‘The enemy is us’ — Donald Trump and the worst-case climate scenario

2 Feb 2025

From his reactions to the Los Angeles wildfires, his promises to ‘drill, baby, drill’, his declarations of an ‘energy emergency’ and his anti-renewable executive orders, it was clear that Donald Trump – for the remainder of his term – was unlikely to acknowledge the planet’s climate realities. The truth, however, was equally unlikely to bend for him. And, ironically enough, it was almost sure to be China that would deliver the lesson.

Firestorm

‘The thing that everyone needs to understand,” said Peter Kalmus, “and I wish that The New York Times would have let me make this point, is that things are going to get worse.”

Kalmus, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was barely holding back tears. That same morning, 10 January 2025, America’s newspaper of record had published his reflection on a decision he had made two years earlier – fearing that his neighbourhood would burn, he had moved his family out of Los Angeles. The idyllic Altadena community, where he had lived for 14 years, was now the hellscape of his darkest forebodings. Every structure that he had known in the community – the pet hospital, the church, the hardware store, the coffee shop – had been reduced to smoldering ash.

But it was only when he learnt that his kids’ childhood home had burned, Kalmus wrote, that his grief had risen to the surface. A former neighbour had texted him with the news that every house on the street had been lost except for one. He had agreed to the interview with Democracy Now, it was clear, to unburden himself of what he had been prevented from placing in print.

“I’m fully expecting heatwaves to start appearing where maybe a hundred thousand people die, or maybe a million people die, or maybe more after that,” he said. “We keep burning these fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry keeps lying, the planet keeps getting hotter, these impacts just keep getting worse. It’s not a ‘new normal’… it’s a staircase to a hotter, more hellish Earth.”

Given that Kalmus had also lamented the widespread obsession with the “new normal” climate message, it wasn’t difficult to guess how he might have made sense of the edits of The New York Times. The general populace, so the reasoning went, did not have the stomach for the brutal conclusions of his science. But in the face of the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, he knew, there was no longer any point in sugarcoating the truth.

And it was in this vein that Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, uploaded a post to his Substack account two days later. Titled “It’s the End of California As We Know It”, Moore’s post had drawn inspiration from the Substack account of Robert Reich, the renowned public policy professor and former member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, who in turn had drawn inspiration from the account of Steven Schmidt, a former Republican who had emerged as one of the most virulent opponents of Donald Trump on America’s west coast.

Like Reich, Moore believed that Schmidt had written the truest and most insightful political take on the fires that were consuming Los Angeles. To this end, the filmmaker – whose work had critiqued globalisation, big business, gun laws and three American presidents, including Trump in his first term – had quoted at length from Schmidt’s musings.

“Somehow,” Schmidt wrote, “[Trump] has concluded that a firestorm that has devoured a geography much larger than Manhattan, and is only six percent contained, is good for him. Trump has decided it proves him right about something – if only any of us could know what that might be. It certainly has nothing to do with his idiocies around the Delta smelt, a small fish that is the subject of controversy hundreds of miles away, as it has been for more than 30 years.”

The link that Schmidt provided for the “Delta smelt idiocy” was to a deeply reported article in CalMatters, a nonprofit news organisation that had developed a formidable reputation for its impact on policy and legislation in California. CalMatters had made short shrift of Trump’s contention that governor Gavin Newsom had refused to divert water to the fires because he was protecting “a worthless fish” – the truth, in the spirit of Kalmus, was much more inconvenient.

“The fires burning in Los Angeles County were fanned by severe winds and exacerbated by near-zero rainfall throughout Southern California,” CalMatters reported. “But sending more water south from the Bay-Delta would have done nothing to prevent them or extinguish them.”

For Schmidt, then, as for Moore, Reich and Kalmus, the Los Angeles fires were a harbinger of what the world could expect in 2025 and beyond. A little more than a week away from his inauguration, Schmidt noted, the president-elect was looking at the fires with only one thing in his sights: opportunity.

“[Trump] sees an opportunity to attack and weaken the enemy, which in his sick mind is California.

“The enemy is us.”

‘Kill, baby, kill’

On 20 January 2025, with the whole world watching, President Trump delivered the phrase that was likely to earn him a place atop the list of all-time environmental felons. Admittedly, on another front, he had also pulled off a relative miracle by forcing a ceasefire in Gaza (a move that this writer analysed through the lens of his hardline business approach), but still, it was only the fully indoctrinated – the most powerful of whom were seated in the inauguration hall before him – who saw no reason to shudder at the words.

“We will drill, baby, drill,” said Trump, slowly and deliberately, before stepping back from the dais to soak up his standing ovation.

As it turned out, the slogan – “drill, baby, drill” – had first been employed at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and later that year had been picked up by Sarah Palin in her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, however, it had been parodied as “spill, baby, spill” and even “kill, baby, kill”, resulting in senior Republicans distancing themselves from the phrase. In 2014, Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defence Fund, would ironically revive it in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine, the subject of which was “how to make fracking safer for the environment”.

Unlike Krupp, of course, President Trump wasn’t the least bit interested in irony, or in making anything “safe” for the environment. On the contrary, it was “safe” to assume that he wasn’t the least bit interested in the environment at all, except as a storage facility for natural resources. In his inauguration speech, in fact, just before he repeated his favourite anti-environment slogan, he had declared a “national energy emergency”, which in his words was the answer to an “inflation crisis” caused by “massive overspending and escalating energy prices”.

A national energy emergency? This was despite the fact that, according to US government data released in March 2024, the country was producing more oil than any country, ever?

Again, Trump wasn’t being ironic – and so it would take one of America’s most knowledgeable and dedicated climate activists to explain what was going on.

“Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency,” stated the headline in The New Yorker on 21 January 2025. Written by Bill McKibben, author, educator and founder of 350.org – the world’s original “grassroots climate campaign” – the piece got to the heart of the matter in no time. Trump, McKibben suggested, was the master of the sleight of hand.

“Indeed,” wrote McKibben, “oil industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down.” Also, when it came to “halting the leasing of federal waters for offshore windfarms,” he added that Trump’s executive order “would effectively limit the amount of energy the country could potentially generate”.

But regardless, as Trump had promised his MAGA constituency – and while insisting, without evidence, that offshore windmills were the cause of an increase in whale deaths – one of his first actions as president was to sign the order anyway.

Then there was the other answer provided by the Trump administration as to why the president was declaring an energy emergency. If the punters weren’t buying the “inflation crisis” line, hey, maybe they would buy the line about the need for more power at data centres, so that America could beat China in the race for artificial intelligence?

As McKibben explained, if that were the real goal, the Trump administration “would want to leave fossil fuels behind” – at the end of 2024, he noted, a Silicon Valley team made up of researchers from Stripe, Anthropic and even Elon Musk’s Tesla had produced a report “showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centres need”.

The only point, then, McKibben surmised, was simply to sow confusion.

“So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment,” he concluded, “almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something – drilling for oil and gas – that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second-most-populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.

“But it’s unlikely that he will fool the Chinese, who are building renewable energy faster than anyone.”

The upside?

From there, unfortunately, it only got more confusing. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, while it came as no surprise, did at least have an element of logic to it – where the US had been steadily decreasing its planet-heating emissions, China’s emissions had been steadily going up. As the world’s biggest polluter, the People’s Republic was now responsible for 35% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Still, in exiting the climate agreement, the US was joining Iran, Yemen and Libya on the list of global dissenters – countries that, recently or historically, had been listed as arch-enemies by Washington, DC.

Once more, the irony was lost on Trump. His focus, conveniently, was on China, which allowed him to play to the crowd – the executive order to remove the US from the agreement was signed on stage in a giant arena, before a throng of the MAGA faithful. And from their cheers, it appeared irrelevant that what they got fed was a mass of contradictions.

“The United States will not sabotage its own industries while China pollutes with impunity,” the president said. “China uses a lot of dirty energy, but they produce a lot of energy. When that stuff goes up in the air, it doesn’t stay there… It floats into the United States of America after three and a half to five and a half days.”

So all of a sudden Trump now believed in the reality of pollution? America was entitled to pollute itself, but under no circumstances could China pollute America? Also, in the context of “drill, baby, drill”, what exactly was “dirty energy”?

McKibben, it appeared, was bang-on – for the MAGA faithful, it didn’t really matter what Trump said, it only mattered that he was the one saying it. Back in the real world, meanwhile, it was clear that McKibben was right about something else.

In November of 2024, nearly half of the experts surveyed by a highly regarded climate think tank – the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air – affirmed their belief that China would reach “peak carbon emissions” by the end of 2025. The pace of the country’s green energy transition, as these academics and industry insiders noted, was such that it was likely to beat its own Paris pledge by an unprecedented five years.

In a nutshell, while Trump was loudly unravelling all of his country’s clean energy gains, Xi Jinping of China was quietly over-delivering on his clean energy commitments. “In 2022,” as a detailed report in Yale E360 noted, “China installed roughly as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined, then doubled additional solar in 2023.”

It was indeed a script worthy of Dr Seuss. On the one side, shooting the lights out, the communist authoritarian state, with its five-year plans and its restrictions on personal freedoms; on the other, descending into policy crisis, the traditional bastion of Western democracy, with all of its anxieties about personal freedoms.

Who would win?

The question, it appeared, wasn’t about the red team or the blue team (in such a scenario, it wasn’t even clear who would consent to be the blue team). On the contrary, the question was about us all, the citizens of planet Earth.

The winner, as always, would be the truth.

As inconvenient as it was, 2024 had been confirmed by science as the hottest year on record. And so McKibben’s final predictions about Trump would almost certainly be fulfilled: “[He] will fail to confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will go on melting, or its forests and grasslands, which will go on burning, or its seas, which will go on rising.”

China, for all of Trump’s sabre-rattling, was about to teach America a lesson that the rest of the world would quickly learn. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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Politics

Firestorm

‘Kill, baby, kill’

The upside?