Six weeks ago I wrote a column entitled, Fighting Climate Meltdown and the Death Cult. In it I said, “This would-be fascist government wants to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars approved in 2022 for wind and solar energy, electric cars, buses and trains and other clean and jobs-producing energy. This is the kind of energy we must shift to as rapidly as possible if we are to avoid the breakdown of ecosystems and human societies worldwide. It’s as if Trump and the MAGA’s were a death cult, truly, and not just when it comes to energy policy.”
I wrote this before the vote, one week later, on the Big Billionaires Bill that passed in the House and the Senate by the narrowest of margins. Millions of US Americans, predominantly low-income working people, will be hurt because of this bill’s passage.
At the very last minute of the months-long work of putting together this legislation there was an effort to insert language to make its energy provisions even worse by adding a new tax on wind, solar, batteries and other clean energy technologies. This tax would be levied if companies cannot prove that their products are made without Chinese parts. This provision, if passed, would have made the bill much worse. Fortunately, there were enough Republican Senators who refused to support it so that it was taken out before the final vote.
Interestingly, as far as I can tell, no one has come forward to take credit for this diabolical effort to decimate these rapidly-growing and world-critical technologies. I’d put my bet on Trump and/or Steven Miller being behind it, almost certainly.
One week ago this Trumpist campaign in support of fossil fuel industry dominance of US energy took another huge step when Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, announced that it will move to overturn the 2009 Supreme Court “Endangerment Finding” which determined that there are six greenhouse gases (GHG’s) that are air pollutants which endanger public health and welfare.
If this 16-year-old finding is ultimately overturned by the current Supreme Court, it would be a huge dagger, a knife to the chest, of US efforts going on since 2009 and before to reduce those GHG’s and shift, instead, to a 21st Century clean energy economy that cleans up air, water and land, particularly in environmental justice communities, and gives humankind a fighting chance to prevent worldwide ecosystem and societal breakdown as this century progresses.
Then there is the recently revealed Trump Administration policy linking lower tariffs for other countries to their agreeing to buy US-produced, climate-destroying methane gas exports. Was this from the beginning a major purpose of the tariff campaign?
Truly, maddeningly, Trump, Miller, Zeldin, Vance, the whole cabal, can best be described given all of these actions, and more, as no less than a death cult. Their actions prove that they literally don’t care about anything other than the amassing of as much wealth and power for themselves and their billionaire backers as they can. They are climate criminals.
Fortunately, the US movement for climate justice is very much alive and kicking. There is organizing going on in every state and numerous localities in support of the urgently needed shift away from fossil fuels and to clean renewables, battery storage, electric vehicles and electric heating/cooling systems. These clean energy technologies are advancing worldwide and, still, if now more slowly, in the US.
Support for renewables among the US population continues to be high. A recent Pew Research poll in June reported that 68% continue to support wind power and 77% support solar power.
Our job today is to expose the deadly implications of the Trump/MAGA policies, activate the clear majority which supports making the clean energy transition, fight in every way we can against the planned dramatic expansion of fossil fuel, especially methane gas, pipelines, export terminals and infrastructure, and groundswell a visible, in the streets, mass climate justice movement that refuses to quit.
Down with the Trump death cult.
Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
