Since the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has shown his eagerness to put profits over people.
In his first minutes in office, he promised to “drill, baby, drill.” In the hours that followed came a flurry of executive orders. Trump declared an “energy emergency” to justify clawing back unspent Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of good jobs. He withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He overturned protections against offshore drilling in more than 625 million acres of ocean. He rolled back incentives for electric vehicles. He halted new leases for offshore wind projects. And, sadly, that was just the beginning.
With these actions and more, he is rapidly ceding vital economic ground to the Chinese government as he attempts to paralyze the green industries helping to power our nation with clean energy.
For all of Trump’s tough talk about putting America first, his actions are doing the opposite. These policies will unravel the nation’s social safety net and sacrifice our health and jobs on the altar of corporate greed. They will make our communities more susceptible to climate-fueled disasters by stripping federal disaster funds and constraining government agencies like the EPA and FEMA. They will drive up illnesses like respiratory and heart diseases, ship our jobs overseas, and increase our energy bills.
As you read this, the Trump administration is actively working to promote the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports to nations that will pay far more than the domestic market rate for methane gas, driving up prices here at home. That will increase your household energy costs. And of course, more methane gas means more fracking and more greenhouse gas emissions. Trump and his supporters are determined to force a national realignment away from clean sources of energy to dirty fossil fuels.
In reality, Trump’s “America First” agenda threatens to make the United States a less compassionate, less equitable, less healthy nation for all.
If you are feeling overwhelmed in the face of this onslaught, you are not alone. Generations of movements – and the activists who led them – have faced moments like this, when dark forces rose to power to reverse hard-won social and democratic progress. We are a nation of progress. There are times when that progress comes under threat and people must rise to the call to protect our country. This is one of those times.
The Sierra Club and our movement are stepping forward to meet this moment. We are organizing at the local, state, and federal levels to protect our victories and score new ones. And we have an army of lawyers resisting the Trump administration. They are using the Freedom of Information Act to expose corruption and hold Trump’s appointees accountable, defending safeguards and agency authority in court, and bringing new litigation to stop unlawful attempts to squash clean energy and benefit polluters.
We have been here before. And we have won before. The Sierra Club shut down coal-fired power plants at a faster rate during Trump’s first term than during either of President Barack Obama’s terms. We sued the first Trump administration hundreds of times, stopping some of its worst attacks on bedrock environmental protections. We saw Trump install cabinet members for the purpose of undermining the agencies they were tasked to lead – like Scott Pruitt at the EPA. Then, he saw us run Pruitt out.
We are strong enough to keep making progress no matter who is president. The people of this democracy do not elect politicians to make change for us. We try to elect the best politicians who will make it easier for us to make change. And when our movement suffers setbacks, when the hill we climb gets steeper, we do not stop climbing.
This organization has been around since 1892, and Donald Trump will be out of office in just a few years. Yes, he is doing a lot of damage. Yes, the people, places, and planet we love are threatened in serious ways by this man’s corrupt, extremist agenda. But we are not going back. And, no, we will never stop fighting.
