Let’s start with a conservative estimate. Trump’s deregulatory environmental rampage completely stalls — rolling back no more protections against small-particulate pollutants or toxic carcinogens and nuking no more policies like the Clean Power Plan or parts of the Clean Water Act, but merely locking in the sadistic legacy of his first term — there will be as many as 80,000 additional American deaths over the course of the next decade. That’s roughly ten times as many as on D-Day, more than 20 times as many as on September 11, and almost 40 times the number of Japanese citizens who have died in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. One million more Americans, The Journal of the American Medical Association reports, will suffer from respiratory illness.
Most presidents spend second terms trying to leave a lasting mark on foreign policy, and it is abroad where Trump’s environmental cruelty is likely to be felt most intensely. This is not just about the 2016 Paris accords, which technically Trump can only pull out of on November 5, the day after he’s reelected. In the meantime, he’s already fatally undermined them, along with like-minded sadists Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil — a trio of world leaders who may come to be seen much more clearly, in a second term for Trump, as a climate axis of evil. In the latest round of post-Paris climate negotiations, the three countries spiked nearly every possibility of meaningful progress. If you add to the axis Vladimir Putin and his petrostate and Xi Jinping and his have-it-both-ways approach (building renewable farms alongside new coal fleets), the loose alliance of climate inaction accounts for more than half of all global emissions. That’s a very powerful veto.
