jewish “space lasers” setting off wildfires, has been rumoured to lead a yet-to-be-formed DOGE subcommittee in the House of Representatives, which will focus on plans to ‘streamline’ the government workforce.

Flunkies

Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator and a former New York congressman, is a typical Trump flunkey, who echoes everything said by his mentor. In 2014 Zeldin said he was “not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem, as other people are”, with global heating – adding, four years later, that he did not support the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump will almost certainly withdraw the US once again.

When he ran for New York governor in 2022, losing out to Kathy Hochul, he constantly attacked her “far-left climate agenda” and assailed Democrats for “forcing people” to drive electric cars. Writing on X, Zeldin promised, or threatened, to “restore US energy dominance”, “revitalise our auto industry to bring back American jobs” and “make the US the global leader of AI” - merely regurgitating a Trump statement days before about how he will slash “totally unnecessary regulation”, “drive US energy dominance which will drive down inflation”, “win the AI arms race with China (and others)”, and “expand American diplomatic power to end wars all across the world”. No mention, of course, of the climate crisis or the need to move away from fossil fuels.

Now the energy secretary, Chris Wright, is a very similar creature - he is chief executive of the Colorado-based gas drilling company, Liberty Energy, but with no government experience. However, he has the virtue of being a major donor to Trump’s campaign and has frequently appeared on Fox News and various podcasts to extol the use of fossil fuels. In a video posted to LinkedIn last year, he told his viewers that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either”.⁴ Like climate-sceptics all over the world, he has denied that extreme weather is worsened by rising global temperatures and stupidly argues that any impacts are “clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption”. He has suggested that “carbon pollution” and even “clean energy” are “nonsense terms” that have been “made up by alarmists”. Proving that he was totally sane (!), in 2019 he drank fracking fluid to demonstrate that it was not dangerous, and proclaimed that the environmental movement around the world was “collapsing under its own weight”.

Then we have Marco Rubio, nominee for secretary of state, who thinks that policies to lower emissions are symptomatic of “the left’s climate-change alarmism”, and Pete Hesgeth - lined up to be head of the Department of Defense (itself one of the largest polluting entities in the world), who is opposed to the “religion” of climate change. Meanwhile, another Fox personality, the former Republican congressman and star of MTV reality shows, Sean Duffy, looks set to become secretary of transportation, despite having no prior experience in an arena that produces more emissions than any other in the US. He pondered last month on Fox: “If you say the climate’s changing, is it coming from CO₂ or is it coming from the sun? Why is the climate changing?”

As for Doug Burgum, the potential interior secretary, he is touted by some as a ‘moderate’, compared to the other picks, but that only shows how crazy they are. He is a keen enthusiast of oil and gas drilling, with his family leasing 200 acres of farmland in North Dakota to energy company Continental Resources, run by another major Trump backer in Harold Hamm - the plot thickens. Burgum, along with Hamm, helped set up a Mar-a-Lago dinner between Trump and oil executives, in which the president-elect asked for $1 billion in campaign donations, while vowing to gut environmental regulations if elected. Burgum has been a vocal supporter of carbon-capture pipelines, going so far as to allow three natural gas companies to use eminent domain (compulsory land acquisition) to seize land and install pipelines. At a rally in Iowa, he insisted, using some twisted logic, that carbon capture was “good” for the economy and the environment, as it would allow the use of traditional internal combustion automobiles indefinitely.

Water wars

But the likes of Zeldin and Burgum have clear directives to oversee rampant deregulation and expedite extraction on public lands. Though billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are obviously on the rise, Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters. For example, following the wildfires during his first term, he threatened California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political transgressions.

Quite rightly, many fear that Trump administration 2.0 will reduce the amount of aid provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government”, urging Trump to remove all unions from the department and only give Fema grants to those localities and private organisations that “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people. Clearly, this approach could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states, such as California and others across the west.

Trump’s allies have already begun to attack the EPA and rules protecting US drinking water.⁵ In a letter to the current EPA administrator, Michael Regan, the Republican House leadership trained their sights on the agency’s scientific integrity policies that are designed to insulate scientists from political pressure. At the same time, the incoming chair of the Senate environmental committee has promised to target the regulation of new perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) put in place over the last year - a top priority, of course, for Trump’s chemical and water utility industry allies. PFASs are a group of synthetic organofluorine chemical compounds and there are seven million such chemicals - the EPA has found that virtually no level of exposure is safe to humans.

After years of industry efforts to cast doubt on the science used to establish PFAS regulations, they are being fully targeted, now that the Grand Old Party is fully in control. If unchallenged, the Trumpites and those they service could literally poison our water.