President Donald Trump speaks alongside EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin during an event announcing the rollback of the endangerment finding at the White House on Thursday. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Trump's EPA denies that greenhouse gases endanger public health. It is destroying public health protections and confirms that environmental policy serves corporate interests exclusively.
“Once relegated as permanent surplus, meaning that capital no longer needs these populations as labor, these populations are little more than the human-as-waste, excreted from the capitalist system.” - Michelle Yates
President Trump’s Environmental “Protection” Agency (EPA) continues its profound and outright assault on public health and, in the process, the People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) of U.S residents. We recently discussed the impacts of EPA’s recent decision to value human life at zero dollars, yet, the agency’s more recent decision to vacate the endangerment finding confirms that Trump’s EPA is willing to do everything in its power to prioritize corporate profits and capital over the health, safety, and welfare of the general public and especially that of poor and working class people - and Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, specifically. At the same time, as we will discuss momentarily, poor, working class, and even the white petty bourgeois have no reason to feel safe and protected as they too may soon be stripped of their wages of whiteness, which W.E.B. Du Bois described in his 1935 opus, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, as, a “psychological wage,” granted to white people of any class; including access to spaces and opportunities reserved solely for their use, safety, enjoyment and ownership.
The endangerment finding was an Obama-era policy that stipulated greenhouse gasses, including, but not limited to, carbon dioxide and methane, present threats to public health and therefore qualify for regulation pursuant to the 1970 Clean Air Act. Under this conclusion, the EPA, until now, established rules for emissions generated by cars, power plants, and other pollutive industries and operations including the production of petro chemicals and hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking.”) Stanford University environmental scientist, Chris Fields, describes the endangerment finding as, “...the foundation for regulation of greenhouse gases at the federal level.” This foundation, pending forthcoming litigation, has been ripped from under the entire structure of environmental protection, which, for the moment, can be described as nothing more than a house of cards - EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment” has been aborted and shifted to a mandate of protecting industry and corporations in service to the sovereignty of racial capitalism. This much was made clear by EPA as part of its official announcement ending the endangerment finding, which includes boasting that it is, “the largest single deregulatory action in U.S. history,” under the guise of, “delivering consumer choice to Americans and advancing the American dream.” While it can be argued that rescinding the endangerment finding is one of the largest deregulatory actions in U.S. history, the idea that it serves U.S. residents and consumers is a bold-faced lie that exposes the farce and ultimate mendacity of Trump’s populism.
As historian and professor Charles Postel reminds us, in 2016 both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were described as populists by bourgeois U.S. press outlets. To this myopia, Postel suggests, “Pairing Sanders and Trump indicates just how flexible the term populist has become and poses the question as to whether populist has any useful meaning and if so, what it might be.” Postel provides historical context of how the term populist first emerged in the U.S. polity, “In the early 1890s the People’s party—whose members were known by the quirky nickname Populists, or just Pops—represented a powerful movement against corporate power that demanded solutions to the Gilded Age crisis of inequality,” and continues, “...the Populists called for a political revolution—that is, using the electoral process to create a more humane and equitable society. The Populists believed that corporations held undue influence over elections, the halls of government, and the courts.”
Trump’s second term, a little more than a year old, confirms, rather than populism, his administration is following the standard ethos of the GOP approach to governing - deregulation, deference to corporations, increased privatization, massive austerity, increasing the coffers and influence of the military industrial complex, and U.S. imperialism, which, in a nutshell, is the ethos of neoliberalism. Trump has always been a servant of the arbiters of capital, the ruling class, and rescinding the endangerment finding is the latest example of this irrefutable fact. Yet this most recent removal of any semblance of social safety nets in the U.S. is not only cause for alarm for those most vulnerable and those disproportionately exposed to and impacted by environmental pollution and associated climate change calamities - Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor people - for by ending EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses in the epoch of late stage capitalism, Trump has also signaled his willingness to garnish the wages of whiteness for a large number of white people in an effort to continue the machinations of racial capitalism.
With the combination of reducing the value of human life to zero dollars and removing EPA’s ability to protect public health from exposure to greenhouse gasses that accelerate climate change, Trump has signaled the existence of a surplus population that no longer serves any purpose except to act as impediments to unlimited growth through unlimited resource extraction that produces unlimited externalities - specifically pollution of air, land and water. As author Mike Davis explains, “This outcast proletariat—perhaps 1.5 billion people today, 2.5 billion by 2030—is the fastest growing and most novel social class on the planet.” He continues, “By and large, the urban informal working class is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers during booms; to be expelled during busts; then reabsorbed again in the next expansion. On the contrary, this is a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.” To this end, the endangerment finding's demise is part of a larger final solution to an endangerment to racial capitalism - a surplus population with no use or value and whose survival itself is an affront to the perpetual goal of increased profits and perpetual economic expansion.
Another aspect of vacating the endangerment finding that confirms the idea of a surplus population is the implication this move has for Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers. The profligate resources necessary to operate data centers, including energy and water, are well documented - data centers in many cases utilize more energy than entire cities and as much as 5 million gallons of water daily, which is as much as a city of 50,000 people at a time when the United Nations has declared that the world has entered an era of “water bankruptcy.” And this is to say nothing about the issue of data centers and land extraction, which Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) national co-coordinator, Austin Cole, recently discussed. The need for more land and resources to power and accommodate data centers, which in turn powers AI, a technology with a primary aim of vastly reducing the need or use for human labor, further proves that ending the endangerment finding represents part of the answer of what to do with, what Mike Davis describes as, “the outcast proletariat.” It may, in part, explain why Big Tech oligarchs including Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, and Sam Altman, are some of the biggest supporters of the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI). This support for UBI is not rooted in benevolence or social responsibility, as much as rooted in an understanding that if some form of social safety net does not exist for a growing number of displaced and redundant workers, the Big Tech hegemony, and racial capitalism itself, is in danger of falling victim to and being violently usurped by a massive proletariat uprising.
But even the most chagrined workers cannot effectively participate in a global uprising against racial capitalism if they are not healthy enough to do so, if they can’t even breathe due to increased exposure to unregulated chemicals in the air that will result if rescinding the endangerment finding survives legal challenges, which is very likely given the current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is why, contrary to reactionary mainstream, liberal environmental groups who contend that vacating the endangerment findings is primarily a denial of climate science and climate change writ large, when what it really represents is a denial of public health in service to racial capitalism. These mainstream environmental groups, themselves capitalists and, at best, social democrats also reveal the need to reject their liberal approach to human rights - the idea that the concept of human rights can be reduced to, “some mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of rights,” and instead view climate change and environmental protection through the lens of PCHRs.
Public health and its protection is absolutely a function of PCHRs, which is to say a key component of the idea of collective self determination. As Cole explains, the U.S. legacies of genocide, displacement of Indigenous peoples, and enslavement of kidnapped Africans had everthing to do with the denial of self determination of all oppressed peoples in the U.S. By removing the endangerment finding, Trump and his EPA have sent a signal that poor and working class white people, whether they accept their true position in the hierarchy of racial capitalism or not, can no longer depend on their wages of whiteness as a social safety net. And the same can be said for elements of the white petty bourgeois as vacating the endangerment finding also sends the signal that they too are on the verge of becoming disposable as there is no one left for the ruling class, the administrators of racial capitalism, to extract from but them while they still retain a semblance of value. To this end, the white petty bourgeois are quickly being transformed from beneficiaries of racial capitalism to sacrificial lambs necessary to maintain it.
By ending the endangerment finding, the reliance of whiteness, to exercise “Not in My Backyard” or NIMBYism to protect white people, in many cases regardless of class status, from exposure to pollution through a reassurance of capital protecting whiteness due its racialized elements is in massive jeopardy. Therefore, now, more than ever, killing capitalism and vanquishing it through class and national struggle will require poor and working class white people to understand and accept that by removing the endangerment finding, Trump and his EPA has effectively “niggerized” them - which is to say, rendered them disposable by assaulting their public health and PCHRs. As such, poor and working class white folk, as well as the white petty bourgeois literally have one choice when it comes to joining the masses or not - ride with us quickly or die with us even faster.
This will require class suicide on the part of the white petty bourgeois and an understanding of the need for the masses and elements of the Black petty bourgois - those captured by the mainstream environmental apparstus - to understand why the notion of “climate and environmental justice” is impossible without first instituting and exercising a framework of climate and environmental liberarion as proposed by BAP’s Climate, Environment, and Militarism initiative, which explains, “While ‘justice’-focused policy advocacy, particularly at a local level is key to protecting PCHRs, Climate and environmental liberation requires moving beyond justice. Because in a world that has become so imbalanced and unequal, exacerbated by a white supremacist, capitalist-fueled climate crisis, achieving ‘justice’ or ‘ecological balance’ is impossible with liberation.” And, as BAP further suggests, this notion of climate and environmental liberation, “requires defeating the interlocking systems of oppression that cause this imbalance and inequality: capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, and all forms of imperialism.” In sum, the only way to overcome being viewed as a collective surplus population to be sacrificed and disposed as part of a final solution to maintain racial capitalism, as signaled by removing the endangerment finding, is to embark on a collective final solution for racial capitalism by embracing the tenets of true ecosocialism, which can only be achieved though a concerted and collective praxis of climate and environmental liberation by the masses, which must include poor and working class white folk, as well as elements of the white petty bourgeois.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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