Bill Mckibben, Common Dreams

Trump's grotesque Greenland fantasy ignores very real crisis bubbling under the surface

When President Donald Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the US, it sounded farcical — a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:

First off, I think it’s a very real possibility. Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?

MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO.

TAPPER: So force is on the table?

MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland.

And here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:

TRUMP: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.

REPORTER: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?

TRUMP: The EU needs us to have it.

None of this makes any actual sense — Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united Tuesday to say, “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.

In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades — not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976.

In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense — a poll last January found that 85 percent of the population opposed the idea.

Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want.

He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20th century.

Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.

I’ve been up on this ice sheet — I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.

I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about US imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to US bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.

They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.

We were camped above the Eagle Glacier — Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip, had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.

Greenland holds 23 feet of sea-level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century — it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: They passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling — the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).

I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on Earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals, and microplastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.

Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously, it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously, it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).

But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot — on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about 1°, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.

And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast US (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).

The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:

We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen

And yet there’s a generosity to their witness — a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.

Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater…
None of us is immune.
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money…
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise

This Trump vandalism is worse than tearing down the East Wing of the White House

It’s the end of the year, and so one should be compiling ten-best lists.

And I turned 65 last week, having spent almost my entire adult life in the climate fight, so it’s one of those moments when I wish I could look back with a certain amount of satisfaction.

But since I owe you honesty, not exuberance, just at the moment I can’t provide much celebration. I was hopeful this column might be about a big victory — on Wednesday the board that controls New York City’s pension funds was considering whether or not to pull tens of billions from Blackrock because of the investment giant’s climate waffling, which would have been a massive display of courage. Sadly, City Comptroller Brad Lander hadn’t gotten the measure on the agenda before the final meeting of his term, and he seems to have run out of time and political juice — the idea was tabled.

And so we’re left staring at a pile of recent defeats, at least in this country (which is an important qualification). I’ll try to end in a more hopeful place, but I fear you’re going to have to work through my angst with me for a few minutes.

The most traumatic item is the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, born like me in 1960. It was a product of that era’s faith in science, a faith that paid off spectacularly. Take weather forecasting. As Nature reported Wednesday:

Work at NCAR played a key part in the rise of modern weather and climate forecasting. For instance, the lab pioneered the modern dropwindsonde, a weather instrument that can be released from an aircraft to measure conditions as it plummets through a storm. The technology reshaped the scientific understanding of hurricanes, says James Franklin, an atmospheric scientist and former branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.

But its most historically significant work has been in understanding the dimensions of the ongoing climate crisis. Nature again:

On the global scale, NCAR is known for its climate-modelling work, including the world-leading models that underpin international assessments such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hundreds of scientists pass through NCAR’s doors each year to collaborate with its researchers. More than 800 people are employed at NCAR, most of whom work at the centre’s three campuses in Boulder, including the iconic Mesa Lab that sits at the base of jagged mountain peaks and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.

There’s no question about why the administration is doing what it’s doing. Project 2025 enforcer Russell Vought explained it quite succinctly — NCAR must go because it is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” This is stupid — it’s like closing the fire department because it’s a source of “fire alarmism” — but it’s by now an entirely recognizable form of stupid. And it’s also sly: It’s like spraypainting over the surveillance cameras so you can rob the bank without anyone watching. But of course nothing changes with the underlying physics. Indeed, as the announcement came down, NCAR was closed for the day because:

the local electrical company planned to cut electricity preemptively to reduce wildfire risk as fierce winds were forecast around Boulder. In 2021, a wildfire ignited just kilometres from NCAR; fuelled by powerful winds, it ripped through suburban homes, killing two people. Many researchers say this is a new normal of increased fire risk in an era of climate change—a topic of study at NCAR.

I am glad people are rallying to fight — there was an emergency press conference Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where many of the world’s Earth scientists are gathered. Third Act Colorado is working with Indivisible on a weekend rally. This is the scientific equivalent of tearing down the East Wing of the White House, and given the moment a lot more significant.

But I’m saddened to see how little our representatives in D.C. seem to really care, even the Democratic ones. Sixteen Democratic Senators voted Thursday to confirm President Donald Trump (and Elon Musk’s) nominee to head NASA, even though, as Brad Johnson pointed out in his Hill Heat newsletter, the administration is trying to slash science research at the agency in half.

The new head, Jared Isaacman, is clearly on board. As he wrote this spring, “Take NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and leave it for academia to determine.” But of course the administration is wrecking that too — they cut off the funding for the gold standard climate research program at Princeton on the grounds that it was “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”

Too many Democratic leaders are feeling comfortable waving off climate concerns, because of a feeling that it might be a political problem for them. That was exemplified Thursday morning in the New York Times when center-right pundit Matt Yglesias issued a strident call for liberals to “support America’s oil and gas industry.”

That he did it hours after that oil and gas industry won its fight to shutter climate research was probably coincidental, but the piece was a woebegone recycling of decades-old bad-faith arguments from a person who has insisted repeatedly that climate change is not an existential risk. Yglesias wants us to follow Obama-era “all of the above” energy policies even though they date from 15 years ago, when clean energy was more expensive than dirty, and long before we had the batteries that could make solar and wind fully useful. It’s no longer a good argument, but he has not changed his tune one iota — he keeps invoking Barack Obama, as if what was passable policy in 2008 still made sense.

The centerpiece of his argument is that we should support the gas industry because at least it produces less carbon than coal.

It is much cleaner than coal, consumption of which is still high and rising globally. Increased gas production, by displacing coal, has been the single largest driver of American emissions reductions over time. To the extent that foreign countries can be persuaded to rely on American gas exports rather than coal to fill the gaps left by the ongoing build-out of intermittent wind and solar that’s a climate win.

By now anyone following this debate knows that this is a mendacious point. That’s because the switch to gas has reduced American carbon emissions at the cost of increasing American methane emissions. Those who, like Yglesias, followed last year’s debate over pausing permitting for liquefied natural gas export terminals know that the crucial point was the science showing that in fact American LNG exports were worse than coal. The job is to get others to switch to solar, not coal — and that’s happening everywhere except the US, whose appetite for the stuff is apparently the thing still driving up global consumption even as demand drops in China and India.

Having written many many op-eds for the Times, I know that they fact-check things like the methane numbers; this should not have eluded them, but in fairness it’s eluded Democrats for decades, because gas has been such a convenient out for those unwilling to stand up to Big Oil. If I sound sore here, it’s because I’ve tried and failed to get this basic point of physics across; it’s just technical enough that senators often forget it, but ostensibly serious people like Yglesias should at least grapple with it.

All of this comes on the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate talks — and 10th anniversary of the Congress and (Democratic) president approving the resumption of US oil exports. I celebrated my 55th in Paris, and I remember being hunched over a laptop at a cafe writing what I think may have been the only op-ed opposing that resumption. As I said at the time:

It’s especially galling that Senate leaders — Republicans and Democrats — are apparently talking about trading this gift to Exxon and its ilk for tax breaks for wind and solar providers. It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of politicians who simply don’t understand the physics of climate change. We don’t need more of all kinds of energy—we need more of the clean stuff and way, way less of the dirty. Physics doesn’t do backroom deals.

And indeed the senators who said it was no big deal were wrong. America is, as Tony Dutzik pointed out this week, now the biggest oil exporter on Earth. He lays out the case nicely:

“There is currently little if any incentive for US oil producers to export crude oil even if the ban is lifted,” wrote Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, in December 2015.

A decade later, those breezy assessments have proven to be wildly off-base. “The United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever,” reads a 2024 headline from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), one of the agencies that got it wrong. Not only did lifting the crude export ban lead to a surge in oil production, but it also dramatically reshaped the global energy system, US politics, and greenhouse gas emissions.

So, anyway, feeling a little sad. But I do think this is a low point, because I think around the rest of the world, where Trump (and pundits like Yglesias) have marginally less sway, things are continuing to break the right way. In fact, this week the premier journal Science picked its scientific “Breakthrough of the Year” and it turned out to be not some fascinating if arcane new discovery, but instead the prosaic but powerful spread of renewable energy around the planet:

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.

The tsunami of tech spilling from China’s factories has changed the country’s energy landscape—and its physical one, too. For decades China’s development was synonymous with coal, which produced choking air pollution and massive carbon emissions, still greater than those of all other developed nations combined. Now, solar panels carpet deserts and the high, sunstruck plateau of Tibet, and wind turbines up to 300 meters tall guard coastlines and hilltops (see photo essay, below). China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.

China’s burgeoning exports of green tech are transforming the rest of the world, too. Europe is a longtime customer, but countries in the Global South are also rushing to buy China’s solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, spurred by market forces and a desire for energy independence. In Pakistan, for example, imports of Chinese solar panels grew fivefold from 2022 to ‘24 as the Ukraine war pushed up natural gas prices and the cost of grid power. “For people who were asking, ‘How am I going to keep the lights on in my home,’ it was a very obvious choice,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In South Africa, old and unreliable coal plants drove a similar dynamic. Ethiopia has embraced solar and wind amid worries that hydropower, the country’s mainstay, will decline as droughts become more frequent.

That’s the fight as we head into 2026. Trump and Big Oil have had the run of things this year, but their idiocy is pushing up against limits: Among other things, it turns out that permitting every data center imaginable while cutting off the supply of cheap sun and wind is sending energy prices through the roof, which may be a real issue as midterms loom.

I’m not retiring — I’m here for the fight, and you too I hope.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."

Trump's lurch into naked piracy shows the danger of oil but we still have a way to beat it

I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them — just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: Pirates are “enemies to mankind.”)

But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight. It’s “a large tanker, very large,” Mr. Trump explained, continuing (inevitably) to describe it as “the largest one ever seized actually.” When asked what would happen to the cargo, he said, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”

Oil is, and always has been, at the center of our concerns with Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves (though much of it is in the incredibly dirty and hard-to-recover form of tarsands). At the moment it’s a major supplier to China, and it claims sovereignty over a major oil field in Guyana which has attracted big investment from Exxon and Chevron.

So if you wonder why we’ve been attacking “drug boats” from Venezuela on the grounds that they’re carrying fentanyl, which Venezuela does not produce, that may give you some sense. Indeed the pressure has been so intense that the Maduro government in Caracas apparently offered to essentially turn over its oil and mineral resources to America in October negotiations. We’ve apparently decided we’d rather just take them.

This kind of coercion on behalf of the hydrocarbon industry is becoming old hat for the Trump administration. It’s used tariff policy, for instance, to force country after country to agree to buy huge quantities of American liquefied natural gas. As CNBC reported last spring regarding one deal with the EU:

“They’re going to have to buy our energy from us, because they need it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can knock off $350 billion in one week,” the president said. The European Union faces a 20 percent tariff rate if it does not reach a deal with Trump.

(Justin Mikulka has a pointed take on why this strategy won’t work for the LNG industry, and new data emerged this week showing just how badly it is going to penalize Americans who depend on propane for heating, since they’re now competing with so many other places for our supply of natural gas).

And of course in another sense we’ve been pirating the atmosphere for more than a century, filling up what is a common property with our emissions — America got rich burning fossil fuels, and the main result for other countries will be an ever higher temperature.

But for the moment let’s just think about the flow of oil, because it’s been behind, in large part, so much of the geopolitical tension of the last hundred years. Japan’s quest for oil played some real role in the attacks on Pearl Harbor; Germany invaded the USSR in no small part to secure the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Suez crisis hinged on the transport of oil to Europe. OPEC seized on our thirst for oil as a powerful weapon in the 1980s, and America’s determination to keep oil flowing has determined much of our global stance in the postwar years — I’ll never forget a sign I saw at an early demonstration against the war in Iraq: “How did our oil end up under their sand?”

The point here is that conflict like this is probably inevitable as long as the world depends on an energy source that is available only in a few places. Control of those places becomes too important — you end up with oligarchs, and with people who want to topple them.

So how nice to imagine a world where location doesn’t matter — where instead we depend on energy from the sun and the wind, available everywhere. In the crudest terms, it’s going to be difficult to fight a war over sunshine. No one will ever seize a tanker to get at its supply of solar energy. Which is good news for everyone except those profiting from the current paradigm — Trumpism represents its dying twitches, but obviously those twitches can do great damage.

Yes, we need sun and wind power to take a bite out of the climate crisis. But we also need it to take a bite out of the authoritarianism crisis. Our job is to make this transition happen faster; every new solar panel erodes just a little bit the logic of oil imperialism. The push for clean energy is the push for peace.

The one thing more inflated than protesters' costumes is Trump's ego. Here's how we pop it

Longtime readers will know that though I generally focus on climate and energy, I also concern myself with organizing: We have to fight for the future we want.

This weekend is one of those occasions: No Kings Day 2, when millions upon millions of Americans will gather to say, in one form or another, we don’t like the turn our country has taken in the last nine months, and we’d like our country to head in a very different direction.

If you don’t know where to go on Saturday, here’s the handy tool to help you find the rally near you. (Many thanks to my colleagues at Third Act who have worked hard to turn folks out; my guess is that older Americans will be overrepresented, as at past such gatherings!)

I’ll be speaking on the Battle Green in Lexington, where in April of 1775 the American battle against kings arguably began. I grew up there, and my summer job was giving tours for the waves of sightseers who would arrive each day — I got to tell, over and over, the stories of the Minutemen who gave up their lives to a mighty military machine on the principle that they were capable of governing themselves. So it will be mostly a solemn talk, I guess — though I will try not to be over-earnest. Because we actually need a fair amount of good humor in these proceedings.

In fact, I think it’s possible that one of the most effective organizers in this entire cursed year is Seth Todd, a local man who appeared at the small protests outside the Portland, Oregon Immigration and Customs Enforcement office a few weeks ago in an inflatable frog costume. He’s been there regularly since — his most viral moment came when ICE officers angry that he was coming to the aid of another protester sprayed mace up his air vent. But he’s been on the news again and again, becoming in the process that most exalted of all humans, a living meme.

Because of the rightly central place that the civil rights movement holds in our history, we tend to think of protest as necessarily somber and dignified.

Those were the moods that that intuitive master strategist Dr. King summoned most effectively. They were designed to appeal to the sentiments of the white Americans he was facing, and to give a socially acceptable form to the deep and righteous anger of Black Americans. King understood that one of his tasks was to persuade the American mainstream that segregation — an accustomed practice — was brutal; quiet dignity against ferocious assault helped make the case, and awed onlookers with the bravery — and hence the humanity — of his followers.

We’re in a different moment now, with different needs. President Donald Trump and MAGA represent an aggressive revanchism built on a series of lies, in this case that the country’s cities are dangerous hellholes protected by dimwitted blue mayors. This is easy to disprove statistically — by many measures Portland is among the safest cities in the country; New York is safer than it’s been in at least a quarter-century; Boston, which Trump was threatening last week to send troops to, is among the least violent cities America’s ever seen.

But statistics have a hard time competing with lurid stories about high-profile murders or (fictitious) out-of-control crime.

“I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” the president said last week. “You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”

As a counter to this, a goofy inflatable frog is pretty powerful; it quickly drives home the message that Portland is more whimsical than dangerous.

If a Black woman in Sunday best presented a messaging problem for Bull Connor in Birmingham, a chubby frog presents a messaging problem for Trump, for different reasons. He hates being laughed at, which is a good indication that he recognizes the power of laughter; this is the classic “emperor has no clothes” moment.

Or, as Seth the frog put it, “I obviously started a movement of people showing up looking ridiculous, which is the exact point. It’s to show how the narrative that is being pushed with how we are violent extremists is completely ridiculous. Nothing about this screams extremist and violent. So it’s just a ridiculous narrative that the Trump administration wants to put out so they can continue their fascist dictatorship.”

Satire like this is not a novel aspect of protest. Americans will remember Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies — running a pig for president, scattering cash on the floor of the stock exchange. In Serbia, the Otpor movement — operating in what was a police state — used humor extensively.

As the website New Tactics in Human Rights explains:

In 2000, before the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, a government initiative to support agriculture involved placing boxes in shops and public places. It asked people to donate one dinar (Serbian currency) for sowing and planting crops. In response, Otpor! arranged its own collection called “Dinar za Smenu” (Dinar for a Change). This initiative was implemented several times and in different places in Serbia. It consisted of a big barrel with a photo of Milosevic. People could donate one dinar, and would then get a stick they could use to hit the barrel. At one point, a sign suggested that if people did not have any money because of Milosevic’s politics, they should hit the barrel twice.
When the police removed the barrel, Otpor! stated in a press release that the police had arrested the barrel. Otpor! claimed that the initiative was a huge success. They had collected enough money for Milosevic’s retirement, and that the police would pass the money on to him.

Hey, and Otpor won — Milosevic was toppled, and many other campaigns have picked up on the strategy around the world. As the Tunisian human rights campaigner Sami Gharbia said, “Making people laugh about dangerous stuff like dictatorship, repression, censorship is a first weapon against those fears … without beating fear you cannot make any change.”

Clearly the frog moment has inspired many here. On Facebook, the Episcopalian church was sharing not just a picture, but an apropos quote from Exodus and the story of Moses against the Pharaoh: “But if you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs … The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your officials.”

Hey, and Moses won too.

Meanwhile, back in Portland, there’s also been a naked bike ride this week to protest ICE. A brass band has been playing outside their headquarters (the clarinetist was arrested while playing the theme from Ghostbusters).

And meanwhile back in DC, the regime is insisting that their opposition is Hamas-loving terrorists. As the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “This crazy No Kings rally this weekend, is gonna be the farthest left, the hardest core, the most unhinged in the Democratic Party, which is a big title.”

We don’t know how Trumpism will fall. We’re in an unprecedented moment in our political history, where the normal checks and balances have failed; it’s unclear if our electoral system will survive intact enough to allow democracy to operate in any way. But for the moment our task is to drive down Trump’s popularity, relentlessly. Their greatest hope is that there will be violence they can exploit; watch out this weekend for agents provocateurs, and pay attention to the people at protests who have been trained in deescalation. But show up — right now that’s our best way to keep building the opposition.

Humor’s far from the only tool. Sometimes the best way to build a movement is to publicize the outrages of the other side: More and more Americans are seeing the images of masked secret police dragging terrified people into unmarked cars and spiriting them away; happily, that’s helping.

Here’s Joe Rogan last week: “When you’re just arresting people in front of their kids, and just, normal, regular people who have been here for 20 years. That everybody who has a heart can’t get along with that. Everybody who has a heart sees that and goes, ‘That can’t be right.’”

And sometimes the best way to do it is to dress up as a frog.

Trump is not just a conman on climate

When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day.

The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction. On the first day of his term, U.S. President Donald Trump set up the con by asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous. Yesterday, EPA czar and former failed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin dutifully made his long-awaited announcement: Nothing to fear from carbon dioxide, methane, and the other warming gases.

Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when he first announced the idea. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”

Trump didn’t really need to do this in order to stop working on the climate crisis — he’s done that already. The point here is to try and make that decision permanent, so that some future administration can’t work on climate either, without going through the long and bureaucratic process of once again finding that the most dangerous thing on the Earth is in fact dangerous.

The problem with this simple one-two punch from Trump and Zeldin is that someone will challenge it in court as soon as it becomes official. “If EPA finalizes this illegal and cynical approach, we will see them in court,” said Christy Goldufss of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And they’ll have an argument, since — well, floods, fires, smoke, storms. I mean, if carbon dioxide was dangerous in 2009, that’s a hell of a lot more obvious 16 years later.

The Supreme Court upheld the idea that CO2 was dangerous in 2007 — here’s how Justice John Paul Stevens began that opinion:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species — the most important species — of a “greenhouse gas.”

But that was a different, and non-corrupted, Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote the dissent, and he’s doubtless eager to do with climate change what he’s already done with abortion. But that would be easier if they had some “well-respected experts” to say that there’s not any trouble — stage three of this grift.

It’s true that there aren’t any well-respected experts that believe that, but the White House has hired several aged contrarians who have maintained for decades that global warming is not a problem, even as the temperature (and the damage) soared. And yesterday they released a new report that reads more or less like a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In it, they cherry pick data, turn to old and long-debunked studies, and in general set up a group of strawmen so absurd that one almost has to grin in admiration. Actual climate scientists were lining up to say their papers had been misquoted, but all you needed was a modicum of knowledge to see how stupid the whole enterprise was.

Just as an example, our contrarians hit the old talking point that CO2 is plant food — indeed, “below 180 ppm [parts per million], the growth rates of many C3 species are reduced 40-60% relative to 350 ppm (Gerhart and Ward 2010) and growth has stopped altogether under experimental conditions of 60-140 ppm CO2.”

Great point except that there is no one calling for, and no way, to get CO2 levels anywhere near that low. I led a large-scale effort to remind people that anything above 350 ppm is too high, and that was so successful that we’re now at 420 ppm and climbing. Too little carbon dioxide is a problem for the planet in the way that too little arrogance is a problem for the president

And yet, when it finally reaches the court, they will doubtless cite this entirely cynical and bad-faith document to buttress the case that the EPA should be allowed to stop paying attention to carbon dioxide. As I said, it’s a pretty easy to follow swindle, but they count on the fact that most people won’t. Butter won’t melt in their mouths — as Energy Secretary (and former fracking executive) Chris Wright said in his foreword to the new report:

I chose the [authors] for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions. What you’ll read are their words, drawn from the best available data and scientific assessments. I’ve reviewed the report carefully, and I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.

Every word of that is nonsense, but it doesn’t matter — because it’s an official document on the right letterhead it will do the trick. This is precisely what science looks like when it’s perverted away from the search for truth. It’s disgusting.

Still, there’s another grift also under way this week, and this one that may work the other way and do the world some good. The president announced his new trade deal with the European Union, which calls for 15% tariffs — but it’s sweetened by the European promise to buy $750 billion worth of American natural gas in the next three years.

Trump has essentially been using the tariff process as a shakedown, a way to repay his Big Oil cronies for their hundreds of millions in support: it’s pretty much exactly like a mob protection racket, where you buy from the guy you’re told to or you get a rock through the window.

The White House quickly put out a list of thank yous, including one from the American Petroleum Institute: “We welcome POTUS’ announcement of a U.S.-E.U. trade framework that will help solidify America’s role as Europe’s leading source of affordable, reliable and secure energy.”

And yet, as Reuters first noted and then many others also calculated, the numbers are clearly nonsense. First, the E.U. actually doesn’t buy any energy itself, and it can’t tell its member states what to purchase; in fact, even those member states usually rely on private companies to buy stuff. Second, it’s physically impossible to imagine the U.S. selling Europe $250 billion worth of natural gas a year. As Tim McDonnell wrote at Semafor:

Total U.S. energy exports to the world were worth $318 billion last year, of which about $74.4 billion went to the E.U., according to Rystad Energy. So to meet the target, the E.U. would need to more than triple its purchases of U.S. fossil fuels — and the U.S. would need to stop selling them to almost anyone else.

“These numbers make no sense,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher specializing in European gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

The biggest reason it won’t happen, though, is that Europe is quickly switching to renewable energy. As Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained to the Financial Times:

“European gas demand is soft, and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports,” he said. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”

Trump will doubtless coerce some countries into buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the short run, and that will do damage. Global Venture announced Tuesday that they’d found the financing for the massive Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) export terminal, which has been opposed by both climate scientists and environmental justice activists.

As Louisiana’s Roishetta Ozane said Tuesday:

The CP2 LNG facility is an assault on everything I hold dear. It’s a direct threat to the health and safety of my community and an assault on the livelihoods of our fishermen and shrimpers.

I’ve seen my kids struggle with asthma, eczema, headaches, and other illnesses that result from the pollution petrochemical and LNG plants dump into my community. I won’t stop opposing this project in every way I can, because my children — and everyone’s children — deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy environment. I refuse to let Venture Global turn my community into a sacrifice zone for the sake of its profits.

But my guess is that such facilities won’t be pumping for as many decades as their investors imagine. Europe pivoted hard to renewables because Russian President Vladimir Putin proved an unstable supplier of natural gas; Trump’s America is hardly more reliable, since the president has made it clear he’ll tear up any agreement on a whim. Any rational nation will be making the obvious calculation: “I may not have gas of my own, but I’ve got wind and sun and they’re cheap. I’d rather rely on the wind than the windbag.”

Trump’s a conman, but he’s also a mark.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."