In contrast to Trump’s wanton and open plunder of the environment, the Democrats under Obama and Biden-Harris took some steps that they claimed addressed climate change. These steps included Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations based on the endangerment finding¹ to put some limits on greenhouse gas emissions, which are now being overturned by Trump. But even these actions came nowhere near what is needed to start addressing the global warming crisis for real: most importantly, quick and massive reductions in the extraction and burning of oil and other fossil fuels. In fact, Biden and Harris boasted during their time in office that the U.S. became the world’s number one producer of oil and gas.²

Raymond Lotta points to how the crisis of climate change is rooted in the nature and workings of the capitalist-imperialist system:

What is it about this capitalist-imperialist system that puts it at war with the environment? Well, it is a system that has an inner nature and logic. It is driven by the pursuit of profit and more profit by privately owned blocs of capital. They compete and must compete with each other for greater market share—based on the more efficient exploitation of human labor worldwide. And if they don't expand and invest to beat out rivals, then they risk losing out and going under. This is a system that treats nature as a “cost-free” input to be poured into production for profit... a system that also turns nature into a waste fill for the consequences of reckless production for profit—from oil spills, to atmospheric pollution, to degradation of soil. 

And competitive geopolitics are built into this system. The production of and burning of fossil fuels has been and remains foundational to the profitable functioning of the world-imperialist system. Control over oil and fossil-fuel markets, finance, and shipping is a means by which the major powers dominate economies and the world economy. Think about this: the U.S. military machine of death and destruction that enforces America's global empire is the single largest institutional consumer of oil, and the single largest institutional emitter of carbon in the world. 

Now, the Trump regime has a “maniacal three-prong program to take this in exactly the opposite direction” of what is urgently needed, as the Revcom Environmental Writing Group pointed out on this year’s Earth Day:

Trump/MAGA fascism aims to smash through all barriers—all restrictions and limitations—to fossil fuel extraction and plundering of the environment. They are hell-bent on pushing aside any obstacles standing in the way of further bolstering U.S. global energy and overall dominance. To make that happen, they are working overtime to attack and cripple climate science and discredit climate scientists… and to enact draconian (vicious) repression against all who stand up to this assault on the climate. 

One Link in a Disastrous Chain

Revoking the endangerment finding comes on top of other moves by the Trump regime to gut the EPA and get rid of rules related to climate change and environmental pollution. To name just a few:

• Eliminating the Office of Research and Development. According to the New York Times, this scientific office provided “the independent research that underpins nearly all of the agency’s policies and regulations.”
• Dismantling the Office of Environmental Justice, which dealt with how communities of Black and other oppressed people, poor rural communities, and others are disproportionately harmed by environmental pollution.
• Repealing or weakening regulations on power plants that put caps on their emission of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants such as mercury. 

All this points to the need, in the words of Bob Avakian’s social media message REVOLUTION #125, to bring forward “a massive popular uprising, determined to actually defeat this fascist regime, uniting around the urgent demand: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!” Reaching out to scientists and reaching into the movement to defend the environment, uniting in struggle while pointing to the larger source of this, should be one critical part of that.

At the same time, there IS a way out of the developing catastrophe through the kind of revolution envisioned in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian. That Constitution explains that a real revolution in the U.S. would represent 

a truly gigantic stride toward the emancipation of humanity and with regard to the ability to more frontally and comprehensively confront and address the critical environmental emergency threatening humanity and the other species and ecosystems (the complex webs of interacting and interrelating life) on this earth. In full recognition of this, the New Socialist Republic in North America, in its development of a socialist economy, in all spheres of government and social activity, and in its international relations, will apply itself–and the initiative, knowledge, energy and creativity of the masses of people who make up and are the backbone of this Republic–to addressing this environmental emergency, in its various dimensions, and will seek out the ways to do so through increasing cooperation and common endeavor with scientists, and people from all walks of life, in every part of the world, struggling and joining with others in struggle to overcome barriers that are placed in the way of such efforts by the operation of the capitalist-imperialist system and the functioning of imperialist and other reactionary states.