Donald Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” Actually Kills Baby Kills

While most political commentators and pundits are focusing on Trump’s proposals during his Mar-a-Laga press conference, Tuesday, January 6, 2025, where he expressed his intentions of vastly expanding the territory of the United States by annexing Canada as the 51^st state, buying or taking Greenland from Denmark, and retaking the Panama Canal, the reality is that this is more bluster and another sign of Trump being unhinged than it is fact.

The likelihood of any of this happening during his upcoming second term in the Oval Office is about as real or grounded on Earth One as was his proposals for people with Covid-19 to take Ivermectin — a potent anthelmintic drug commonly used in horses to control internal and external parasites – to irradiate people with UV light, and to inject the body with disinfectants like bleach.

Of more pressing concerns were his brutal criticisms of environmental and energy efficiency. Throughout the recent presidential campaign season, in addition to his attacks on black and brown immigrants and on the civil and human rights of transgender people, his continual calls to “drill baby drill” fossil fuels were central to his right-wing populist message of eliminating regulations and, he claims, bring down energy costs.

The United States is currently the world’s leading producer of oil, natural gas, and coal, and the leading domestic environmental polluters are power plants run on these fossil fuels. The U.S. is ranked as the second-largest polluter of carbon in the world following China.

As Southern California experienced the highest wind velocity on record, which has whipped up the rapid spread of wildfires causing extreme damage to land and structures and has resulted in dangerous air pollution throughout Los Angeles and other counties, Donald Trump blasted current technologies to lower wasted resources, such as low-flow showers and low-water dishwashers, and cleaner energy sources.

This has been a common theme since his first term. He denounced water in toilets, for example, in 2019 complaining, “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”

Without any evidence, he blamed windmills for an increase in the fatalities of whales across the New England coastline: “The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” Trump said.

He claimed that windmills “litter our country” and compared them to “dropping garbage in a field.” Devoid of proof, he declared that they are “the most expensive energy ever,” and that only those who build them with subsidies want them. “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said.

During the campaign, Trump threatened to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, among other governmental offices.

Trump’s First Term Was Disastrous on the Environment

 What we are experiencing with increasing frequency is the unprecedented intensity and duration of our planet’s climatic conditions. For example, Hurricane Harvey dumped more rain on Texas alone than any past storm in the history of meteorological record keeping, and Irma remained a category 5 hurricane longer and, also, clocked the highest sustained winds of any Atlantic hurricane ever, caused, in large part, by extraordinarily high Atlantic water temperatures.

By examining Harvey and Irma, we are witnessing our future. Today, meteorologists use terms like “unprecedented” and “historic” in describing the component conditions of these two climatic events. Tomorrow, we will hear them defining similar storms as “normal.”

How many years into the future will it take for climate scientists to increase the ratings of hurricanes to “category 6” or “category 7,” which would indicate that these storms are 6 or 7 times as intense as those of category 1?

The Obama administration conducted an extensive study, its National Climate Assessment, which found conclusively that our global climate is, in fact, changing, and this is due primarily to human activity, in particular, to the burning of fossil fuels.

The Assessment investigated approximately 12,000 professional scientific journal papers on the topic of global climate change, and it discovered that in the articles expressing a position on global warming, fully 97% authenticated both the reality of global warming and the certainty that humans are the cause.

Additional studies report that we will be experiencing more category 4 and 5 hurricanes, and the beginning of the depletion and ultimate total collapse of glaciers in Antarctica, which can continue to raise worldwide sea levels an additional 4 feet. This depletion is now irreversible.

What seems obvious to the scientific community seems like science fiction to many key politicians, including Donald Trump and members of past and future administration.

Trump pulled the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, severely gutted regulations on corporations and industries that seriously pollute our water, air, and ground, while reemphasizing fossil fuels and deemphasizing clean energy sources as he did recently during his press conference.

He chose during his first administration to head the Department of Energy former Texas Governor, Rick Perry, who admitted he was unaware of the function of the department he was to administer, and who, in his infamous “oops” moment during his run for the presidency in 2012, actually forgot that this was one of the three federal agencies he intended to eliminate.

To “lead” the Environmental Protection Agency first time around, Trump picked Scott Pruitt who contradicted reliable scientific evidence when he stated he doubts that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor of climate change:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s [CO2] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

This aligns with Trump’s statement on the campaign trail calling climate change “a hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, even though the EPA’s conclusion on its website states (before Trump had the agency delete it) that, “Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change.”

In his first time in office, Trump declared war on the environment by proposing a substantial budgetary reduction of an estimated 24% and a staff cut of 20% to the EPA, consideration of lower automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards, relaxation of prohibitions against dumping toxins like coal ash into streams and rivers, reinstatement of the potentially environmentally damaging Dakota Access and Keystone oil pipelines, and increased coal mining, natural gas, crude and scale oil drilling.

Trump chose William Happer, a National Security Council official, to head a proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security.

In 2014, Happer, who co-founded the CO2 Coalition, an advocacy group that focuses on “the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions,” compared criticism of carbon dioxide, the increase which most scientists declare has raised global temperatures, to the Nazi treatment of Jews.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” Happer said on CNBC in 2014. “Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”

Two years later, he again justified his CO2 Coalition group by likening it to Jews and the Anti-Defamation League as “the CO2 anti-defamation league…because there is the CO2 molecule, and it has undergone decade after decade of abuse, for no reason.”

We all must distinguish the difference between “intent” and “impact.” Giving Happer the benefit of the doubt, which I find difficult, that his “intent” was to highlight the suffering of Jews and the benefits they bring to society, the “impact” of his words is highly offensive and antisemitic.

While Happer may believe he honors Jews by invoking their (our) tragic past, he does us a great disservice by misappropriating our history to serve his interests.

In a wide-ranging executive order, Trump further reversed Obama-era environmental protections by reducing governmental regulations on the coal and oil industries that were intended to curb greenhouse gases. Specifically, Trump repealed Obama’s moratorium on coal mining on federal lands and on coal-fueled power plants, and advised federal agencies to “identify all regulations, all rules, all policies…that serve as obstacles and impediments to American energy independence.”

Against mountains or irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the climate deniers, including Donald Trump and significant numbers of his Grand Old (Polluting) Party are perpetrating a delusional fraud against volumes of reputable evidence to the contrary that if allowed to continue, will end in the extermination of all life on this planet (except, or course, cockroaches who seemingly survive almost anything).

So, what major factors keep conservatives (who oppose conserving our environment) in perennial denial with their heads buried in the increasingly toxic sands?

Conservatives have a vested interest in denying the human-related causes of global climate change, since to do otherwise would impose a sort of narcissistic injury upon themselves that would challenge their entire political philosophy, and, also, the money in their political war chests given by corporate lobbyists.

While differing marginally on specific issues, many Republicans march in lock-step to the drummer of conservative political and corporate dogma centering on a market-driven approach to economic and social policy, including such tenets as reducing the size of the national government and granting more control to state and local governments; severely reducing or ending governmental regulations over the private sector; privatizing governmental services, industries, and institutions including education, health care, and social welfare; permanently incorporating across-the-board non-progressive marginal federal and state tax rates; and possibly most importantly, advancing market driven and unfettered so-called “free market” economics.

In truth, the conservative Republican battle cry, seemingly coined by Sarah Palin, of “drill baby drill,” unfortunately is what Trump has pushed, and ironically, as the Obama administration before him forwarded, resulting in significantly more domestic oil and gas production through “fracking” than under the George W. Bush administration. This, however, is simply unsustainable since, in the words of President Obama in 2012:

“But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil.”

A non-regulated privatized so-called “free market” economic system lacking in environmental protections for our air, our water, our climate, our land, and our animals is tantamount to a social system absent of civil and human rights protections for our people.