In the first week of his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders that laid out the priorities of his administration – nearly three times as many as his predecessor, Joe Biden, signed on his first day, who was himself an extreme outlier compared to the other presidents of the past 25 years. The orders are, as expected, his preferred means of implementing Project 2025 into government policy, relying on pure executive fiat rather than a divided and uncooperative legislature.
In issuing these orders, Trump is attempting to restructure to the federal government to persecute immigrants, to return racial and sexual discrimination to the federal workforce, to enforce control over gender identity and reproductive rights, and to rename mountains after presidents you only remember from Trivial Pursuit.
The Wild Hunt will be following all of these stories, and I know I will be watching especially for developments regarding the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the Trump administration’s attempt to overrule Bostock vs. Clayton County and make the oppression of transgender people a bedrock of federal policy.
An oil rig [Pixabay]
Today, however, I want to focus on one of the biggest foci of Trump’s early days in office – namely, his policies on energy and climate change, which are set to have a huge impact on the environment. Most modern Pagans value environmentalism and protection of the natural world as a central part of our ethics, as most of us believe that the Earth is alive and divine, and the life upon our planet is connected to that divinity. For that reason, environmental policy will always be a central concern for The Wild Hunt.
Trump’s policies are, in short, a huge giveaway to the fossil fuel industry. The farthest ranging to my eye is the declaration of a “national energy emergency” – an “emergency” in only the loosest terms, unbound to any material circumstances and without any clear goal that would bring it to an end. “The United States’ insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to our Nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy,” says the order. “In light of these findings, I hereby declare a national emergency.”
In other words: an emergency is any time I don’t think we’re drilling enough.
It’s worth noting that under the Biden administration, oil and gas were extracted at record levels. The framing of this “energy emergency” as rectifying the mistakes of liberal tree-huggers is nonsense; it’s totally manufactured.
The effect of declaring an emergency is opening channels to ignore environmental protection laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, allowing fossil fuel interests to swiftly obtain permits without the kind of scrutiny required by those laws. The “energy emergency” combines with other executive orders, “Unleashing American Energy,” “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” to put up a billboard inviting more drilling with less oversight.
It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s policy is explicitly not an “all of the above” energy policy, which is generally what the Biden administration implemented with its signature Inflation Reduction Act. Trump only wants to promote extractive oil and gas. The leniency Trump wants to show to fossil fuels is being outright denied to the renewable sector – he has barred new offshore wind farms and demanded a review of the permitting process for windmills in general. As noted by Grist, this is controversial even within the Republican party, as four of the top states for wind production are dominated by Republicans. But Trump seems to believe we need dramatically expanded energy capacity – just so long as that energy is generated by oil and gas.
Windmills [Pixabay]
And that’s consistent with his attempts to roll back as much of the Inflation Reduction Act as possible through executive action. Other presidential orders this week have called for an end to the so-called “electric vehicle mandate,” more accurately described as incentives and subsidies for consumers to transition to electric vehicles, an end to the American Climate Corps, and freezing all appropriations related to the IRA or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that would have created more charging stations for electric vehicles.
The IRA – which I was critical of at the time of its passage due to being a watered-down version of the Build Back Better proposal before it – turned out to be a stunningly effective law. Unfortunately, a vulnerability of the law has always been that its effects would take time to be noticeable, focused as it was on building new infrastructure and manufacturing – things that can’t just pop up overnight. In the hands of the second Trump administration, it feels likely that the IRA will be strangled in its cradle, and of course, there’s no hope for any new climate legislation on the horizon.
One of the splashier executive orders declares that the United States is, once again, out of the Paris Climate Accords. Although I don’t want to downplay the significance of the act – one more move toward isolationism and withdrawal from the world stage, alongside other foolish moves like withdrawing from the World Health Organization and antagonizing long-term allies like Canada and Greenland – the fact is that our relationship to Paris was already like the relationship between Schrödinger’s cat and the Geiger counter. Trump already withdrew us once before, in his first term, and as a result it’s not like any other country could take our commitment seriously in the future anyway. At least we are in good company, alongside Iran, Libya, and Yemen.
We are, it’s true, in the middle of an energy emergency – but the Trump administration’s actions are only set to exacerbate it. Instead of facing the bare facts in front of us – that we are buffeted from all sides by extreme weather, from Hurricane Helene in the east to wildfires in the west, that 2024 was the hottest year on record and 2023 had been the hottest year before that, that we are on pace to increase the temperature of the planet by seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century – the policy of the U.S. federal government is to plug up its ears, screw up its face, and a look for a way to bring those temperatures up even higher.
Many of these actions will be challenged in court, but that’s not enough. If we give a damn about our Mother, like we’ve said on all those bumper stickers, Pagans need to be out in force supporting environmental movements over the next four years.
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