The Return of the Carbon Criminals: Trump’s Climate Crimes 2.0

• In Event: Crime, Law, Justice and the Trump Administration 3: Regulatory Rollbacks and Environmental Threats

Abstract

While in office from 2017 to 2021, the Donald Trump administration engaged in many state crimes (morally blameworthy harms) related to climate change: Organized denial of global warming, increased public support for the continued extraction of fossil fuels, and political omissions concerning the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions that resulted in the rollback of existing regulatory policies related to the climate crisis. In several works I have examined this carbon criminality through the lens of the concept of state-corporate crime, a concept utilized by several green criminologists to analyze environmental harms. Now the carbon criminals are back in office. The Trump administration is once again committing a rash of state-corporate environmental crimes. This paper presents a preliminary description and analysis of Trump’s climate crimes 2.0.

Author

• Ron Kramer, Western Michigan University