Dear Editor,

US President Donald Trump’s playbook has always been to campaign like a populist and govern like an oligarch. But it is still shocking just how brutally he went after our country’s working people in the first few days — even the first few hours — after he was sworn in last week.

Trump’s actions on day one of his presidency, and each day since then, have laid bare his willingness to undermine the health and wealth of working families. He is determined to pollute our air and water. And for all his tough talk about China, he is rapidly ceding vital economic ground to China as he attempts to shutter the new factories powering our nation with clean energy. A true “America First” agenda would focus on American leadership on the global stage. And it would put the American people first. Instead, he is putting Americans last by sacrificing our health and our jobs in favour of corporate greed.

In the first minutes of his presidency, Trump promised to “drill, baby, drill” in his inaugural address.

In the first hours, in a flurry of day one executive orders, he declared an “energy emergency” and moved to claw back unspent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) funds; withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement; overturn protections against offshore drilling for more than 625 million acres of ocean; roll back federal vehicle emission standards for cars and trucks; halt the development of all offshore wind projects; remove vital protections for public lands across Alaska, and, sadly, that was just the beginning.

Making our communities more susceptible to climate-fuelled disasters, driving up respiratory and heart disease, increasing our energy bills, and shipping our jobs overseas is the opposite of ‘America First’. And it shows Trump breaking his promises — on day one — to stand up for working-class families.

As you read this, the Trump Administration is actively working to boost Americans’ household energy costs by promoting the expansion of liquefied natural gas(LNG) exports. Those exports go to nations that will pay far more than the domestic market rate for methane gas, driving up prices here at home. And, of course, more methane gas means more fracking, more pollution, and more disaster-prone transportation and refinement of yet another dirty fossil fuel. Not to mention the national security implications of LNG producers and exporters selling this energy resource to adversaries like China that then can resell it to client states and leverage its status as an LNG supplier.

The Administration is driving up energy costs and threatening grid reliability — in an age of increasing extreme weather from climate change — with its hostility to the clean energy sources that are cheaper and more resilient than fossil fuels.

It is killing thousands upon thousands of good American jobs with actions like his executive order banning more development of offshore wind energy. So much for the GOP’s “all of the above” energy approach. Wind energy now makes up 10 per cent of US electricity generation and offshore wind alone currently employs 120,000 Americans. New offshore wind projects would promise many thousands more. And offshore wind has also helped revitalise domestic supply chains, support growth in American shipping, and bring in billions of dollars in investment.

The Administration is killing jobs by attacking the progress and investments spurred by the last administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have already created more than 400,000 clean energy jobs.

The fossil fuel push will lead to pollution that causes heart attacks, asthma attacks, cancer, and more — and will end up killing many of the very people he pledged to fight for. It also will have an especially deadly impact in the communities that already suffer disproportionately from pollution.

A recent Stanford Medicine study, for instance, found that Black Americans are far more likely to die from air pollution-related causes than other groups. This bears out in a city like Chicago, where the city’s West Side, which has more black and Latino residents than other parts of the city, has up to 32 per cent more nitrogen dioxide (NO2) air pollution.

And one more way this Administration looks to hurt both the wallets and bodies of working families is with the rising cost of health care that all the illness from increased air and water pollution is sure to bring.

In these dark times, it is critical to remember that we are strong enough as a country to keep making progress no matter who is president.

As I’ve seen first-hand from the front lines of the civil rights and environmental movements, when the American people suffer setbacks, when the hill gets steeper, we do not stop climbing.

Ben Jealous

Executive director of the Sierra Club