Trump meets with the Pennsylvania Air National Guard in 2017. Credit: Picryl/Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (public domain)

Here’s our problem

Big corporations and the rich are destroying the environment.

Disasters like the East Palestine train derailment or destructive practices like fracking release deadly chemicals into our air and water. Natural disasters are becoming worse and worse because of climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal. Rising sea levels and expanding deserts are already forcing people around the world to flee their homes, and this displacement could become even more massive in the future. 

Corporations that make money by destroying the environment pay politicians to say that everything is alright, or even that climate change doesn’t exist at all, but scientists working for oil corporations were some of the first to discover that it was real. For example, private documents from Exxon show that the company knew their product caused climate change as early as 1977.

The con game of billionaires

Life has been getting harder and harder for working people because more and more of society’s wealth is being hoarded by a tiny handful of millionaires and billionaires. Those same ultra-rich people and their bought-and-paid-for politicians want to convince us that the reason why living standards are declining is that environmental regulations have destroyed jobs and held back economic growth. And so they tell us that the solution is to drill as much oil and dig as much coal as possible, while removing limits on corporate pollution.

The people Trump chose to lead the most important government agencies related to the environment are cashing in on the destruction of the planet. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, who’s literally the CEO of a fracking corporation! His company, Liberty Energy, made $4.7 billion in revenue last year. Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was chosen to lead the Interior Department, which is in charge of approving fossil fuel drilling on federal land. His political career was bankrolled by billionaire donor Harold Hamm, who’s the CEO of another fracking corporation called Continental Resources. And Lee Zeldin is a former Congressman who has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign donations from oil and gas executives.

The real answer for the working class

We can create millions of blue-collar jobs that pay a living wage and save the planet at the same time by transforming the energy and transportation system in this country.

We can build huge new wind farms and install solar panels everywhere to meet our energy needs, and the vast expansion of public transportation using electric vehicles can greatly reduce energy consumption. Every worker in an industry related to fossil fuel production would have their income guaranteed while they are connected with a new job that pays at least as much money.

We can get the resources we need to pay for this transformation by seizing the big oil companies and turning them into public property. The biggest fossil fuel corporations in the US made $173 billion of profit in 2023 alone! They made this money destroying the environment that belongs to all of us, now it’s time for us to take it back.

This article is also available as a downloadable pamphlet here.