Trump 2.0 Is the Environment Terminator
Spoiler alert: Everyone dies and the world ends.
by Richard Conniff
On the windward face of Hawaii’s Big Island, the honeycreeper species akiapolaʻau bangs out its living woodpecker-style, but with its beak wide open. Finding a suitable spot on a lichen-covered branch, the akiapolaʻau opens wide and jackhammers away at the bark with its straight lower bill till it finds an insect larva. Then it reaches in with its slender, curved upper bill to extract its prey.
It’s a hard life, made much harder in modern times by introduced wild pigs, feral house cats, and mosquitoes. The pigs wander everywhere and dig wallows, which kill the trees the birds depend on. The mosquitoes lay eggs on the water that puddles up in the wallows. The adult mosquitoes bite the birds and transmit malaria, an introduced disease that is fatal for honeycreepers.
The akiapolaʻau … But wait. This is just the sort of name Donald Trump likes to make cringey, demeaning jokes about. So let’s stop for a moment to say it outloud: ah-kee-a-POO-LAH-ow. And again? Ah-kee-a-POO-LAH-ow. Excellent!
The akiapolaʻau has survived, so far, because of a heroic human rescue effort—focused on the 32,733-acre Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge. The work there, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is underpaid and often difficult, but also rewarding. It involves gathering seeds in very wet, dense rainforest, bringing them back to grow in the nursery, and later planting them out to reforest parcels that used to be cattle pastures. It means building and maintaining fencing to keep out the pigs, and fighting an endless campaign to protect the habitat from bird-killing house cats, rats, and other introduced pests.
When President Trump and his Project 2025 overlords fired 370 Fish and Wildlife workers last week, the layoffs included critical staff at Hakalau, effective immediately. The nursery lost its manager and shut down, maybe for good. The akiapolaʻau and 28 other threatened or endangered species found nowhere else in the world thus edged a little closer to extinction. For Trump, that might matter only if, as in the Gaza Strip, the site seemed like a beautiful place to build another “magnificent” resort.
What’s happening at Hakalau is being repeated at national parks, national forests, and other public lands across the United States. Perhaps it will matter more elsewhere because humans are also being pushed out of their comfort zone. At Grand Canyon National Park on the weekend of the firings, it took 90 minutes, double the normal wait, just to get in the southern entrance. At Yosemite National Park, you could get in, but you might not be able to get out again: Trump had fired the only park staffer with the keys and the know-how to rescue visitors locked in the restrooms.
All this headline-making chaos was, however, only the inept public face of Trump 2.0’s much broader behind-the-scenes attack on the environment—with consequences that may be far larger and more difficult to reverse. Let’s break down three of the many areas under attack this time around:
Undermining the Endangered Species Act
Just for the sake of argument, say you were a developer and thought Hakalau really did have potential as a resort? And say there was only one endangered species left there, and it wasn’t as charismatic as a honeycreeper, but more like a bat or an insect. (Hakalau has both, in various stages of peril.) The Endangered Species Act would still present an impediment, but perhaps not a fatal one for the resort idea.
You might offer certain measures to make the development seem less threatening, like setting aside a portion of the site to preserve the endangered species. Or maybe there’s a remnant population in another location, and you could pay to improve habitat there as a way to mitigate damage done at the site of your resort. All this would require a long, expensive legal negotiation. But federal agencies go to surprising lengths to help make these mitigation strategies practical. They might, for instance, allow you to kill a certain number of endangered individuals unintentionally if it seemed that the species could withstand the loss. The reality for regulators is that blocking your development would just land them in a messy political mud wallow.
Even in the unlikely event that the regulators ultimately ruled against your resort, you could still seek relief from the he “God Squad.” Known formally as the Endangered Species Committee, it has the power to weigh the public interest regionally or nationally, including economic and other factors, and allow a project to go forward even when it might cause a species to go extinct. But the God Squad hardly ever meets and has ruled in such cases only three times in the decades since it was created.
Trump means to change that, first by declaring a “national energy emergency” intended to remove environmental obstacles to fossil fuel development; and second, by announcing that the God Squad will now meet at least four times a year. The God Squad is comprised by law mainly of cabinet members, appointed of course by Trump himself. Even so, getting rid of a problematic species is not as easy as Trump might imagine. There are rules to be followed, and wildlife advocates can appeal a decision, for instance on the grounds that Trump’s “national energy emergency” is a convenient fantasy.
The Project 2025 bots around Trump may, however, also pursue other means to cut off the protection of endangered species at its ankles. They might do so in the context of the 2023 Supreme Court Sackett ruling, which held that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its authority in the way it protects wetlands under the Clean Water Act. The majority opinion effectively limited protection to streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes—not the sort of marshes and saturated lands that scientists define as wetlands and that also serve the public good (and commerce) by, for instance, reducing the danger of floods and protecting the clean water supply.
Justice Clarence Thomas went even further in a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among states and Indian tribes. But since a 1937 decision that legitimized Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Supreme Court has interpreted that clause as the basis for much broader regulatory measures. Thomas argued that the commerce clause should apply only to direct regulation of trade and exchange, not “federal regulatory schemes that would have been ‘unthinkable’ to the Constitution’s Framers and ratifiers.” If a majority of the Supreme Court takes that route, it could rule out measures like the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the Marine Mammal Act, and in truth much of the modern federal government. (Do eagles have anything to do with trade and exchange? Their appearance on the back of every dollar bill would be a good place to start the discussion.)
“When you look at the Sackett decision, I'm very, very concerned about whether this administration will continue to defend the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act,” says Andrew Mergen, who spent much of his career mounting just that sort of defense as an appellate attorney in the Department of Justice and now teaches at Harvard Law School. That concern is greater “if you understand a lot of what is going on with the Trump administration right now to be a deliberate attempt to sort of tear down the New Deal.”
Dumping Environmental Justice
This happened on Trump’s first day back in office, when mass firings wiped out the Office of Environmental Justice at the Environmental Protection Agency and its counterpart office in the Department of Justice. The administration was using its anti-DEI campaign “as a cover to eliminate programs they disagree with,” says Hannah Perls, an environmental justice specialist at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. Environmental justice isn’t about diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s about pollution that disproportionately sickens and kills people in poor or marginalized communities, regardless of skin color, religion, or sexual orientation.
For instance, when explosions rocked the Texas Petrochemical Company plant on the Texas coast in 2019, 60,000 people had to evacuate the surrounding community of Port Neches and beyond. By its own admission, the company knowingly failed to take necessary measures that would have prevented the explosion. As a result, it released more than 11 million pounds of “extremely hazardous substances” and caused heavy damage to neighboring properties, human health, and the environment. The 2024 consent decree in the case brought by environmental attorneys in the Department of Justice imposed an $18 million criminal fine on Texas Petrochemical for failing to comply with risk management regulations—regulations that Trump 1.0 had worked to weaken and the Biden administration later strengthened. The agreement also required the company to invest $80 million to improve safety at its plants, make a public apology, and mount air pollution sensors at its fence line with regular community access to the results.
A 2023 settlement against Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Corporation, for pouring lead and other dangerous contaminants into the air around its Dearborn, Michigan, plant, required it to invest $100 million in pollution reduction equipment. It also included a “supplemental environmental project” to provide residents with home air purifiers—under a program Trump 1.0 eliminated and the Biden Administration restored.
Trump 2.0 has now spared itself finicky half-measures against environmental justice by simply firing the regulators responsible for identifying and prosecuting violators. It’s worth noting that both Port Neches and Dearborn are majority white, with one town generally voting Republican, the other Democratic. Either way, the message from Donald Trump is that low-income communities should just suck up whatever pollution unregulated local industry decides to dish out to them.
Pretending Climate Change Doesn’t Exist
Trump has previously, in 2018, ordered the words “climate change” deleted from federal documents and government websites. It had no visible effect on people fleeing massive wildfires, dying in heatwaves, or watching their cars being swept away in 500-year flash floods. Now he’s trying again: “Climate change” is once again the-thing-that-cannot-be-named by federal workers.
Right from the start, more seriously, Trump has also directed staff to analyze “the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 Endangerment finding” and report its recomendations to the White House. That’s the ruling that climate change harms public health and welfare, and it’s the basis for federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plant, and oil and gas facilities. This past Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the White House its recommendations on the Endangerment Finding—but refused to make them public.
The science on climate change is now so inescapably clear that even power companies have backed away from fighting the endangerment finding. The Supreme Court also seems unwilling to sustain a direct attack on the endangerment finding. Instead, the Trump administration is likely to seek roundabout ways of minimizing the finding’s effects on industry, by stretching out enforcement timelines, or establishing acceptable levels of harm. It may also resort to its now-standard tactic of simply firing the staff needed for enforcement. The bottom line is that the Trump Administration will spend the next four years furiously backpedaling on climate regulations, at the very moment climate scientists say rapid progress is critical for prevent catastrophic damage to life on Earth.
Think about that. Think about a time before the New Deal, and before the environmental movement—when our rivers were open sewers and the air was thick with whatever filth industry wanted to send up its smokestacks, and when the ivory-billed woodpecker vanished because we we had no laws to stop lumber companies from cutting down its last habitat to make railroad ties. Then add in uncontrolled climate change and mass extinctions. Top up with the autocratic behavior of a democracy-hating, Putin-loving president, and we face a very dark, dangerous future.
The answer isn’t to obey in advance, a dangerous tendency among federal workers and others in the early weeks of this administration. The answer is to ridicule and resist, loudly and publicly, and damn the cost. The cost of staying silent is far worse.
Hey Dick! Fun to see you here on Substack. I guess this is a refugee holding-pen for people who had to flee the magazine industry, due to lack of support.
Yes - resist loudly. I need help knowing how though.