While I don't think it's any sort of secret that Trump and the larger Pork Reich are no friends to our environment or the struggle against climate crisis, a little over a week ago Downmarket Mussolini signed an almost certainly illegal executive order that speaks to the scope of his plans to burn the planet to ash for profit as quickly as possible.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-and-the-environment

'This Executive Order is Illegal': Trump Attacks Half-Century of Environmental Protections in One Fell Swoop

"Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was "beyond delusional" for Trump to attempt to repeal "every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order."

"Trump's farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident," said Hartl. "This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court."

You absolutely just read that quote correctly; with the stroke of a pen Trump literally tried to wipe out five decades worth of laws like the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, by essentially demanding various departments of the government "sunset" environmental protection regulations and cease enforcing them by September 30th, 2025. Furthermore while absolutely none of this is legal, the government is once again asserting a rarely used procedural authority to try and expand its power to act unilaterally and in direct violation of the law.

"In a memo, the White House wrote that "in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the 'good cause' exception in the Administrative Procedure Act."

"That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be 'impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'" said the White House."

As the article notes, it is shockingly disingenuous and absurd for the Trump regime to argue that regulations on air quality, fossil fuel production, environmental pollution control, and nuclear fucking waste are "contrary to the public interest." Unfortunately that really doesn't matter because once again it's clear that the public interest was never the point. The crass level of corruption and self-serving exercise of power the Klepto Kaiser regularly partakes in makes it obvious that this is all just a way to reward his capitalist donors without having to tolerate pushback from a public that cares very much about clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and a world on fire. Fascist is as fascist does I guess.

Will he get away with it? Well let's hope not; but at the intersection of Trump's emergency powers granted by invoking made up crises and the unorthodox weaponization of procedural rules towards purposes they were never intended for that we've seen the regime already employ, Der Leader has gotten away with an awful lot of fascist bullshit I for one thought was strictly illegal. Given that, I can't say I'm sleeping confidently at night over this.

#Fascism #Trump #ClimateCrisis #ExecutiveOrder #Capitalism #Oligarchy #polution #Environment #AtomicEnergyAct #NationalApplianceEnergyConservationAct #NuclearWastePolicyAct #GlobalWarming #USPol

If you want to understand why extremely wealthy people in American society are lining up behind the Trump regime's fascist order, consider for a moment the idea that they know they've hoarded so much of the wealth that it's only a matter of time before the peasants show up at their castles with pitchforks, and one of their few options to prevent that is eliminating civil rights and building out a fascist police state.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/19-richest-us-families

Top 19 'Truly Superwealthy' US Families Grew $1 Trillion Richer Last Year: Analysis

"A new analysis by a leading chronicler of the United States' exploding inequality shows that the 19 richest American households added $1 trillion to their collective fortunes last year and saw their share of the nation's wealth jump at a record-shattering pace.

The analysis by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the 19 wealthiest U.S. families now control 1.8%—or $2.6 trillion—of the nation's total household wealth.

In 2024, those ultrarich households saw the largest single-year wealth increase on record."

I need people to understand that while this is certainly political, it isn't partisan. These numbers are from 2024 when Biden was president, but I think it's safe to say the figures under a Trump administration that is absolutely willing to burn your grandparents on the pyre of capitalist accumulation won't be significantly different. These guys stack wealth under neoliberal Democrat presidents, and build fortresses with public money during fascist Republican presidencies; when you're rich and powerful enough in a free market fundamentalist society, it's pretty easy to engineer the outcome you desire no matter what political factors do to the markets. Furthermore, given the propaganda about "crime" in our society, it's easy enough for wealthy donors to guarantee that either way, the police state grows stronger.

Perhaps most importantly, the material realities of our present global situation doesn't change when power shifts from neoliberal parties, to fascist ones or vice versa. The planet is still on fire, capital accumulation still depends on the fossil fuels that are killing us, and billions of lives still hang in the balance. The reality that capitalism goes, or a planet that can comfortably support eight billion human beings does, has not changed under either neoliberalism or its kissing cousin fascism. The ultra-wealthy know that its only a matter of time before the billions of people they intend to sacrifice to keep the line going up even during a climate apocalypse, realize what's going on and come for them; because they have no intention of surrendering the way of life that gives them so much luxury and power.

Understood through that lens then, the uber-rich's support for the fascist Trump regime makes perfect sense. They want your civil rights curtailed, they want it to be illegal to assemble in protest, they want a fascist police state that polices resistance ideology to keep the people they're commodifying and intend to sacrifice to the money god, afraid to act. They might object to Trump's most absurd economic policies, but they know he's going to harden borders, empower a fascist police state, and strip the civil rights of their class enemies- and they're counting on that strategy to get them through the literal end of the world.

#Fascism #Trump #ClimateCrisis #Economics #Broligarchs #Oligarchy #PoliceState #WealthInequality #RichPeopleTasteLikePork

It's honestly a little difficult to properly express how hard the Trump regime is leaning into its "villain in a Captain Planet cartoon" schtick with how quickly they're working to gut environmental regulations, strip mine the country, and turn the planet to ash. Furthermore, you can tell it's a real priority for the Kelpto Kaiser, his rich donors, and his fascist administration because of the extreme lengths the regime is willing to go to, in order to (not so) plausibly grant itself the power to do so.

Take for example the US interior department's announcement that they're going to fast track permit approvals for fossil fuel and mining projects on currently protected lands; and by "fast track" we mean reduce the length of the process to the point that the government is basically just rubberstamping mining projects. Their justification for doing so? Trump's executive order declaring an “energy emergency” which the regime argues, grants them extraordinary powers to quickly strip mine national monuments without consultation, or something.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/interior-agency-fossil-fuel-mining-permits

US interior agency to fast track permits for fossil fuel and mining projects

"The US interior department has announced plans to radically fast track permitting for projects involving fossil fuels and mining citing Donald Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ declaration that many experts say does not exist.

The move would reduce to a maximum of 28 days permitting procedures that previously could take multiple years, the department said late Wednesday.

Green groups immediately criticized the plans to boost planet-heating fossil fuels and questioned their legality describing them as an extreme change to the nation’s core environment laws.

The department said that reviews that now typically take around a year would be reduced to just 14 days while a full environment impact statement that usually took two years would now take less than a month."

Obviously this is an extraordinarily bad idea for too many reasons to list fully here; not the least of which being that there is no energy emergency because the United States is already "extracting more oil and gas than any other country in world history." On a boiling planet run by genocidal billionaires, the last damn thing anyone needs is the US government helping Trump's fossil fuel industry donors mine more oil and gas we shouldn't be burning out of the ground on federally protected lands. I'm not surprised environmental groups are planning to sue to stop this, and I hope they win; assuming court orders mean anything to this administration at all - it's currently not clear that they do.

A moment must also be spared to note however that this is yet another example of Trump's strategy to expand his executive powers in ways that fracture the rule of law, by declaring a bunch of made up emergencies. At this point, I highly doubt that most Americans even know that the Trump administration has declared no less than 8 "national emergencies" to increase his power to do (mostly) fascist shit; that's how often the regime has gone to this well. There is no more an "energy emergency" in America, than there is an "invasion" by "narco-terrorist gangs" occurring on our southern border. The regime is merely pretending these things are true, and pointing to Trump's delusional edicts to justify enforcing this "unreality" as if they were true; but at the end of the day the Emperor really is bare ass naked, and reality isn't a game of nazi Simon Says.

#Fascism #ClimateCrisis #Trump #DepartmentOfInterior #DougBurgum #BigOil #FossilFuels #Mining #Capitalism #Corruption #NationalEmergency #Autocracy

Not satisfied with scouring national monuments and poisoning our air, Trump has signed an executive order giving the green light to extremely dangerous and environmentally damaging deep sea mining operations in an unhinged scheme to compete with China in the critical minerals industry; a task which, stop me if you've heard this one before, Trump has declared a "national emergency."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-deep-sea-mining

Trump Signs Executive Order to Advance 'Deeply Dangerous' Deep-Sea Mining

"Deep-sea mining is opposed by over 30 countries as well as academics and advocacy groups worldwide. Among them is Greenpeace USA, whose campaigner Arlo Hemphill said Thursday that "authorizing deep-sea mining outside international law is like lighting a match in a room full of dynamite—it threatens ecosystems, global cooperation, and U.S. credibility all at once."

"We condemn this administration's attempt to launch this destructive industry on the high seas in the Pacific by bypassing the United Nations process," Hemphill declared. "This is an insult to multilateralism and a slap in the face to all the countries and millions of people around the world who oppose this dangerous industry."

While the article goes on to note that this executive order in no way guarantees extractivist corporations will be able to successfully mine in the deep sea, I think we all understand that these greedbag sociopaths can do a fuck lot of damage to our oceans, a resource shared by the entire human species, while failing to profitably mine critical minerals. Furthermore, this order must be understood as part of a much larger environmental strategy by the Trump regime that from out here, sure as shit looks like letting the regime's billionaire supporters loot the till while the house burns down.

#Trump #ClimateCrisis #Fascism #DeepSeaMining #Extractivism #Environment #Capitalism #ForeignPolicy #China #Corruption #NationalEmergency #USPol

One of the most frustrating things about explaining the origins of climate catastrophe in a free market fundamentalist society is getting people to understand that when I say "capitalism is causing climate crisis and will kill billions of people if we don't end it," I'm speaking quite literally. The evidence that capitalism itself, not just fossil fuels (although to be fair, capitalism and the wealth of the ruling class already depends on fossil fuels far more than you've been told) is the driving factor is all around us, it's just rarely reported in focus and with the level of concern it deserves in corporate media; which for both professional and class reasons, are pretty married to capitalism and free market fundamentalist ideology.

Take for example this recent Dartmouth University study demonstrating that just 111 large corporations are responsible for 28 trillion (with a t) dollars worth of climate damage to our shared biosphere.

https://truthout.org/articles/worlds-top-111-corporations-have-caused-28t-in-climate-damages-study-finds/

"In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature last week, Dartmouth University researchers find that the global economy would be $28 trillion richer if extreme heat caused by climate emissions from the top 111 carbon majors had never happened. This is nearly the equivalent value of a year’s worth of all goods and services created in the U.S., as The Associated Press points out.

Ten top fossil fuel companies, including entities like Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, are responsible for half of those losses, the study finds.

The study authors say that their goal is to provide a scientific linkage between individual companies and financial losses due to their emissions, in hopes of bolstering efforts to hold polluters accountable for the climate crisis amid a growing wave of climate lawsuits and as more states and lawmakers pursue “polluter pays” laws."

Look, I don't want to give people trying to do something useful to help achieve climate justice a hard time; this study is extremely revealing, even if it does adopt a capitalist framework to describe what is quite frankly mass fucking murder in slow motion. In my experience studies like this have a rather large blind spot towards the human cost of conducting capitalism on a boiling planet where everything, including our governments, is owned by billionaire nazis, so it's likely that these folks are actually underestimating the climate costs of "doing business" for the top corporations they studied.

The larger point here however is that as a society we have already amassed oodles of definitive proof that capitalists are burning the planet and threatening billions of lives for profit, and that evidence is typically only worth a paragraph-long notice in our corporate media publications. Rich people are killing us, billions of us, they're just doing it slowly; that's not a metaphor, and I am being dead serious with you when I say that either capitalism goes, or a planet that can support 8 billion people does. Clearly the free market fundamentalists who run our society on behalf of an obscenely wealthy billionaire ruling class aren't coming to the rescue because the rich people who own them have already made their choice. They're going to slaughter billions of people to keep doing capitalism; the question then becomes - do we as a species intend to let them?

#ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #FossilFuels #Corporations #Extractivism #Environment #Media #Genocide #Anticapitalism #EcoSocialism

Despite us being over three months into Trump 2.0, I still periodically still find it breathtaking how much unhinged cartoon villain bullshit they can cram into any given exercise of power. This story for example touches on the way the Klepto Kaiser is using the Department of Justice as his personal legal team to further the objectives of his donors, Trump's attempts to seize power for the presidency from other government bodies, and Downmarket Mussolini's fake "national emergency" scheme to do blatantly illegal shit because Pam Bondi thinks it walks.

This week the Department of Justice filed complaints or lawsuits against four states, New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan, to stop them from enforcing their own state climate laws and mechanisms to hold the fossil fuel companies killing us all, financially accountable for their crimes against humanity.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-phony-energy-emergency

Trump's 'Phony Energy Emergency' Used by DOJ to Target State Climate Laws

"On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed complaints against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which empower states to seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate mitigation. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of human-caused global heating.

Separately, the DOJ also sued Hawaii and Michigan "to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies in state court to seek damages for alleged climate change harms."

As the article mentions, Bondi's maneuvers here stem from Trump's April 8th sweeping executive order in which the president claims the authority to erase any law at any level of government that might impede the fossil fuel companies that put Trump into power; because he also declared a fake national energy emergency. Like most of Der Leader's executive orders, the dictate is vague and broad enough to essentially empower Trump to bulldoze anyone or anything he doesn't agree with, which is pretty much all climate or fossil fuel extraction legislation or regulations. The order is also almost certainly illegal; whatever that actually means in a burgeoning fascist dictatorship where the regime is openly ignoring a number of court orders as we speak.

It's hard to really drill down here and find the greater problem with all of this because virtually everything about this executive order is itself an existential crisis. The planet is literally on fire, climate crisis is real, and billions of (mostly poor) people's lives hang in the balance; the last thing anyone needs is for Trump to empower extractivist mass murder companies to rip more fossil fuels we shouldn't even be burning out of the ground because they're greedy, and Trump wants to pretend he can drive gas prices down and create an American economic utopia by drilling more oil as the world turns to ash. Secondly, to our great shame Trump was elected President of the United States, but he was not made King of the realm and he does not have the power to override the authority of every State government in America on a whim; nor should any president have that authority, as winger fascist "states rights" debate bros have been reminding us all for six decades. If Trump wants to dismantle state climate laws and regulations, his Big Oil donors are going to have to take it through the courts just like everyone else; and yet here's Trump trying to bully their way across the finish line on the cusp of being sued by Hawaii, with one signature.

In my mind however the most shameful and egregious part of all this is the way Trump is weaponizing the Department of Justice to fight the legal battles of extractivist corporations and donors who helped him become president. Not only does it make clear the reality that Trump perceives the Justice Department as the president's own private cadre of lawyers who exist to prosecute his grievances and manipulate the law to further his fascist objectives, but it's also a pretty clear example of quid pro quo and bribery. The message here is if you donate enough money to Trump, you get Trump's lawyers to work for you and those lawyers happen to be the literal Department of Justice; and there's not a lotta wiggle room to argue otherwise, quite frankly. Obviously none of this is how either the Justice Department or presidential power is supposed to work, but as usual the Klepto Kaiser and his bootlicking Attorney General, Pam Bondi, don't seem to care.

#Fascism #ClimateCrisis #Trump #PamBondi #DoJ #Hawaii #Michigan #Vermont #NewYork #ClimateSuperfund #BigOil #FossilFuels #Extractivism #Capitalism #Bribery #ExxonMobil #Chevron #BP #Shell