Day: November 19, 2024

For those of us with an old-fashioned commitment to justice, science, and common decency, the 2024 U.S. election was a lot of dark things. But one thing it wasn’t? A referendum on climate action or environmental protection.

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It’s true that President-Elect Donald Trump prefers golf courses and MAGA merch to national parks and wildlife; he’s a noted climate change denier and shameless booster of dirty fossil fuels. It’s also true that those character flaws weren’t the same ones that got him reelected.

There’s no denying that Trump’s next nine holes at the White House will be an ugly obstacle to saving the planet. But the silver lining is this: When it comes to the climate and extinction crises, the American people overwhelmingly want action.

The reality is that sustaining a livable climate, breathable air, and drinkable water is still a political winner, despite the billions of dollars constantly being spent by private interests to greenwash killer technologies and tear down regulations. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, two-thirds of Americans think corporations aren’t doing enough to curb climate change. At least 80% want to help endangered species and wild places. In a country where so much is decided on the strength of a paper-thin margin, including who occupies the White House, those numbers are a powerful signal that the vast majority are asking for a stable planet with abundant wildlife.

During his campaign, Trump distanced himself from the extremist Project 2025—a radical Christian nationalist proposal that aims to gut environmental laws, along with other dangerous moves like giving unprecedented authority to the president, abolishing the Department of Education, and quashing civil rights and science—as soon as he understood how unpopular it was. It remains unpopular today. Now that he’s won the presidency, though, with both houses of Congress under GOP domination, Trump has less to gain personally by keeping the extremists at arm’s length. And for him, personal gain is where the buck stops.

Read more: Trump Will Set Back Climate Action. But He Can’t Stop It Entirely

In the face of this, those of us clamoring for action on climate and extinction can’t throw up our hands in despair. We have a brief window of time to avert the worst scenarios, and for the next four years we’ll face antagonists at the top. That means we have to fight from the bottom, the middle, and all sides.

In the next two months, President Biden can help shore us up against ruin by filling all 47 current judicial vacancies in district and appellate courts. For decades, a top priority of Republicans has been to shift the judiciary to the hard right; this reached its zenith in Trump’s first term and left us a court system stacked with zealots and a corrupt Supreme Court that no longer heeds the will or welfare of the people.

Democrats need to respond with equal force to rebuild the integrity of our third branch of government by appointing judges who accept science and the rule of law. So far Biden has done relatively well filling vacancies; he needs to finish the job, and fast.

Next, after Inauguration Day, states and public-interest groups must redouble their efforts to beat back the deregulatory agenda. States are the natural first line of resistance to bad policy emanating from the Trump White House—a bulwark, in this embattled moment, against a federal government essentially bent on self-immolation.

Much can be done by states and cities to get rid of fossil fuels and speed up the shift to clean energy. In red states not disposed to resistance, individuals, neighborhoods and towns will have to rise up from the grassroots and insist on progress. Being involved is now a moral imperative, and it’s important to work toward local wins like getting cities to adopt green energy and vehicle procurement policies, move building codes quickly toward zero pollution, or expand green spaces—the list of possible actions is long. (And as soon as you can, ditch that gas car, too.)

During Trump’s first term, the hundreds of lawsuits launched against his attacks on the successful programs that protect our climate and health had an 80% success rate. And although he’s coming into this round armed with a blueprint for annihilation, dismantling longstanding rules involves red tape—and time. A full-court press in the judicial system is more important than ever to minimize the damage.

All states should ramp up electric vehicle sales rapidly, as California is doing, and resist industry attempts to fast-track more oil and gas development on federal lands and waters. Trump would like to sacrifice every last publicly owned acre to oil and gas extraction; states must oppose this. They can do so by reviewing each new proposal for legal compliance and heading to court to enforce the law—and the people who live in those states need to support those efforts.

As Trump seeks to free polluters from government restraint, states should legislate to hold them accountable, passing laws like Vermon’s Climate Superfund bill. In 2024 Vermont became the first state to enact legislation requiring large fossil fuel producers to pay a fee for the harms caused by their oil, gas and coal. New York’s bill is awaiting the governor’s signature by year’s end; California should pass its own bill, which stalled in the state Senate this summer, promptly in the next session. Climate Superfund legislation complements the lawsuits that have already been filed by states and local governments to force fossil fuel polluters to pay for the damage off which they profit so handsomely—critical lawsuits that must be continued.

State public utility commissions—the bodies that regulate monopoly utilities—can prohibit those utilities from building new fossil gas plants to fulfill the skyrocketing demands of AI and data centers. Unfortunately, utilities like Dominion in Virginia, Duke Energy in North Carolina, and AEP in Ohio all plan to build new gas plants. But we the people can do something about it: Customers and community groups can get involved as public commenters and challenge the rate hikes being imposed on them to pay for those polluting plants.

States should also develop more rooftop, community solar, and other responsible renewable sources through state and municipal programs and laws. Net energy metering—a policy that allows rooftop-solar owners to sell self-produced energy back to the grid—has helped rooftop solar flourish across the country, but these programs have come under attack in California and North Carolina and need to be defended. (Florida successfully rescued its program.)

During the first half of Trump’s first term, the GOP held both chambers of Congress—as it will in Trump’s next term, at least until 2026. Despite that congressional control, it failed in its efforts to cut down the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, all of which play a major role in addressing the climate crisis. Republican members of Congress will renew their assault on these fundamental laws in the coming term, so protecting them needs to be a top Democrat priority—and all of us, whether our representatives in Congress are red or blue, need to voice our personal opposition to any weakening of our safety nets.

Climate activists have begun to expand their reach, allying with social-justice, public-health, labor, and civil-rights groups. But that reach should really have no limit at all: Every one of us has a stake in survival. Mass mobilization is inevitable as almost every year is hotter than the one before and we’re battered by storm after storm and fire after fire.

Why not make it happen now, while we still have so much to save?

Just over a year into Donald Trump’s first term as President, immigration agents raided a meat processing plant in Bean Station, Tennessee, arresting 104 workers. It was the largest worksite raid in a decade. Two months later, 114 were arrested at a large-scale nursery in Sandusky, Ohio. The next year, immigration agents raided poultry plants in six towns in central Mississippi, arresting 680 workers in one day. 

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When Trump comes back to office in January, he plans to bring back the raids, after President Biden largely put a stop to such enforcement tactics.  

“Worksite operations have to happen,” Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his incoming “border czar,” said on “Fox and Friends” last week. 

Worksite raids generate headlines and TV news stories, but the operations don’t lead to a significant number of deportations, according to those familiar with such operations. “They are flashy, they are disruptive, they are controversial—therefore, I would expect them” during the second Trump Administration, says John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama Administration. “But from a numbers perspective, they are not going to materially increase the count.” 

Trump won the election after repeatedly promising on the campaign trail to launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, one that would remove millions of people from the country. Trump confirmed Monday on social media that he was prepared to declare a national emergency and use the military to help beef up his mass deportation program.

Deporting people is challenging and requires time and resources. During Trump’s first term, deportations peaked in the 2019 budget year, when the federal authorities removed about 347,000 people.

To further boost those numbers, the Trump administration may decide to address the backlog of some 3 million cases in the immigration courts by convincing Congress to  fund more immigration judges. Or they could hire more agents to locate hundreds of thousands of people still in the U.S. who have already been ordered removed by a judge, says Sandweg.

Worksite raids are expensive, resource-intensive operations that are likely to be less effective in boosting that number, experts say. 

Eric Ruark, director of research for NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reducing both legal and illegal immigration levels, says “worksite enforcement is essential” to dealing with illegal immigration. “It also sends a message to people who might want to come that there’s not going to be the opportunity to work in the United States because they don’t have authorization,” Ruark says. (Homan has also argued that worksite raids are an effective way to find victims of sexual trafficking and forced labor.)

Ruark predicts that reviving of workplace raids will prompt a collision within the Republican Party, as pro-business Republicans are likely to see the raids as undermining the economy. “You’re going to see pushback,” Ruark says. “The only thing standing in the way of carrying out his campaign promises would be opposition within his own party.”

Michelle Lapointe, legal director for the American Immigration Council, which opposes Trump’s immigration plans, agrees that the raids are about sending a message. “Part of the strategy is to terrorize people—and these worksite raids do exactly that,” she says.

After the raid in eastern Tennessee in April 2018, workers sued in court and claimed officers with Homeland Security Investigations and the Internal Revenue Service had illegally singled them out for arrest based on their appearance. A court approved a $1 million settlement. Some workers were also granted legal status as part of the settlement terms. The meat processing plant in Bean Station is still operating.

Lapointe says her organization is preparing to defend workers if worksite raids ramp up again under Trump. “They promised to carry these out again and we take them at their word, unfortunately,” she says.