Cathie Lloyd begins making sense of Trump’s environmental wrecking ball - and other regressive policies.
Readers’ thoughts and comments are very welcome: how we can expand left thinking to deal with the Trump phenomenon and its closer-to home-variants – and what actions should we take?
As we try to decipher what is taking place in the new extreme right regime in the USA, it is useful to look at the early actions and ideas behind these changes through the lens of environmental policy. In doing so we can try to identify and support the early glimmerings of resistance to these developments.
What is the nature of the regime being rammed into place in the USA?
Recent analyses have drawn parallels between 1930s (mainly) Germany and the state of contemporary society, particularly in the USA. These warnings have come from all sides as the alt-right appropriates left discourse.
The rise of fascism they refer to was almost a century ago in different circumstances. though there are resonances and lessons to learn, it’s important to instead detect what is happening today in terms of contemporary social reality and progressive visions of the future.
Traditional economistic left/right thinking may not be enough to understand and resist a situation where political alignments are determined by mind boggling conspiracy theories relating to a crazy mixture of current issues. How can we begin to understand what is behind support for the extreme right?
One useful concept is diagonalism: the methods which today’s far-right actors have found effective have involved developing and promoting diagonalist coalitions of unlikely bedfellows as described by William Callison and Quinn Slobodian in an article in Boston Review (a very valuable and thoughtful US left journal). Naomi Klein deals with the diagonalist phenomenon in her indispensable, entertaining and frightening recent book Doppelgänger.
Environmental policies are key targets, portrayed as an attack on individual liberties (as in controversies over low emission zones). In order to respond and extend our mobilisation beyond the labour movement, we need a renewed focus on the resistance to these ideas being expressed in other European countries through a shared vision of a future different to that of predatory capitalism.
Actions
Since the second Trump administration took office there have been three main types of actions – the reckless promotion of fossil fuel extraction as an emergency, the unaccountable Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) takeover of federal agencies; and withdrawal from international commitments intended to influence reactions elsewhere.
Trump has pledged to drill unrestrainedly for oil and gas, dismantle environmental protection agencies, remove incentives for electric vehicles, paused leases for offshore windfarms and challenged low emission zones. This raises key constitutional questions about the scope and powers of federal government which will be slowly challenged in the courts. Unaccountable Musk minions have been allowed access to a range of federal agencies in pursuit of ‘wasteful public expenditure’. Employees have been excluded from their places of work and their contracts terminated. All at breathtaking speed implementing the concept developed in Silicon Valley of ‘effective accelerationism’ (e/acc). Targets include federal agencies overseeing education, nuclear energy safeguards, and national parks.
As expected, Trump has removed the USA from the Paris climate agreement, just like it did in 2017. For predatory or mafia capitalism, draconian measures withdrawing from international cooperation are intended to infect global political initiatives and cripple them through financial penalties.
Will others follow their lead in abandoning social and environmental commitments? The United Nations remains firm in seeing the world’s addiction to fossil fuels as ‘Frankenstein’s monster’. COP30 will be held in more sympathetic Brazil this year, and has already appointed a respected veteran diplomat to be the summit’s president. Developing countries are urging the rich to defy Trump’s ‘climate nihilism’.
And elsewhere…
Others are eager to cut back on their ‘green’ strategies. Activist investors in BP have successfully pushed the company to ‘fundamentally reset’ its priorities towards enhanced fossil fuel exploitation, while HSBC have pushed back their net zero targets by 20 years.
Beleaguered political parties like Scottish Labour and the Tories have followed the lead of the Brewdog company in aping Musk’s DOGEs to clamp down on ‘wasteful’ public expenditure.
We need analyses of those elements of the far right in power /threatening in Europe to evaluate their weak points and highlight where, as in the UK, they are responding to the threat by emulating authoritarian repressive policies.
On the other side of the balance sheet renewable energy made up 10% of China’s GDP last year and there is similar progress in Europe, where more electricity was made from solar than coal in the same period. In the UK electricity was the cleanest ever in 2024, with a record 58% produced from low-carbon sources. Straws in the wind include resistance to Labour’s unqualified focus on growth as in resistance to Heathrow expansion, while a high tec early warning system for climate tipping points will be funded by Westminster.
The supreme court decision blocking the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields until the production companies justify the long-term implications of their exploitation means that the final call on the licences will fall to Keir Starmer. This is already causing serious ructions within the Labour party. A recent decision about Drax has halved its four-year taxpayer subsidy, and requires it to only burn sustainable wood for power.
Influencing
We can expect far right organisations to feel empowered to intervene more brazenly in our politics. The media suck up stories of the US government presence at far-right meetings like the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London. Speakers there attacked net zero aspiration as a ‘sinister goal’ and fulminated about undue government control over lives while
Trump bans scientific research which even mentions the word ‘climate’. In the US, officials admit that firing of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is intended to traumatise them.
Resistance
Remember - the previous Trump administration lost 2/3 of the lawsuits filed against them. At this stage opposition to Trump’s first initiatives is new and uneven. In the USA some states (New York, California, Rhode Island) are committed to progressive environmental policies and may become beacons of resistance. Others have already defied attempts to silence them: after Trump ‘killed’ a report on nature, researchers from Ars Technica pushed ahead with release.
Resistance to the Trump regime is already taking shape through consumer boycotts, mass noncompliance, localised resistance, establishment of alternative information networks, reaffirmation of transversal solidarity. We need a sharper assessment of and response to misinformation. It is no coincidence that the alt right attacks green policies, which express a different vision of the future, challenging transactional views and insisting on consideration for others in the broadest sense. The left needs to respond by broadening alliances beyond traditional allies, centred on ideas of sustainability, mutuality and equity. To borrow a concept from the late A. Sivanandan in describing antiracist/anti-imperialist mobilisations, can ‘communities of resistance’ be developed, ‘to bring out the common denominators (which) … point the way to a common struggle’? And what should their strategy be? What would be their relationship to those taking shape in the USA and to social democrats and left-wing parties in the UK and Europe?
Published 27 February 2025