Let’s rewind a bit, to the week Trump won. At that moment, I was reeling from witnessing not one catastrophe, but two. And I don’t think we can understand the true danger of the Trump disaster unless we grapple with both of them.
As I mentioned, I was in Australia for work, but I was also very conscious that, because of the carbon involved in that kind of travel, I might not be able to return for a long time. So I decided to visit, for the first time in my life, the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, a World Heritage Site and the earth’s largest natural structure made up of living creatures. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
I spent a lot of time underwater as a kid. My father taught me to snorkel when I was six or seven, and those are some of my happiest memories. There was always something amazing to me about the intimacy of the interactions with ocean life. When you first swim up to a reef, the fish mostly scatter. But if you hang out for a few minutes, they stop seeing you as an intruder and you become part of the seascape to them—they’ll swim right up to your mask, or nibble on your arm. As an anxious kid, I always found these experiences wonderfully dreamlike and peaceful.
As the Australian trip approached, I realized that my feelings about seeing the Reef were tied up in my being the mother of a four-year-old boy, Toma. As parents, we can sometimes make the mistake of exposing kids too early to all the threats and dangers facing the natural world. The first book about nature that a lot of children read is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, which is all about pollution and beautiful places being turned into garbage and all the animals dying and disappearing and choking. It’s really scary. I read it to Toma when he was two and watched the terror cross his face. And I thought, “No, this is completely wrong.” Now we read stories about fast-talking squirrels and books that celebrate nature’s beauty and wonder. Even if I know these books are about species that are on the brink of extinction, Toma doesn’t need to worry about that yet. I figure that my job is to try to create as many positive experiences as possible that will attach him to the natural world. You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it.
I also wanted to go to the Reef in my role as a journalist. Over the previous two years, something unprecedented in recorded history had happened. Because of record-breaking temperatures, more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been impacted by what’s known as a “mass bleaching event.” It’s hard to stress just how cataclysmic the bleaching has been. When coral is bleached, those beautiful, intensely colored creatures—an ecosystem as rich and teeming as the Amazon rain forest—turn ghostly and bone-white. Bleached coral can recover, if temperatures quickly go back down to normal levels. This time, they hadn’t gone back down—so almost a quarter of the Reef has died.
It’s worth underlining how little warming it took to bring about such a radical change. Ocean temperatures went up just one degree Celsius higher than the levels to which these incredible species are adapted, and that was enough for a massive die-off. Unlike many other climate change—related events, this wasn’t some dramatic storm or wildfire—just silent, watery death.
When we got to the Reef, there was still an air of unreality about the whole thing: the Port Douglas boats packed with tourists were still going out, the surface of the water was blue and beautiful, there were stretches of spectacular turquoise. But the ocean has a way of hiding humanity’s worst secrets, a lesson I first learned covering BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, and seeing how quickly the spill disappeared from the headlines once the oil began to sink, though the damage below continued unabated.
We went out on the Reef with a team of extraordinarily dedicated marine biologists (all of whom were emotionally shattered by what they had been documenting) and a film crew from the Guardian. We started filming the parts of the Reef that are still alive and we managed to get Toma to put on a snorkel. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to focus on the coral at all; he had just learned to swim and was wearing floaties. But the scientists were incredibly patient with him, and there were about five solid minutes when he really was able to pull it off and have a flash of true wonder—he “saw Nemo,” he saw a sea cucumber. I think he even saw a sea turtle. These parts of the Reef, the ones that are neither bleached nor dead, are only a fraction of the whole, but they are still glorious—a riot of life, of electric-colored coral and fish, sea turtles and sharks swimming by.
We didn’t take Toma on the boat when we filmed the dead and bleached parts of the Reef. And it was a graveyard. It was as if a cosmic switch had been flipped and suddenly one of the most beautiful places on earth had been turned into one of the ugliest. The coral bones were covered in a goo of decaying life—a brown goo. You just wanted to get away from there. Our wetsuits stank of death.
We chose to film the Reef in this state because, for many people, there is a sense that climate change is a distant crisis, that there’s still a bit of time to procrastinate before we get serious. We wanted to show that radical changes to our planet, including parts we count on to be brimming with life, are not far off in the future—they are happening right now. And the impacts are enormous, including the fact that roughly one billion people around the world rely on the fish sustained by coral reefs for food and income.
And I wanted to try to show the disaster through Toma’s eyes too. Because one of the most unjust aspects of climate disruption (and there are many) is that our actions as adults today will have their most severe impact on the lives of generations yet to come, as well as kids alive today who are too young to impact policy—kids like Toma and his friends, and their generation the world over. These children have done nothing to create the crisis, but they are the ones who will deal with the most extreme weather—the storms and droughts and fires and rising seas—and all the social and economic stresses that will flow as a result. They are the ones growing up amidst a mass extinction, robbed of so much beauty and so much of the companionship that comes from being surrounded by other life forms.
It is a form of theft, of violence—what the author and theorist Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” A clean, vibrant planet is the birthright of all living beings. That’s why the Great Barrier Reef is classified as a World Heritage Site. It belongs to the world, and it is dying on our watch. I realized that the story I wanted to tell is about intergenerational theft and intergenerational justice. That’s why I decided to put Toma on camera for the first time; I was reluctant, but I just couldn’t tell that story without him.
By the end of the day, we were all completely wiped out. We had seen so much death, so much loss, but my son had also had this special experience. That night, tucking him into bed in our Port Douglas motel room, I said: “Toma, today is the day when you discovered there is a secret world under the sea.” And he just looked up at me with an expression of pure bliss and said, “I saw it.” I burst into tears, some mixture of joy and heartbreak at the knowledge that, just as he is becoming aware of this beauty in the world, all this magic, it is being drained away.
I have to admit, I was angry too. That whole day I had not been able to stop thinking about ExxonMobil—about how this company, it has now been documented, knew about climate change as far back as the seventies. According to a groundbreaking investigation by InsideClimate News (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Exxon did its own cutting-edge empirical research, taking CO2 samples off its oil tankers and building state-of-the art climate models that predicted the coming changes such as sea-level rise. It also received warnings from its own senior scientists, including James Black who was categorical in his reports to his employer about the “general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” He also wrote that “man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” That was in 1978.
By the time Rex Tillerson took over the job of general manager of the central production division of Exxon USA, these facts had long been known in the company, including the uncomfortable one about how little time remained. Despite this, ExxonMobil has since then lavished more than $30 million on think tanks that systematically spread doubt through the press about the reality of climate science. Mobil (before its merger with Exxon) even took out its own full-page ads in the New York Times casting doubt on the science. ExxonMobil is currently under investigation by the attorneys general of New York, California, and Massachusetts for these alleged deceptions. Because of this campaign of misinformation, promoted by the entire fossil fuel sector, humanity lost key decades when we could have been taking the actions necessary to move to a clean economy—the same decades in which ExxonMobil and others opened up vast frontiers for oil and gas. If we had not lost that time, the Great Barrier Reef might still be healthy today.
But my time at the Reef didn’t leave me feeling entirely helpless. Because there are dogged communities and growing movements around the world determined to get their governments to wake up and stop drilling new oil and gas fields and digging new coal mines. We rushed like mad to turn the film around in four days so it could be out on the eve of the US elections, thinking it might play some tiny part in motivating people to vote, and then in fueling the pressure to get Hillary Clinton to do more on climate. And we made it—we posted the video on November 7.
The next day, Trump won. And then ExxonMobil’s CEO was named secretary of state.
The stakes in the 2016 election were enormously high for a great many reasons, from the millions who stood to lose their health insurance to those targeted by racist attacks as Trump fanned the flames of rising white nationalism; from the families that stood to be torn apart by cruel immigration policies to the prospect of women losing the right to decide whether or not to become mothers, to the reality of sexual assault being normalized and trivialized at the highest reaches of power. With so many lives on the line, there is nothing to be gained by ranking issues by urgency and playing “my crisis is bigger than your crisis.” If it’s happening to you, if it’s your family being torn apart or you who is being singled out for police harassment, or your grandmother who cannot afford a life-saving treatment, or your drinking water that’s laced with lead—it’s all a five-alarm fire.
Climate change isn’t more important than any of these other issues, but it does have a different relationship to time. When the politics of climate change go wrong—and they are very, very wrong right now—we don’t get to try again in four years. Because in four years the earth will have been radically changed by all the gases emitted in the interim, and our chances of averting an irreversible catastrophe will have shrunk.
This may sound alarmist, but I have interviewed the leading scientists in the world on this question, and their research shows that it’s simply a neutral description of reality. The window during which there is time to lower emissions sufficiently to avoid truly catastrophic warming is closing rapidly. Lots of social movements have adopted Samuel Beckett’s famous line “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” as a lighthearted motto. I’ve always liked the attitude; we can’t be perfect, we won’t always win, but we should strive to improve. The trouble is, Beckett’s dictum doesn’t work for climate—not at this stage in the game. If we keep failing to lower emissions, if we keep failing to kick-start the transition in earnest away from fossil fuels and to an economy based on renewables, if we keep dodging the question of wasteful consumption and the quest for more and more and bigger and bigger, there won’t be more opportunities to fail better.
Nearly everything is moving faster than the climate change modeling projected, including Arctic sea-ice loss, ice-sheet collapse, ocean warming, sea-level rise, and coral bleaching. The next time voters in countries around the world go to the polls, more sea ice will have melted, more coastal land will have been lost, more species will have disappeared for good. The chance for us to keep temperatures below what it would take for island nations such as, say, Tuvalu or the Maldives to be saved from drowning becomes that much slimmer. These are irreversible changes—we don’t get a do-over on a drowned country.
The latest peer-reviewed science tells us that if we want a good shot at protecting coastal cities in my son’s lifetime—including metropolises like New York City and Mumbai—then we need to get off fossil fuels with superhuman speed. A paper from Oxford University that came out during the campaign, published in the Applied Energy journal, concluded that for humanity to have a fifty-fifty chance of meeting the temperature targets set in the climate accord negotiated in Paris at the end of 2015, every new power plant would have to be zero-carbon starting in 2018. That’s the second year of the Trump presidency.
For most of us—including me—this is very hard information to wrap our heads around, because we are used to narratives that reassure us about the inevitability of eventual progress. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a powerful idea that sadly doesn’t work for the climate crisis. The wealthy governments of the world have procrastinated for so long, and made the problem so much worse in the meantime, that the arc has to bend very, very fast now—or the shot at justice is gone for good. We are almost at midnight on the climate clock.
During the Democratic primaries, I was really struck by the moment when a young woman confronted Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail and asked her if—given the scale of the global warming crisis—she would pledge not to take any more money from the fossil fuel interests that are supercharging it. Up to that point, Clinton’s campaign had received large sums of money from employees and registered lobbyists of fossil fuel companies—about $1.7 million, according to Greenpeace’s research. Clinton looked disgusted and snapped at the young woman, saying she was “so sick” of this issue coming up. A few days later, in an interview, Clinton said young people should “do their own research.” The woman who had asked the question, Eva Resnick-Day, worked as a campaigner for Greenpeace. She had done her research, she insisted, “and that is why we are so terrified for the future…. What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species.”
For me, her words cut to the heart of why this was not just another election cycle. Why it was not only legitimate but necessary to question Hillary’s web of corporate entanglements. Resnick-Day’s comments also highlight one of the big reasons why Trump’s presidency is harrowing: the most powerful man in the world is a person who says global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese, and who is feverishly trashing the (already inadequate) restraints on fossil fuels that his country had put in place, encouraging other governments to do the same. And it’s all happening at the worst possible time in human history.
We have so far warmed the planet by just one degree Celsius, and from that, we are already seeing dramatic results: the mass coral die-off, balmy Arctic weather leading to severe ice loss, the breaking apart of Antarctic ice sheets. If we continue on our current pollution trajectory, we are set to warm the planet by four to six degrees Celsius. The climate scientist and emissions expert Kevin Anderson says that four degrees of warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.” That is why governments came together in Paris and drew up an agreement to make their best efforts to get off this dangerous course, and try to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees, pursuing efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees. The high end of that temperature target represents double the warming we have already experienced, so it’s by no means safe.
Which is why we have to try very hard to hit the lower end of that target. And that’s tough. According to a September 2016 study by the Washington-based think tank Oil Change International, if governments want a solid chance of keeping temperature increases below two degrees Celsius, then all new and undeveloped fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. The problem is, even before Trump, no major economy was doing what was required. They were all still trying to have it all ways—introducing some solid green policies but then approving expanded fossil fuel extraction and new pipelines. It’s like eating lots of salad and a whole lot of junk food at the same time, and expecting to lose weight.
In the United States, Obama introduced the Clean Power Plan, which was set to accelerate the retirement of the country’s aging coal plants and to require new ones to capture some of their carbon emissions, but he was simultaneously presiding over a boom in natural gas fracking and fracked oil in the Bakken. In Canada, the government has introduced national carbon pricing and a coal phaseout, but it is also allowing the tar sands to expand and approved a massive new liquid gas export terminal—pretty much guaranteeing that it won’t hit its Paris goals.
Even so, the fact that so many governments signed the Paris accord to great fanfare, and at least paid lip service to the need to achieve its ambitious temperature targets, gave the climate movement a lot of leverage to push for policies that were in step with the stated goal. We were trying to hold them to their word in Paris, and we were making some progress.
But now Trump is saying: Leave all that money in the ground? Are you nuts?!
On the campaign trail, Trump’s standard stump speech reliably hit all the crowd-pleasers: build the wall, bring back the jobs, law and order, Crooked Hillary. Climate change denial usually didn’t make the list (though Trump would spout off if asked). But if the issue seemed peripheral during the campaign, that changed as soon as Trump began making appointments. And since his inauguration, taking aim at any and all climate protections has been a defining feature of the Trump administration. As if in a race against time, he and his team have set out to systematically tick off every single item on the fossil fuel industry’s wish list. His top appointments, his plans to make severe budget cuts and gut environmental regulations, his conspiratorial denials of climate change, and even his entanglements with Russia—they all point in the same direction: a deep and abiding determination to kick off a no-holds-barred fossil fuel frenzy. There are many plots and intrigues swirling around Washington, most notoriously claims about the Trump team conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election outcome—and these are being investigated, as they should be. But make no mistake: Trump’s collusion with the fossil fuel sector is the conspiracy hiding in plain sight.
Within days of taking office, he pushed through the Dakota Access pipeline, cutting off an environmental review and against the powerful opposition of the Standing Rock Sioux. He’s cleared the way to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, which Obama rejected in part because of the climate impacts. He has issued an executive order to roll back Obama’s moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, and has already announced plans to expand oil and gas drilling on the Gulf Coast. He’s also killing Obama’s Clean Power Plan. And as the administration rubber-stamps new fossil fuel projects, they’re getting rid of all kinds of environmental regulations that made digging up and processing this carbon less profitable for companies like ExxonMobil. As a result, these projects, already disastrous from a climate perspective, are more likely to lead to industrial accidents like the Deepwater Horizon disaster—because that’s what happens when regulators are missing in action.
As I write, it’s not yet clear whether the US will officially withdraw from the Paris Accord; there is some disagreement about this within the administration. But whether the country stays or leaves it’s undeniable that the Trump administration is shredding the commitments made under the accord.
In addition to Rex Tillerson, Trump has stacked his administration with fossil fuel executives and political figures with extensive ties to the industry—several of whom are opposed, or at best indifferent, to the mandates of the agencies they’re now in charge of running. Scott Pruitt is Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency—but, as attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the EPA multiple times and, perhaps not coincidentally, has received tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies. Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Rick Perry, had myriad ties to the oil industry, including serving on the boards of two of the companies behind the Dakota Access pipeline. Back in 2011, while running for the GOP nomination, Perry campaigned on eliminating the energy department entirely.
Together, this group of men is doing favors for oil, gas, and coal companies on multiple fronts. For instance, Trump has killed a new program that required oil and gas companies to report how much methane—a very powerful greenhouse gas—their operations were releasing, including from leaks. Industry hated the program, which was only finalized in the last weeks of Obama’s administration, in part because it was poised to blow the lid off the claim that natural gas is in any way a climate change solution. Trump is handing the industry a big gift by effectively saying: don’t tell us, we don’t want to know. From here on in, the rest of the world will have to guess the extent to which the US is a climate renegade, because a key piece of the data won’t exist.
By far the biggest threat this industry faces is the demand for real action on climate change being voiced by people around the world, and the mounting consensus that taking the crisis seriously means a halt on new fossil fuel projects. That prospect strikes terror in the hearts of fossil fuel executives and in the governments of petro-states (like Russia), because it means that trillions of dollars’ worth of proven reserves—currently propping up share prices—could become worthless overnight. This is sometimes referred to as “the carbon bubble,” and by 2016 it was already beginning to deflate. Think of Trump as the guy running to the rescue with a bicycle pump, signaling to the industry that he’s going to fill their bubble with a few more years’ worth of toxic air. How? Easy. By making climate change disappear.
We can see it all playing out with a kind of absurd clarity. On day one, the White House website was cleansed of many of the references to climate change. There are plans to cut the NASA program that uses satellites to accumulate basic data on how the earth is changing—including disappearing glaciers and rising seas. The White House’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was pretty blunt about all this: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward—we’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
They are so determined to erase the reality of climate change that they are even aiming to wipe out programs that help communities cope with its impacts. Trump proposed cutting a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association program that helps communities protect their coasts. He also wanted to slash the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency charged with responding to large-scale natural disasters, and cut entirely its key program designed to help communities prepare for future crises. His plan to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget by over 30 percent would lay off thousands of people and eliminate the entire environmental justice program. The latter helps low-income communities—overwhelmingly African-American, Latino, and Indigenous—deal with some of the impacts of having the most toxic industries in their backyards. And it’s worth noting that many of the measures—including cuts to programs dealing with lead poisoning from pipes—would disproportionately hurt children in marginalized communities. A Congressional budget deal has delayed the worst of the EPA cuts until 2018.
So Trump’s rescue plan for the fossil fuel sector is multipronged: bury the evidence that climate change is happening by stopping research and gagging agencies; cut the programs that are tasked with coping with the real-world impacts of climate disruption; and remove all barriers to an acceleration of the very activities that are fueling the crisis—drilling for more oil and gas, mining and burning more coal.
Some of this backsliding can be balanced out by bold action in large states such as California and New York, which are pledging to rapidly roll out renewables regardless of Trump’s pro—fossil fuel policies. But there is one other crucial factor that may determine whether the ExxonMobil subsidiary known as the Trump administration is able to unleash an irreversible catastrophe.
There is one thing above all that is currently restraining fossil fuel companies from launching large new extraction projects, and it’s not a piece of legislation that Obama introduced and Trump can reverse. What’s holding them back is the price of oil and gas. As I write this in 2017, the price is much lower than when Obama took office, because there’s an oversupply—more oil and gas is available than consumers want.
The reason price is such an issue for new projects is that the cheap and easy-to-access fossil fuels have been steadily running out, particularly in the US. So what’s left? Stuff that’s hard and expensive to get to. It costs a lot of money to drill in the Arctic, or in very deep water, or to dig up and refine the semisolid oil found in Canada’s Alberta tar sands. When the price of oil was soaring, as it was as recently as 2014, fossil fuel companies were making multi-billion dollar investments in order to go after those expensive fuel sources. With oil at $100 a barrel, they could still turn a hefty profit even with the high costs for extraction. And the development in this sector did spur economic growth, and it did create a lot of jobs. But the environmental costs were enormous: the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was intimately connected to the fact that these companies are drilling deeper than they ever have before. The reason the tar sands in Alberta are so controversial is that Indigenous lands and waterways have been badly contaminated by the invasive and carbon-intensive process of mining for that heavy crude.
Rex Tillerson’s ExxonMobil went wild buying up high-cost heavy-oil reserves; it reached the point where fully one-third of the company’s reserves were located in the Alberta tar sands. When the price of oil collapsed, it came as a major shock. Oil prices began to crash in 2014, with Brent crude—the global benchmark for oil—plummeting from $100 a barrel to $50 in just six months, and the price has hovered at around $55 a barrel ever since. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of companies pulling back from extreme energy projects. Fracking for oil and gas in the United States has cooled off, with devastating human costs: an estimated 170,000 oil and gas workers have lost their jobs after the 2014 price collapse. Investment in the Alberta tar sands dropped by an estimated 37 percent in the year following, and continues to fall. Shell pulled back from the Arctic and has sold most of its tar sands reserves. The French oil company Total has retreated from the tar sands as well. Even ExxonMobil has been forced to write off nearly 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil because the market considered these reserves to be no longer worth extracting at current oil prices. Deepwater drilling is also in a lull.
For the big oil companies—particularly those that gambled on the price of oil staying high—all of this has been a disaster. And no oil major has suffered more than ExxonMobil. When prices were high, with Tillerson at the helm, the company broke the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States, earning $45 billion in 2012. Compare that to 2016, when Exxon’s profits fell well shy of $8 billion. That’s a more than 80 percent drop in profits in a span of just four years.
What does all this mean? It means that oil majors like ExxonMobil, and the banks that underwrote their bad bets, desperately want the price of oil to go back up—to get their super-profits back and to get the fossil fuel frenzy back on. So a very big question that needs answering is this: what is the Trump administration—aka Team ExxonMobil—going to do to achieve that?
We are already seeing some policies that appear designed to drive up oil prices. For instance, Trump moved to eliminate the Obama-era requirement that vehicles become more fuel-efficient—which means more trips to the gas station for consumers. Trump’s budget plan, meanwhile, aimed to completely eliminate funding for new public transit projects, and kill funding for long-distance train services.
So far, though, the market isn’t responding, at least not by much. The price of oil got a little bump after Trump was elected but has held pretty steady since. From a climate perspective, this is good news: cheap gas may encourage short-term consumption, but it discourages a lot of the long-term investments that lock us into a disastrous future. The concern—and it is a real one—is that Trump and Co. may well have more tricks up their sleeves to try to push up oil prices and realize their goal of setting off a fossil fuel frenzy.
The reason we need to have our eyes firmly fixed on this dynamic is that nothing drives up the price of oil quite like war and other major shocks to the world market—a scenario we’ll dig into in Chapter 9.
For many years, I wondered why some people were so determined to deny global warming. It’s strange at first glance. Why would you work so hard to deny the scientific facts that have been affirmed by 97 percent of climate scientists—facts whose effects we see all around us, with more confirmation in the news we consume every day? That question led me on a journey that informed my book This Changes Everything—and I think some of what I discovered when writing that book can help us make sense of the centrality of climate vandalism to the Trump administration.
What I found is that when hard-core conservatives deny climate change, they are not just protecting the trillions in wealth that are threatened by climate action. They are also defending something even more precious to them: an entire ideological project—neoliberalism—which holds that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.
There is a lot of confusion around the word neoliberalism, and about who is a neoliberal. And understandably so. So let’s break it down. Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world’s elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US Right.
Neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the market or the decisions of individual consumers. It is probably best summarized by another of Reagan’s famous phrases, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top—eventually. If it doesn’t work, and stubborn inequalities remain or worsen (as they invariably do), then according to this worldview, that must be the personal failing of the individuals and communities that are suffering. They must have “a culture of crime,” say, or lack a “work ethic,” or perhaps it’s absentee fathers, or some other racially tinged excuse for why government policy and public funds should never be used to reduce inequalities, improve lives, or address structural crises.
The primary tools of this project are all too familiar: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sphere, and low taxes paid for by cuts to public services, and all of this locked in under corporate-friendly trade deals. It’s the same recipe everywhere, regardless of context, history, or the hopes and dreams of the people who live there. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist of the World Bank in 1991, summed up the ethos: “Spread the truth—the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” (Which is why I sometimes call neoliberalism “McGovernment.”)
The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall was interpreted as the signal to take the campaign global. With socialism in decline, there was seemingly no longer any need to soften capitalism’s edges anywhere. As Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative.” (Another way of thinking about this is that neoliberalism is simply capitalism without competition, or capitalism lying on the couch in its undershirt saying, “What are you going to do, leave me?”)
Neoliberalism is a very profitable set of ideas, which is why I am always a little hesitant to describe it as an ideology. What it really is, at its core, is a rationale for greed. That’s what the American billionaire Warren Buffett meant when he made headlines a few years ago by telling CNN that “there’s been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won…the rich class.” He was referring to the tremendous tax cuts the wealthy have enjoyed in this period, but you could extend that to the whole neoliberal policy package.
So what does this have to do with the widespread refusal by the Right to believe that climate change is happening, a refusal deeply embedded in the Trump administration? A lot. Because climate change, especially at this late date, can only be dealt with through collective action that sharply curtails the behavior of corporations such as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. It demands investments in the public sphere—in new energy grids, public transit and light rail, and energy efficiency—on a scale not seen since the Second World War. And that can only happen by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, the very people Trump is determined to shower with the most generous tax cuts, loopholes and regulatory breaks. Responding to climate change also means giving communities the freedom to prioritize local green industries—a process that often clashes directly with the corporate free trade deals that have been such an integral part of neoliberalism, and which bar “buy local” rules as protectionist. (Trump campaigned against those parts of free trade deals, but, as we will see in Chapter 6, he has no intention of rescinding those rules.)
In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project. That’s why the Right is in a rebellion against the physical world, against science (which is what prompted hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world to participate in the March for Science in April 2017, collectively defending a principle that really shouldn’t need defending: that knowing as much as possible about our world is a good thing). But there is a reason why science has become such a battle zone—because it is revealing again and again that neoliberal business as usual leads to a species-threatening catastrophe.
What mainstream liberals have been saying for decades, by contrast, is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But the challenge is much more fundamental than that. It requires throwing out the neoliberal rulebook, and confronting the centrality of ever-expanding consumption in how we measure economic progress. In one sense, then, the members of Trump’s cabinet—with their desperate need to deny the reality of global warming, or belittle its implications—understand something that is fundamentally true: to avert climate chaos, we need to challenge the capitalist ideologies that have conquered the world since the 1980s. If you are the beneficiary of those ideologies, you are obviously going to be very unhappy about that. That’s understandable. Global warming really does have radical progressive implications. If it’s real—and it manifestly is—then the oligarch class cannot continue to run riot without rules. Stopping them is now a matter of humanity’s collective survival.
If we fail, the death I saw at the Great Barrier Reef will spread to all corners of our collective home in ways we can scarcely imagine.