Donald Trump with a group of coal miners at the White House, Washington, 8 April 2025. Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for their war on the environment.
A Call for Sanctions on Ecocide Enablers
Europe punished Russian billionaires over the war in Ukraine. It should do the same to those abetting an ecocidal regime. The ecological disasters of the US-Israel war with Iran are already severe: noxious smoke from bombed oil facilities, spills in the Gulf waters, contamination of farmland and groundwater with toxic chemicals, and millions of additional tons of CO2. Yet 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 was not because most were individually responsible for Vladimir Putin's war. They were targeted because, as a class, they were inextricable from the corruption and power levers of the Russian state threatening global stability. Climate breakdown threatens our world similarly. It is time to apply the same logic to a different caste of oligarchs, American this time, who seem inextricable from the Trump administration. They include Silicon Valley tech barons and fossil fuel executives, along with apparatchiks carrying out an anti-environmental policy that should be viewed as ecocide.
The Foul Men Burning the Planet
These men should have access to as little of the planet as possible. Trump's name should not adorn his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. His minion Lee Zeldin, leading the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should not lecture Europe in Munich. No billionaire in Trump's orbit should ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, enjoy champagne at Cheval Blanc, or spend over €100,000 weekly on luxury villas in the Algarve or Côte d'Azur if complicit in ecocide threatening these places.
Putin's world has been constrained by an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for alleged war crimes. As the Democratic Republic of the Congo's environment minister, Marie Nyange Ndambo, wrote, ecocide is a crime against humanity and should be recognized as such. The Trump administration is perpetrating ecocide. In recent months, it has pursued destruction of millions of acres of US east coast forests through logging, a million acres of the American Serengeti in Alaska for drilling, seabed mining across millions of miles of underwater ecosystem despite a global moratorium, and conditions for another Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
Systemic Destruction and Sociopathic Agenda
In pursuit of systemic destruction, Trump's government eliminates the EPA's ability to regulate CO2 emissions and obliterates basic scientific work. It allows oil and gas operators to kill polar bears and their cubs, and scrapping protections for the 50 remaining whales of a species. Ordering the Pentagon to burn more coal, turning away from wind projects, is cartoonish ecological evil. This is a sociopathic agenda of destroying the natural world. Why else would a government end private investment in renewables, paying energy companies to cancel offshore windfarms? The Trump administration also threatens other countries for pursuing carbon-reduction policies.
Crime Against Humanity
Terms like genocide, ecocide, and crime against humanity often describe atrocious acts against groups meriting empathy. But crime against humanity implicates all of us as victims. Destroying ecosystems we exist within is a crime against our common humanity. The Trump administration's crimes are committed against polar bears, ice caps, forests, and against me and you. Europe, due to its geographic position, is deeply vulnerable to the climate crisis.
I am not naive that, as international rule of law crumbles, multilateral support for sanctions based on ecocide will surge. Both Putin and Netanyahu face ICC warrants but no fear of jail. European leaders have begun to cease obsequious pilgrimages to the Oval Office. Emmanuel Macron stated that this moment sees Trump, Xi Jinping, and Putin ferociously opposed to Europe. Friedrich Merz said Trump is humiliated by Iran's leadership. Pedro Sánchez has gone further in word and action. We need them to be braver and act faster, accepting that this US is the enemy of global wellbeing. The powerful individuals pushing Trump's agenda should face individual sanctions, travel bans, and fear for their liberty if they set foot in countries holding them accountable.
It will not happen all at once, but someone must decide in favor of consequences and stop those polluting the planet at mass scale from roaming carefree around it. Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now.
