Drilling in (still) the Gulf of Mexico.
My step-grandmother was ferocious during our visits about keeping me and my teenaged cousins from uttering words that she said were just disguises for swears. “Gosh” and “golly” were out because, she said, these were substitutes for “God.” We weren’t allowed to say “shoot” because it was a replacement for you-know-what. “Darn,” “dang,” and even “doggone it” were literally verboten territory, although we were allowed to imitate her childhood German “Ach du lieber Himmel” (good heavens!). So I learned to sanitize my speech and it’s still mostly prim compared with my peers of whatever ideological persuasion or age.
But Ach du lieber Himmel won’t cut it so long as these goosestepping motherfuckers are on the march in Washington. As Elon Musk showed the other day with his Hitlergruß, the gap between our oligarchs in charge and guys in uniforms and armbands is narrowing. It should never be forgotten that those latter guys used the laws to get where they got and then changed the laws to keep themselves there.
That, obviously, is what Donald Trump has in mind as he showed with the deluge of extremist executive orders carved right out of the 900 pages of cultural, political, economic, and societal upending in Project 2025, the authoritarian manifesto No. 47 claimed in the campaign he had nothing to do with. I have lived long enough to know better than to make absolutist predictions. How successful the new administration will be clearly cannot be judged when it’s not even half-a-week in office. Despite the understandable fear, rage, and panic, there are obstacles to Trumpian victory. But just how much successful oppositional litigation and other kinds of resistance can be mustered is obviously unknown.
Known is that the prescribed upending now in the infant phase of implementation could have a giant negative impact on tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans and thousands of millions of other humans. From crushing reproductive rights to enshrining royalist, racist, sexist privilege and xenophobic foreign policy, from kneecapping federal agencies to shoveling more money into the plutocrats’ maw, the administration is ready to give American governance a dark makeover. While its early tendrils were forged decades ago in the Heritage Foundation kiln, Project 2025 marks a sharp break with past incremental Republican weakening of federal policies and posits a revolution, or rather a counter-revolution since so much of the agenda is devoted to dismantling or reversing what exists.
The environment is, no surprise, one of the Project 2025 blueprint’s many targets. That the Donvict-President has taken up the cause makes happy the ideologues who’ve long been out to eviscerate if not eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, gut science and health-related agencies, and force a retreat when it comes to penalizing companies for “leaking” methane, spilling oil, and the like. If Trump were to get his way with chopping the Inflation Reduction Act, it would among so many other things end assistance to states for shutting and decontaminating oil and gas wells orphaned by corporate abandonment, leaving clean-up to the taxpayers. Just one benefit to the fossil fuel companies that provided $445 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. There’ll be many more benefits to come if Trump has his way and Exxon, et al. have theirs.
One favored target is the EPA’s endangerment finding. Trump’s wide-ranging Unleashing American Energy executive order mandates (§6f) a report in 30 days "on the legality and continuing applicability" of the agency’s 2009 ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten human health and can thus be regulated. The finding was made possible by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in 2007. It has since formed the legal foundation for the EPA’s climate restrictions for vehicles and power plants. Since these emissions are harmful to health given that human-caused climate change sickens and kills people, experts have argued that it would be hard to kill the endangerment ruling because, you know, facts.
But there is another fact. None of the five justices who ruled to authorize the EPA to assess whether greenhouse gases endangered people are now on the court. Three of the justices who voted against the EPA’s jurisdiction in the matter are still there.
In the months to come, Earth Matters will be looking at the impacts of the administration’s assault on the environment and the resistance against Trump, his minions, and the monied forces that put him back where he can help them harm the rest of us.
—Meteor Blades
Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
You can also find me @meteorblades.bsky.social
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