As climate change worsens and environmental disasters ensue, denier Trump takes office

The most pressing issue that the incoming Trump administration will impact is undoubtedly climate change, and efforts to keep our planet, and our nation, livable.

Like many recent years, 2024 was the hottest year on record worldwide. We are surrounded by evidence of climate disasters. After months of unprecedented drought, wildfires are burning out of control in Los Angeles, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless and costing many billions of dollars.

In recent years, derechos (a term most of us had never heard, until recently) have devastated wide swaths of Iowa and eastern South Dakota. A recent hurricane devastated Asheville, and other communities in western North Carolina, hundreds of miles away from the Atlantic Ocean. They had never experienced major hurricane damage before.

Smoke from massive, and unprecedented, forest fires in extreme northern Canada now routinely fouls our air quality in South Dakota, and has actually spread as far east as New York City. 

There are economic and social consequences to this dramatic increase in annual climate disasters. Increasing numbers of residential properties — indeed, entire communities and regions — are becoming uninsurable, as companies cannot accurately measure the increased risks of disastrous floods and fires. Donald Trump and his acolytes bemoan the increased migration of refugees who show up at our southern border, but a portion of that migration is attributable to climate disasters in their home countries. 

We know from past experience that the Trump administration will be deeply hostile to any effort to protect the environment. In his previous administration, Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords, transforming America from a role model to an outlier nation, sometimes denying that climate change was even a problem.

There will be a renewed push, challenged in the federal courts, to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is America's largest and most pristine wilderness area. Trump will doubtless renew his previous efforts to eviscerate Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, created by President Barack Obama and re-created by President Joe Biden and vulnerable to energy development.

Many Utah politicians were supportive of rescinding these monuments, but Trump’s previous effort was tied up in federal court when Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election. Trump has a very limited respect for our public lands; indeed, he famously botched the pronunciation of Yosemite, one of our most famous and iconic national parks.

We can also expect efforts to eliminate federal subsidies for green energy like wind and solar. Federal employees who work on the science of climate research may learn that their positions have been eliminated in the effort for more government efficiency. Universities may face consequences — in particular, the loss of federal funds — if they continue to sponsor research into the effects of climate change. 

The Trump mantra of “drill, baby, drill” means massive profits for the oil industry, which is certainly salivating. There will be an effort to massively increase oil, natural gas and coal extraction on public lands.

It is not irrelevant that titans in the oil industry helped fund Trump’s winning campaign. As Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times points out, Charles Koch and other Republican mega-donors have “learned to treat the Trump presidency like a natural disaster: an eruption of volatility to prepare for and exploit.”

While American energy czars may view the new Trump presidency as a bonanza, the rest of us are likely to experience the wanton destruction of our special places and an increase in catastrophic floods, wildfires and other environmental disasters across the nation.

Author’s note: Some of the information in this piece was gleaned from an article by Alex Steffen in the January/February 2025 issue of Mother Jones.

Jay Davis is a retired Rapid City attorney and a regular contributor to The South Dakota Standard.

Photo: recent Los Angeles fire, public domain, wikimedia commons