In the first 100 days of his second presidential term, Donald J. Trump has unleashed a tsunami of attacks against climate policies that not only roll back bedrock legal protections, but are also stirring a broader backlash against billionaires and resetting progressive policy agendas for deeper change. While we see significant setbacks for climate action in the US and internationally, the lack of leadership from Trump’s official opposition may allow space for local communities and national networks to amplify progressive policy analyses and advance an agenda aligned with global climate justice.
Trump’s return to office has caused chaos throughout the global economy and geopolitical order by unilaterally waging a world trade war, while also threatening trusted allies with military invasion. Vulnerable populations are caught in the churn of Trump’s imperialist brand of isolationism he glibly terms “America First”, which has so far seen him threaten territorial expansion, deport immigrants, and decimate foreign aid.
Outside the US, Trump is often portrayed as an irrational and self-interested head of state wreaking havoc on international markets and supply chains. Yet when assessing his climate policies, some see Trump as tending to pursue “rational” private capital and geopolitical interests. While indeed iconoclastic, what defines Trump’s ideological identity is his mercantilist mindset that defies both neoliberal and neoconservative labels. Moreover, “rational” investors today are generally aware of — and accept — climate risks, leaving Trump’s reckless disregard for scientific consensus squarely in the camp of other dangerous autocrats.
With merely 18 months before the US midterm elections (when, as history shows, sitting presidents often lose their hold over the legislature), Trump’s mounting pressure to pass his “America First” agenda on trade, taxes, and other issues could soon peak, as his window of opportunity closes and his political capital depreciates. Nevertheless, most expect that things could get much worse before they get better.
“America First”, Whatever the Cost
Trump arrived in his second term at the White House having learned, following the experience of his first term, the importance of packing his administration with loyalists who will advance his agenda. Much of what we’ve seen him do so far was already published in Project 2025, the economic nationalist playbook of radical policies to reshape government and consolidate power under the president drawn up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation before the 2024 election.
For the third time now, a Republican president has withdrawn US participation in international climate agreements, following George W. Bush leaving the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, Donald Trump from the Paris Agreement in 2017, and again in 2025 on his first day back in office. As the nation with the highest historical emissions —North America’s 4 percent of the global population is responsible for 24 percent of global emissions, compared to South Asia’s 25 percent of the global population responsible for only 4 percent of global emissions since 1850 — Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement throws the world wildly off track from limiting global warming to 1.5C.
Trump’s “American energy dominance” agenda already had the US producing more crude oil in 2019 than any other country, but his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill”, combined with his trade war, have driven prices per barrel so low that US producers are now barely making a profit. Should prices and demand continue to drop, drilling could slow and expansion all but end. Trump, however, is trying to preserve their profits by enacting wholesale deregulation, opening up more reserves to drilling, and expediting the expansion of export facilities, especially for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
Europe’s purchases and financing could determine the future of US LNG production, which producers plan to expand by 200 percent by 2030 — the largest fossil fuel expansion on the planet today, more than all other countries combined. Trump’s trade war is putting increasing pressure on European — and especially German — executives and elected officials to purchase more US LNG while waiving the EU’s new methane rules, seen by Trump as an unfair “non-tariff barrier” to US exports. US LNG expansion will also have major impacts on frontline communities, as Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) member John Beard of the Port Arthur Community Action Network on the Gulf Coast of Texas explains:
This political gambit not only has disastrous economic but also environmental implications. Increased methane/LNG use exacerbates climate change, extreme weather and warming temperatures, not to mention negative effects for all life on Earth. We in the Gulf South cannot endure more hurricanes, tornadoes and catastrophic floods, nor endure seeing our family, friends and loved ones die from more pollution causing cancer, lung, heart disease. We urge our EU allies to join us, and say “NO!” to more methane. Enough is ENOUGH!
One key aspect of LNG expansion is deregulation of land protection for fossil fuel exploration, precipitated by Elon Musk taking his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chainsaw to reduce staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Interior, and several other agencies responsible for climate programs and policies. The move is in keeping with the American Petroleum Institute’s five-point plan calling for cutting overall regulatory authority at the EPA, especially measures restricting emissions, and has even initiated a formal “reconsideration” of the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding”, which established the legal foundation for many climate regulations. Another articulation in the American Petroleum Institute’s plan is the rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the name of “permitting reform”, which would considerably reduce the legal rights of affected communities to provide feedback on proposed projects, a bedrock rule for environmental justice.
Trump has also strived to overturn any gains made by his predecessors, targeting Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on his first day in office. The previous administration’s landmark climate law increased investment in renewables and acted as the formal instrument implementing President Biden’s pledge by the US to the Paris Agreement. Trump, however, froze IRA funding as part of a series of Executive Orders, many of which were outlined in Project 2025. Conservative think tanks are still assessing their options, as many Republican-controlled states are recipients of significant IRA funding for the rollout of renewable energy projects — infrastructure and jobs they do not want to lose. Additionally, in an attempt at yet again prolonging US coal production, Trump has directed the EPA to repeal former President Obama’s flagship climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, which reduced coal use for power plants and constituted a major measure reducing US emissions.
Shock, Awe, and Self-Sabotage
Anticipating Trump’s next attacks is a fool’s errand, as his own “Make America Great Again” agenda ultimately appears unclear even to Trump himself, yet they are still somehow predictable. We know he sees fossil fuels as essential to reviving manufacturing and ensuring national security, believing that demand must be endlessly stimulated and any regulation only adds costs. Given that fact, we should be prepared for the worst while working hopefully for the best.
Trump’s intensifying trade war is bolstering the risk of recession, while lower crude oil prices are slowing the expansion of production. Climate campaigners universally regard ending expansion as an important initial step in equitably phasing out fossil fuels. Now, Trump may ironically achieve by accident what Biden promised but never accomplished. US LNG expansion is another area where Germany can play a key role by defending its methane rules while refusing purchases of US LNG exports and any EU funding for infrastructure, especially export and import facilities.
Risks are also rising for US frontline communities resisting fossil fuel expansion, who now face harsh crackdowns against anyone opposing Trump’s agenda. Many of these communities already suffer systemic environmental racism from the petrochemical industries located in their neighbourhoods. Defying Trump’s so-called “National Energy Emergency” — which treats political resistance as a national security threat, potentially justifying the criminalization of peaceful protesters and perhaps even the application of military force against domestic populations — now warrants watchfulness and solidarity from the international community to support their demands for justice.
DOGE’s reckless downsizing of all aspects of government activities includes the ability to forecast extreme weather events as well as respond to, and recover from, climate emergencies caused by unnatural disasters now occurring with higher frequency and intensity. Trump’s proposed elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is only the latest, yet may be his greatest act of self-destruction. We know more climate catastrophes are bound to happen as extreme weather events and unnatural disasters proliferate due to endless burning of fossil fuels. Yet, despite FEMA’s flaws, dismantling the best-equipped government agency to address extreme weather events could come back to haunt Trump when elections roll back around.
This is not an exhaustive list of all Trump’s anti-climate measures taken to date or to come, but it highlights some of his most damaging moves, all taken as acts of wilful negligence around basic geophysics which, predictably, intensify today’s climate crisis. And yet politics mimics physics in that for every action, there tends to be an equal and opposite reaction, which is what we are slowly beginning to see emerge not only among opposition party elected officials, but more importantly from grassroots groups and civil society as a whole. The outrage at Trump’s oligarchic takeover is beginning to take organized form.
The Fightback Begins
Republicans have so far fallen faithfully in line behind Trump’s drive to cull any form of effective climate action, except perhaps in the case of Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sent a letter to Congressional leadership asking to preserve the IRA’s energy tax credits in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Arguing that repealing the tax credits would disrupt investment and harm businesses and jobs, their commitment will be tested when Congress attempts to address tax reform while reconciling the budget later this year.
At the state level, governors from 24 states are defying Trump’s anti-climate agenda by joining the US Climate Alliance, which aims to accelerate state actions from reducing emissions to rolling out renewables. Representing 60 percent of the US economy and 55 percent of the population, this potential threat to Trump’s agenda is seen as so significant that he launched an attack against states taking climate action.
On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Party leaders, like many Americans who voted against Trump, still seem somewhat stunned into silence by his return to power. Democrats are struggling to develop any common, compelling critique, while the divisions deepen between mainstream Democrats with corporate backers desperate to appeal to centrist voters on the one hand, and more “progressive” politicians rallying raucous stadium-sized crowds in Republican-leaning states to “fight oligarchy”.
It is within this tension that US climate justice campaigners are seizing the moment by the resetting agenda behind an equity message emphasizing the need for a just transition away from fossil fuels and commitments to provide climate finance and technology for Global South countries. As an offshoot of a 2024 cross-constituency collaboration led by youth, faith, women, and communities of colour organizations to draft a “US Fair Shares NDC” (Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement), the new ShiftUS initiative sprang up to serve as the climate justice movement’s reset button. Still getting off the ground but well anchored by DCJ members at the Alabama-based People’s Justice Council, ShiftUS’s Analyah Schlager dos Santos explains that, “climate and environmental justice in the US has always been a battle, but Trump has turned this into war. Today’s wartime that we find ourselves in is either going to bring the United States back to the table to be in right relation, or it will crumble in the melee.”
These developments across the US climate justice movement take place within the wider context of a nationwide peaceful grassroots protests under the slogan “Hands Off”, a reference to Trump’s imperialist notions of invading other countries and Elon Musk’s reckless slashing of government services. Many more people turned out than expected, with over 1,300 rallies and more than 3 million marchers voicing their discontent. For the first time in generations, we saw not just massive crowds in the major cities but also marches in many small-towns where people walked with canes and pushed strollers. It marked a moment many have been waiting for, when affected everyday people stand up and take direct action.
Growing people’s power to ultimately turn the tables on Trump will require building on this momentum and other organizing. Europeans can play a pivotal role in supporting these efforts by refusing to purchase or finance more fossil fuels from the US, especially LNG exports.
Victor Menotti is US Coordinator for the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 200 climate and human rights organizations working for climate justice and just transitions at the international, regional, and local level.
Photo: Charles Edward Miller, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
