Donald Trump’s election loss was good news for climate activists. On his first day in office, he took down the White House’s climate policy web page and replaced it with his “America First Energy Plan.” On his fifth day, he signed executive orders approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, rolling back the modest gains of the climate and indigenous anti-pipeline movements. In a speech proclaiming what he called “American energy dominance,” he excitedly announced that the country had “more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal.”¹ He appointed fossil fuel industry hacks to his cabinet. He sold or leased public lands at an extraordinary scale. He unleashed an unprecedented wave of deregulation rescinding more than a hundred environmental rules for industry.

While no one on the Left will fondly remember the Trump era, we have to understand what his defeat means. Donald Trump’s offensive environmental agenda — both offensive to the polite belief in science and offensive in the sense of actively pushing environmental destruction — created utter despair among environmental activists. Yet it also created a kind of delusion. The presence of “post-truth” Trump in office intensified the sense that environmental struggle is, at its core, a struggle over knowledge and science. For example, a movement of professional liberal activists organized a “March for Science,” explicitly disavowing politics. The organizers asserted the march “is not a political protest,” let alone a struggle over material control of resources.² There became a sense that if we could simply eject the “denier in chief” and install a Democrat who “believes science,” we could start to take the necessary action to solve the climate and ecological crisis. The election of Joe Biden as president is stoking these hopes.

But we’ve seen this movie before. When it comes to the climate crisis, offensive Republican environmental destruction is only slightly worse than enlightened Democratic Party environmental destruction. After eight years of a pro–fossil fuel George W. Bush administration, President Barack Obama announced in a victory speech: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”³ Yet, if anything, the age of American energy dominance was not a Trump creation but a product of the Obama era. Beyond rhetoric, fossil fuel extraction expanded much more under Obama than under Trump.⁴ The climate change believer even bragged about this in a 2018 public event: “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer . . . that was me, people . . . say thank you.”⁵