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 not be flown to Munich to lecture Europe about its destructive policies. No billionaire in Trump’s orbit should be able to ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, be served champagne at the Cheval Blanc, or splash out upwards of €100,000 a week for luxury villas in the Algarve or the Côte d’Azur if they are complicit in an active ecocide that threatens the very existence of all these places.
Putin’s world has been constrained and shrunk by an international criminal court (ICC) warrant to face justice for alleged war crimes. But as the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s environment minister, Marie Nyange Ndambo, wrote in the Financial Times recently, “ecocide is a crime against humanity” and should be recognised as such. And make no mistake, ecocide is exactly what the Trump administration is perpetrating. In just the past few months alone, it has pursued the destruction of millions of acres of US east coast forests through logging and a million acres of what is known as the American Serengeti in Alaska to drilling; a seabed mining rampage across who even knows how many millions of miles of underwater ecosystem (despite the global moratorium imposed by 40 countries); and creating the conditions for the entire Gulf of Mexico to suffer the consequences of a second oil-drilling catastrophe like 2010’s Deepwater Horizon.
In pursuit of this broader systemic-level destruction – such as eliminating most of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions, obliterating the basic scientific work that underpins most of its other regulations – Trump’s government appears to think that it’s perfectly acceptable for oil and gas operators to kill polar bears and their cubs, and for an entire species of whale to be eliminated from the face of the Earth, by scrapping protections safeguarding the 50 there are left. You could not write a more cartoonish level of ecological evil than ordering the Pentagon to actively burn more coal – meaning it is turning its back on ongoing wind projects for the sheer sake of polluting more.
This is an agenda of sociopathic levels of destruction of the natural world that we depend on. Why else would a government act to end private investment in renewables, even at the cost of paying energy companies to cancel offshore windfarms? And it’s not even limited to the US: the Trump administration is levying threats against other countries for pursuing carbon-reduction and net-zero policies.
Terms such as “genocide”, “ecocide” and “crime against humanity” are often heard as superlatives to describe atrocious things done to certain groups of people who merit our empathy and outrage in response. But “crime against humanity” does not only mean “this thing is abominable on a scale almost beyond belief”. It implicates all of us as victims. Seeking to destroy, in whole or in part, a cultural grouping of human beings is a crime against our common, interconnected humanity. The same is true of wreaking mass destruction against the ecosystems that we exist within, collectively. The Trump administration’s crimes are not simply being committed against polar bears and ice caps and forests – these crimes are being committed against me, against you. Europe in particular, by virtue of its geographic position, is deeply vulnerable to the climate crisis.
I’m not naive enough to think that right now, as the international rule of law crumbles, there will be some multilateral surge of support for a new regime of sanctions built around ecocide. Both Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu face international arrest warrants for alleged war crimes; neither has much present-day fear of actually facing a jail cell in The Hague. European leaders have, however, finally begun to cease the obsequious drip-drip of Oval Office pilgrimages and humiliations. Emmanuel Macron stated last month that this is a unique moment that sees Trump, Xi Jinping and Putin “ferociously opposed to Europe”. Friedrich Merz finally said the obvious truth that Trump is being “humiliated” by the Iranian leadership. Pedro Sánchez has consistently gone further than either Macron or Merz, in both word and action.
We need them to be braver, and act faster, and finally accept that this US is the enemy of global wellbeing. The powerful individuals who push forward the Trump administration’s agenda, whether in an official or unofficial capacity, should face individual sanctions, individual travel bans, and should worry about their personal liberty being at stake if they set foot in a country that agrees to hold them accountable.
It won’t happen all at once and, if it happens at all, it will be a slow drip at first, the result of some daring first-mover. But, at some point, someone must decide in favour of consequences and stop the people who are polluting the planet at mass scale from roaming carefree around it.
