Trump and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for its war on the environment
The ecological disasters of the US-Israel war with Iran are already bad enough. The noxious smoke from bombed oil facilities, spills in the Gulf’s waters, the contamination of farmland and groundwater with toxic chemicals unleashed by explosions and their debris, the millions of additional tons of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. But as bad as it is, the Iran war hides another conflict: the ecological war that Donald Trump’s US is waging against the rest of the world.
When the EU and UK imposed individual sanctions, travel bans and asset seizures on Russian oligarchs, it wasn’t because most of them were individually responsible for Vladimir Putin’s colonial war of aggression against Ukraine. They were targeted because, as a class, they were viewed by many as inextricable from the apparatus of corruption and levers of power of the Russian state threatening global stability.
Climate breakdown and its cascade of still-avoidable ecological consequences threatens our world in the same way. It’s time to apply the same logic to a different caste of oligarchs, American this time, who seem inextricable from the apparatus of the Trump administration. They include Silicon Valley tech barons and fossil fuel industry executives whose names lurk deeper in Trump’s shadow, along with the apparatchiks who carry out an overall anti-environmental policy that should be rightly viewed as ecocide.
The foul men – they are mainly men – burning the planet should have access to as little of it as possible. Trump’s own name should not adorn the gates of his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his minion Lee Zeldin, who leads the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should........
