Resisting Climate Crimes in the Second Trump Administration

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

Abstract

As state-corporate crime scholars have demonstrated, during the first Trump administration, increased regulatory rollbacks designed to protect consumers, the environment, and general public health from corporate harms created greater opportunities for state-facilitated corporate crimes (Michalowski and Brown 2020). This included extensive cuts to climate regulation and expanded opportunities for climate crimes (Kramer 2020). Early in the second Trump administration, initial threats to progress on addressing the climate emergency include executive actions to withdrawal the US from the Paris Agreement, increase oil and gas production, cut staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, pause electric vehicle production and wind development, among other environmental rollbacks. Noting the unprecedented speed and scale of cuts to federal funding, workers, and regulations, a recent New York Times article headline referred to the Trump administration’s new climate policy onslaught as ‘Full on Fight Club,’ (Gelles, Friedman, and Plumer, 3/2/25). With little hope of climate action coming from government officials, this paper will explore emerging efforts of environmental activists and social movements to resist carbon criminals and climate crimes in the initial year of the second Trump administration.

Author

• Elizabeth Bradshaw, Central Michigan University