Stopping Trump is the Most Important Fight Against Far-Right Authoritarianism in Human History
If the Trump administration’s fascist take over is not swiftly stopped there will be no chance of preventing civilization-altering climate catastrophe
Far-right authoritarianism is not new. Typically led by psychopathic men who need to dominate others to feel good about themselves, authoritarians always significantly harm regular people and the natural environment. Unless the Trump administration’s far-right coup is swiftly impeded, however, it will have far-greater consequences than any previous authoritarian takeover. That’s because humanity will lose its last chance to prevent civilization-altering climate catastrophe. This is the most important fight against far-right extremism in history, and we must win.
My family history has been influenced by authoritarianism. As teenagers in the early 1920’s my maternal grandparents were put on a boat by their parents and sent to the U.S. from eastern Europe. They never saw their parents again. Their parents took this heartbreaking action to protect their kids from the threats posed by fascist discriminatory and persecutory policies, economic hardship, and violence.
My grandmother was not even 5 ft. tall and spoke with a heavy eastern European accent. But I remember her talking about the anguish authoritarians caused her and her family. Even back in the 1960s she saw similar traits in the U.S. Republican party and would continually say the “Republicans always caused problems that the Democrats have to fix.” She was not a political person. Her comments were related to the harm she experienced from authoritarians during her life, not U.S. party politics.
Twenty plus years after my grandparents arrived in the U.S., my father-to-be fought against the Nazi’s and other “Axis” nations during WWII. As so many others American’s did, he put his life on-the-line to stop the fascists. What he saw and did in the war affected how he viewed people and acted in the world for the rest of his life.
Today, once again, we need to stop far-right authoritarians from taking control and fix the problems they created. This time the outcome will determine the fate of humanity.
Trump’s Actions Are Undermining the Future of Human Civilization
Donald Trump has continually claimed the climate crisis is a hoax. Following the far-right Heritage Institute’s Project 2025 talking points, people in his administration have termed it the Green New Scam promoted by liberals, scientists, communists, radical environmentalists, and other “woke” groups.
Oil, gas, and coal corporative executives, bankers, and hedge fund managers financially invested in these industries support him because he said he would ignore both climate science and the on-the-ground impacts of the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis seen daily to protect their economic interests.
Trump has certainly made good on his promise by ransacking every mechanism he can find that helps reduce the C-E-B crisis to manageable levels.
Right after taking office, for example, Trump began rolling back regulations aimed at limiting pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes and abandoning the federal government’s legal basis to regulate climate-damaging carbon emissions.
Trump also immediately declared an “energy emergency,” which gave him the ability to fast-track approvals for coal and other mining projects and natural gas pipelines. In addition, Trump has lifted the pause on the construction of new natural gas export terminals and is using the threat of tariffs to pressure numerous countries to buy more American gas.
Then in April he expanded beyond federal policy by signing an executive order that seeks to stop the enforcement of state climate laws. California, New York, and Vermont were named as specific targets. The EO also listed a range of state policies that the administration would seek to invalidate, including cap-and-trade systems and emission permitting rules.
In addition, Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, dismantled federal climate science assessments, disbanded most federal environmental programs, eliminated websites with historical and current climate and environmental data, and terminated federal employees working on these issues.
Further, the Trump administration recently tried to block litigation by Hawaii and ten other states as well as numerous cities and counties aimed at holding large fossil fuel corporations accountable for the massive damage their products have created.
On top of this Trump has moved to gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and withhold disaster aid to numerous states.
As Trump has pursued these actions, his administration has also taken numerous steps to undermine the growth of clean renewable energy, which is essential to control the C-E-B crisis and is also one of the country’s fastest growing business and job creators.
Many of Trump’s actions lack a sound legal basis to succeed. But he continues to pursue them to create chaos, intimidate people, and obliterate every mechanism he can that will help reduce carbon emissions, regenerate ecological systems and species, and allow communities build resilience for and survive the impacts of the C-E-B crisis.
Even as Trump Ignores Reality and Shreds Vital Safeguards, the Climate-Ecosystem-Biodiversity Crisis Accelerates
All of this is occurring even as last year was the hottest in recorded history. Global temperatures have now risen by 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 F) above pre-industrial levels for an entire year. For decades warming increased in a mostly linear fashion matching the rise in carbon emissions. But it is now happening much faster, potentially at double the previous rate.
As a result, in 2024 new national heat records were set in 104 countries including the U.S., Brazil, Canada, China, Greece, and others. Record warmth occurred on land and in most ocean basins worldwide as well.
With last year’s 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise, there were 108 major disaster and emergency declarations in the U.S. affecting 137 million people, or over 40 percent of the population. Every small increase in temperatures will activate even more destructive wind, rain, or snowstorms, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other disasters and emergencies that harm more and more people and communities.
Further, due to emissions already concentrated in the atmosphere, increasing climate feedbacks, and other factors a research team led by renown climate scientist Dr. James Hansen recently used extensive data to determine that it is no longer possible to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). They said temperatures will likely be that hot within just twenty years—by 2045.
The implications of a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures are profoundly disturbing.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a CarbonBrief report, and other assessments, one of the most noticeable impacts of a 2 degree Celsius increase will be even more frequent, extreme, and prolonged disasters and emergencies. These events will have devastating effects on communities, physical infrastructure, businesses and jobs, ecological systems, and much more.
For example, the probability of destructive heatwaves like the one that affected Europe in 2003, causing over 30,000 deaths, is projected to increase from once every 100 years to once every 4 years when temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius.
The Middle East, North Africa, and other regions already prone to high temperatures will likely experience “super heatwaves” with temperatures sometimes exceeding 50 degrees Celsius (122 F). This will make some areas uninhabitable, and without significant and likely very costly adaptation measures will activate mass human migration that affects the lives of those able to move, as well as harsh political pushback in the cooler areas they locate to.
Droughts will become more frequent and more severe in many parts of the world. Global land affected by drought disasters are projected to increase by 50% compared to today’s 1.5 Celsius increase.
While some areas will get drier, others will experience more floods. With 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the global population exposed to river flooding is projected to be 170% higher compared to today’s 1.5 Celsius increase.
Heavy precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions, particularly at high latitudes and in the tropics. The increase in extreme rainfall events will mean more flooding of urban areas and agricultural lands.
Rising sea levels will be another major impact of 2 degree Celsius of warming. More coastal flooding and erosion will occur affecting low-lying coastal cities and small island nations. Saltwater will increasingly intrude into coastal aquifers and affect freshwater resources.
These and many other changes will put thousands of terrestrial and marine species at risk of extinction as they struggle to move north, south, or uphill to cooler places to survive.
In addition to increasingly harmful disasters, these impacts will activate cascading disruptions to the ecological, social, economic, and political systems humans rely on for food, water, shelter, jobs, incomes, health, safety, and other basic needs.
Food productivity, for instance, will decrease due to heat stress, droughts, changing precipitation patterns, and increased outbreaks of pests and diseases. These changes will lead to malnutrition in some regions and starvation in others, and heighten food insecurity and increase food prices in still other locations.
Human health will also be greatly affected. Repeated and intense disasters will physically injury or kill millions of people, as well as first responders. Increase heat-related deaths and co-morbidity will occur among populations that lack resources to stay cool and obtain adequate food and water during extensive heat events. Increased respiratory illnesses will also occur because of higher levels of ground-level ozone and longer pollen seasons (a problem that affected my wife and I this spring). And vector-borne diseases will expand.
The combination of these traumatic stressors will accelerate psychological, emotional, and behavioral health problems for millions of people in the U.S., and billions worldwide. Psychosocial problems are also certain to skyrocket including many forms of substance abuse, as well as family and interpersonal aggression and societal violence, causing entire populations to feel threatened, insecure, and unsafe.
In sum, a 2-degree Celsius rise will undermine much of human civilization as we know it.
With temperatures on a path to rise by 2 degrees Celsius within just 20 years, historic actions to limit warming to that level, and then bring them back down to manageable levels, must begin immediately. Yet Trump and his far-right authoritarian cohorts are doing everything they can to prevent this from happening. There is no other way to say this: they are committing genocide because their actions will activate mass atrocities worldwide.
The U.S. is the Largest Contributor to the C-E-B Crisis and Must Lead Efforts to Prevent Global Catastrophe
The U.S has, by far, contributed the most to the C-E-B crisis of any nation on earth by generating the most emissions historically, and we remain one of the top contributors today. Our nation has a moral, ethical, and legal responsibility to people today and all future generations to lead the way in addressing the crisis.
This will require an unprecedented large-scale two-part campaign: First, we must stop the Trump administration’s genocidal effort to dismantle climate and environmental policies and programs and promote more fossil fuel use. The defensive strategy must be coupled with a major proactive movement to implement policies, programs, and practices that immediately slash emissions, regenerate ecological systems and species, and build external physical resilience as well as human psychological and emotional resilience for the C-E-B crisis.
Here are a few of the minimum actions needed to achieve these goals:
Everyone should vocally demand action: Every U.S. resident should, on a weekly basis, contact the White House, as well as their Congressional House and Senator members, to demand that Trump immediately restores federal climate and environmental policies and programs, and stops trying to gut state and local climate policies. This should be coupled with the demand that the Trump administration and Congress immediately enact policies that dramatically slash emissions and build community resilience for the now inevitable impacts.
In addition, each resident should continually contact their state, county, and local officials to demand that they take immediate action to aggressively oppose the Trump authoritarian takeover as they also slash local emissions, regenerate local ecological systems, and build community resilience.
When contacting officials, make it clear that there is now nothing more important to human society than keeping temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius.
Join with others to protest, resist, and disrupt: All residents need to continually join others to protest the Trump authoritarian coup, resist their efforts in every way possible, and disrupt activities that clearly harm other people, the climate, and ecological systems and biodiversity.
Slash your community’s ecological footprint: Every household, civic, non-profit, private, and public organization should join forces to dramatically cut their emissions and regenerate local ecological systems. Making this the top priority in your community is certain to generate many new family-wage jobs and give residents a much-needed sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.
Form community resilience and mutual aid networks everywhere: As seen in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, in Los Angeles after the recent wildfire, and elsewhere, strangers almost always come together during and after disasters to physically assist each other and provide food, water, shelter, and emotional support. The accelerating adversities that will occur as temperatures climb toward 2 degrees Celsius require that every neighborhood and community form permanent transformational resilience and mutual aid networks, so residents learn how to assist each other when the next disaster occurs, and how to build individual and collective wellness and resilience afterwards.
The next few years are the last chance we have to implement actions that can prevent temperatures from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. The Trump authoritarian takeover must be stopped to have any chance of achieving this. We are in a fight for our lives—and the outcome will determine the fate of all human civilization.