SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
environment
Green Groups Organizing 'All Out on Earth Day' Protests Against Trump Authoritarianism
"Trump is dismantling critical environmental safeguards, putting lives at risk, and leaving working people to suffer the devastating consequences," said one campaigner.
Apr 14, 2025
A coalition of green groups on Monday promoted plans for nationwide "All Out on Earth Day" rallies "to confront rising authoritarianism and defend our environment, democracy, and future" against the Trump administration's gutting of government agencies and programs tasked with environmental protection and combating the climate emergency.
Organizers of the protests—which are set to take place from April 18-30—are coalescing opposition to President Donald Trump's attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies, which include efforts to rescind or severely curtail regulations aimed at protecting the public from pollution, oil spills, and other environmental and climate harms.
"This Earth Day, we fight for everything: for our communities, our democracy, and the future our children deserve."
The Green New Deal Network, one of the event's organizers, decried Trump's "massive rollbacks" to the EPA and noted that funds "for critical programs have been frozen and federal workers have been unjustly fired" as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, takes a wrecking ball to government agencies.
"This Earth Day, we fight for everything: for our communities, our democracy, and the future our children deserve," Green New Deal Network national director Kaniela Ing said in a statement.
"Trump, Musk, and their billionaire allies are waging an all-out assault on the agencies that keep our air clean, our water safe, and our families healthy," Ing continued. "They're gutting the programs and projects we fought hard to win—programs that bring down energy costs and create good-paying jobs in towns across America, especially in red states."
"So, we need to make sure the pressure continues and our protests aren't just a flash in the pan," Ing added. "When we stand together—workers, environmentalists, everyday folks—we can not only stop them, but we can build the world we deserve."
All Out on Earth Day participants include Sunrise Movement, Climate Power, Third Act, Popular Democracy, Climate Defenders, the Democratic National Committee Council on Environment and Climate, Unitarian Universalists, NAACP, Dayenu, Evergreen, United to End Polluter Handouts Coalition, Climate Hawks Vote, and the Center of Biological Diversity (CBD).
Last month, CBD sued five Cabinet-level agencies in a bid to ensure that DOGE teams tasked with finding ways to cut costs—including via workforce reductions—fully comply with federal transparency law. This, after DOGE advised the termination of thousands of probationary staffers at the EPA, Department of the Interior, and other agencies.
Although a federal judge last month ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of government workers fired from half a dozen agencies based on the "lie" that their performance warranted termination, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court subsequently sided with the White House, finding that plaintiffs in the case lacked the legal standing to sue.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and founder of the elder-led Third Act, harkened back to the historic first Earth Day in 1970.
"Fifty-five years ago, a massive turnout on the first Earth Day forced a corrupt Republican administration to pass the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and create the EPA," he said on Monday, referring to the presidency of Richard Nixon. "Let's do it again!"
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, highlighted the need for action now, noting that Trump "is giving oil and gas billionaires the green light to wreck our planet and put millions of lives at risk, all so they can pad their bottom line."
"Just three months into the Trump presidency, the damage has already been catastrophic," she added. "Trump is dismantling critical environmental safeguards, putting lives at risk, and leaving working people to suffer the devastating consequences. "This Earth Day, we stand united in defiance of their greed and fight for a future that prioritizes people and the planet over profits."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'This Executive Order is Illegal': Trump Attacks Half-Century of Environmental Protections in One Fell Swoop
"This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court," said one advocate.
Apr 11, 2025
Numerous environmental protection groups were preparing to file lawsuits Friday after President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to repeal what he called "unlawful regulations" aimed at protecting the public from pollution, oil spills, and other harms—sharply curtailing the process through which rules are changed as he ordered agencies to "sunset" major regulations.
The order was issued a week-and-a-half before the deadline set by another presidential action in February, when Trump required agencies to identify "unconstitutional" and "unlawful" regulations for elimination or modification within 60 days.
Those restrictions, under Wednesday evening's order, can be repealed without being subject to a typical notice-and-comment period.
Trump named the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement among several agencies affected by the order, and listed more than two dozen laws containing regulations that must incorporate a sunset provision for no later than September 30, 2025.
The laws include the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, suggested the order was Trump's latest push to benefit corporate polluters.
The Trump corporate regime orders agencies to ‘sunset’ environmental protections, as part of an effort to make it easier for industry to pollute. thehill.com/policy/energ...
[image or embed]
— Hans Kristensen (@nukestrat.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 7:14 AM
Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was "beyond delusional" for Trump to attempt to repeal "every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order."
"Trump's farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident," said Hartl. "This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court."
In a memo, the White House wrote that "in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the 'good cause' exception in the Administrative Procedure Act."
"That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be 'impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'" said the White House.
As climate advocates scoffed at the suggestion that regulating nuclear power and pollution-causing energy infrastructure is "contrary to the public interest," legal experts questioned the legality of Trump's order.
"If this action were upheld, it would be a significant change to the way regulation is typically done, which is through notice and comment," Roger Nober, director of George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center, toldGovernment Executive. "If the agencies determine that a rule is contrary to the Supreme Court's current jurisprudence, then [this order says they] have good cause to remove it and [they] can get around notice and comment. That's certainly an untested and untried way of implementing the Administrative Procedure Act."
Georgetown University law professor William Buzbee toldThe Hill that the Supreme Court "has repeatedly reaffirmed that agencies seeking to change a policy set forth in a regulation have to go through a new notice-and-comment proceeding for each regulation, offer 'good reasons' for the change, and address changing facts and reliance interests developed in light of the earlier regulation."
"Adding a sunset provision without going through a full notice-and-comment proceedings for each regulation to be newly subject to a sunset provision seems intended to skirt the vetting and public accountability required by consistency doctrine," he said. "Like many other attempted regulatory shortcuts of the first and second Trump administration, this [executive order] seems likely to prompt legally vulnerable agency actions."
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert suggested that the executive order is the latest example of Trump's push to govern the U.S. as "a king."
"He cannot simply roll back regulations that protect the public without going through the legally required process," Gilbert told Government Executive. "We will challenge this blatantly unlawful deregulatory effort at every step to ensure it doesn't hurt workers, consumers, and families."
Michael Wall, chief litigation officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the order "a blatant attempt to blow away hundreds of protections for the public and nature, giving polluters permission to ignore whatever is coming out of their smokestacks while developers disregard endangered species protections and Big Oil no longer heeds the reforms put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster."
"This executive order is illegal," he said. "Congress passed these laws, and the president's constitutional duty is to carry out those statutes; he has zero power to rewrite them."
"There's no magic wand the administration might wave to sweep away multiple rules on a White House whim," Wall added. "Any changes to the rules the president wants rescinded would have to be justified, rule by rule, with facts, evidence, and analysis specific to that rule. He cannot do this by fiat."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Is Wielding Tariffs to Help Billionaires, But They Can Be a Tool for Fair Trade, Too
Rather than reflexively dismiss tariffs altogether, those of us who care about sweatshop labor, plastic pollution, climate change, and other destructive by-products of tariff-free trade can still use them to demand a fairer economy.
Apr 03, 2025
President Donald Trump has said “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” He claims tariffs will restore American trade supremacy, bring lost jobs back to the United States, and most bizarrely, replace income taxes.
Tariffs can be a useful tool to regulate global trade in the interest of jobs, wages, labor rights, the environment, and consumers—if applied correctly.
But Trump’s chaotic, overly broad tariffs are only likely to hurt working people. They won’t ensure labor rights or protect the environment. They won’t even return jobs to the U.S., if his first term tariffs are any indication.
Tariffs on oil imports, for example, if done correctly, can foot the bill to repair the climate destruction that fossil fuel companies profit from, and incentivize phasing out oil and gas altogether.
Because new tariffs require congressional approval, Trump manufactured a crisis about the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants across U.S. borders in order to use executive power to unilaterally impose tariffs. He insists that foreign governments and companies pay these tariffs—and that imposing them on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China will solve all of the U.S.’ economic problems.
Tariffs aren’t the same as income taxes. When applied to goods being imported from, say, Canada, tariffs aren’t paid by either the Canadian manufacturer or the Canadian government. They’re paid by the U.S. importer to the U.S. government. So a company like Walmart would pay a fee in order to be able to import specific goods from Canada.
Importers will often pass increased tariffs on to consumers, resulting in higher prices. But as Hillary Haden of the Trade Justice Education Fund explained to me in an interview, that’s not a given. Sometimes tariffs are absorbed by the importer as the cost of doing business.
Unsurprisingly, the stock market is leery of tariffs, as are investors and free market champions, who’ve pushed for decades to demolish trade barriers via such initiatives as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Indeed, China has already filed a lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs at the WTO.
With the world’s free-trade-based economy teetering on a knife’s edge, Democrats are attempting to undo Trump’s haphazard tariffs, especially against our neighbors, Mexico and Canada. After all, it was a Democratic president—Bill Clinton—who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, turning all three member nations into a tariff-free zone. (In 2020, Trump signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, replacing NAFTA.)
There’s good reason to criticize Trump’s blanket tariffs. But rather than reflexively dismiss tariffs altogether, those of us who care about sweatshop labor, plastic pollution, climate change, and other destructive by-products of tariff-free trade can still use them to demand a fairer economy.
In 1999, hundreds of thousands of activists, including union members and environmentalists, marched against the WTO in Seattle. The “Battle of Seattle,” as it came to be known, was the high point of the so-called anti-globalization movement, which sought to prioritize human rights, workers’ rights, conservation, and other considerations before corporate profits.
It was the pursuit of a “fair-trade” economy over a free-trade one.
So it’s ironic that President Trump is wielding tariffs as a central pillar of his pro-billionaire economic agenda—and his liberal opposition is championing free trade. Neither pro-billionaire trade nor unregulated trade is in the interests of working people.
Tariffs on oil imports, for example, if done correctly, can foot the bill to repair the climate destruction that fossil fuel companies profit from, and incentivize phasing out oil and gas altogether.
Similarly, tariffs on products manufactured with slave labor or underpaid labor can level the playing field for manufacturers who pay their workers a fair, living wage and ensure safe working conditions.
Rather than reflexively opposing tariffs because it is Trump’s latest fixation, we ought to demand a protectionist economy that can apply tariffs carefully, strategically, and thoughtfully in order to undo the damage of free market capitalism.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular