Within hours of his inauguration on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, a 2015 international treaty on climate change mitigation, mirroring a similar executive order issued during his first term in 2017.
Trump said the move was in the interest of keeping taxpayer dollars away from countries who don’t deserve American assistance.
Young people say otherwise.
Younger generations have consistently shown they are not only more proactive in addressing climate change, but also more willing to take the necessary steps to prevent it. We’ve inherited a dying planet, and now we have to foot the bill for those who can turn a blind eye to its demise.
For those concerned with the climate crisis, Trump’s immediate withdrawal from the agreement represents an increasingly dangerous partisanship in climate initiatives that fuels further environmental indifference.
In his efforts to eliminate DEI and slash federal funding, Trump has, in turn, scrapped environmental justice initiatives.
Because the effects of environmental degradation are not indiscriminate — the brunt of these disasters often fall on low-income communities of color — Trump has successfully folded his withdrawal from climate initiatives into a broader anti-DEI framework, wiping climate justice references from government websites.
These executive orders echo an ethos all too familiar to those concerned with the climate crisis — when leaders can’t see the disaster in front of their faces, they might as well pretend it isn’t there.
But while climate change might not be an equalizer now, the scale of impending disaster is global. The climate is intertwined with every other sociopolitical issue on earth — labor, racial justice, prison policy, education, housing justice — and the longer we wait to address it, the more apparent the crisis will become.
By rolling back regulations and politicizing climate action, Trump’s executive orders shave more time off of the planet’s health and delay intervention in this acceleration towards catastrophe.
The alarming pace of deregulation leaves a sliver of hope.
Widespread climate activism experienced a schism under President Joe Biden — with some groups, like policy advocates Evergreen Action, pressing him for harsher regulation and others worried a strong stance might fracture his constituency — and the movement lost the momentum it had gained during Trump’s first presidency.
While Biden’s climate action, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, spurred hope among some young activists, disincentivizing a need to march in the streets, the same cannot be said for our new administration’s policies. There’s no ambiguity in the environmental policy of a man who promised to massively expand fossil fuel production and “drill, baby, drill” in his inauguration speech.
Maybe Trump’s uncompromising apathy to poisoning the planet will be the driving force to a revival of the climate activism we saw during his first term.
But there’s a chance that Trump’s environmental deregulation won’t spur action — it might also further indifference amongst younger generations.
In a year already marked by one of the largest wildfires in American history — which California Governor Gavin Newsom met with cutting regulatory corners to rebuild and generate profit as fast as possible — it is increasingly challenging to be motivated to take individual actions to curb your environmental footprint when executive and corporate bodies act with an opposite interest.
With massive climate initiatives being overruled every day, small personal changes like saving water or reusable straws feel futile. Some might start to abandon them entirely, feeding a vicious cycle — massive policy rollback prompts disillusionment and divestment from communal actions, further contributing to the degradation already kickstarted by environmental deregulation.
Then it really starts to feel like there’s no way out.
In a media climate that focuses on the extremes of climate disaster, it’s even easier to feel helpless, to get caught up in anxiety when looking at daunting statistics. There’s a delicate line between creating a sense of urgency and overwhelming us to the point of inaction, and the scale of climate change has forced many of us into the latter position.
But while many young people have started to give in to the fears that the planet’s remaining lifespan might be shorter than their own, our Earth still turns. This reality may be debilitating, but the fact of the matter is that our planet is far from gone.
We deserve a future that isn’t prevented by our own indifference. Our planet is still living, and if we don’t take action to mobilize on large and small scales, we’re resigning ourselves to a doomed future that isn’t guaranteed.
We can either turn a blind eye and plan for a future that won’t exist —or we can ensure that we won’t pay the price of inaction with our livelihood.
This Editorial was written by Opinion Co-Editor Ada Sussman.
