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One week after the victory of President-elect Donald Trump, the implications of his second term on climate change and the West are coming into focus. As Sammy Roth writes in the L.A. Times' Boiling Point newsletter, Trump's return means "the same types of people who populated his first administration—many of them fossil fuel lobbyists and climate deniers—will be back in power." Trump's agenda, including the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the trying to repeal oil and gas reforms in the Inflation Reduction Act, prioritizes fossil fuels and deregulation.
Jonathan Thompson, in his Land Desk newsletter, takes a deep dive into what Trump policies may mean for public lands. "[J]udging from Trump’s platform, promises, and his first-term record," Thompson writes, "we do know he and his minions will set out to dismantle the administrative state, which is to say gut federal agencies, replace experienced staffers with Trump loyalists, and remove government protections on human health, the environment, and worker safety."
Thompson anticipates a reversal of the Biden-era ban on drilling near Chaco Culture National Historic Park and Colorado's Thompson Divide, and an attempt to dismantle the Bureau of Land Management's Public Lands Rule, which provides a framework for conservation and recreation as an explicit use of public lands, alongside grazing and extraction.
Over at Heated, Emily Atkin writes about the implications of Trump's EPA nominee, Lee Zeldin. Atkin notes that Zeldin's first tweet after his nomination said he would "use the EPA to 'restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI'—three things that have nothing to do with human health or the environment."
With that assault on the planet already taking shape, Atkin looks at the prospects of more grassroots activism during Trump's second term. The Sunrise Movement plans to expand the school strikes that made headlines in 2020, and eventually grow to a general worker strike if Trump's climate policies get even more extreme.
Correction: Tuesday's Look West said that Lee Zeldin was a former congressman from Florida. He is from New York.
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We gotta get used to talking to regular-ass people. We have to be creating campaigns that aren’t just getting people that agree with us to donate $5, but that are getting people out, knocking on doors and having the millions of conversations needed to actually bring new people into the movement.”
