Death Sentence for Mother Earth

Donald Trump has been repeatedly calling climate change a “hoax.” For instance, on 2 January 2014, in one of his tweets, he glibly admonished the world’s foremost climate scientists: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has to stop.” So when on 1 June 2017, as President of the country that spews as much as 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, he announced that the United States (US) will withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, shocking though this piece of news certainly was, it was not unexpected. A revealing memo about the incoming Trump administration’s climate policy, drafted by Thomas Pyle, head of the Koch brothers-financed American Energy Alliance and the lead player in the Trump transition team for the Department of Energy, had been leaked in early December 2016. Put simply, the message of the memo made clear the core of the Trump administration’s climate policy: (i) take the US out of the Paris climate change agreement, (ii) rubbish Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), and (iii) make sure that the pipeline projects, including the Keystone XL Pipeline, go ahead.

No doubt Trump and his advisors embody and/or represent the interests of a certain section of the US ruling class, the owners and financiers of the fossil-fuel businesses, but the decision to withdraw from the Paris climate pact has not gone down well with the US ruling class as a whole. Nor has Trump’s rash resolution been agreed to by the ruling classes of the other constituents of the triad—Western Europe and Japan. Surely, his “America First” nationalism has undermined American leadership of the triad.