Women Climate Activists: Stand Up To Your Debaucher-In-Chief

The current administration in the US White House is led by a control freak at best, a wannabe dictator at worst. Anti-intellectual, authoritarian, impulsive, divisive: Donald J. Trump is also a misogynist — he’s our very own debaucher-in-chief, a sexist fully exposed (pun intended) by a continuing cycle of news revelations.

Some of you reading this article will ask, What does this have to do with clean energy? How does writing about the current administration’s effect on women relate to the quest for a net zero world? Well, in response I will say that women are on the front lines of the global environmental crisis. They are often the first and worst affected. Many women climate activists work from a position of intersectionality — the interconnectedness of social categories, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability, all of which shape an individual’s experiences and opportunities.

It’s important at this crucial moment in time in which the US is under absolutist rule, and climate science is being hidden, for women who work from an intersectional activism to fight for systemic change. At the highest levels of the US government, Trump 2.0 has been ruinous to this democracy. And his influence on women’s lives is directly related to his duplicitous rollback of US climate regulations.

Trump’s Misogyny Makes the News — Again

Three distinct events made the headlines this week that captured how our country is run by a debaucher, a misanthrope, a person who uses his power to denigrate women at every possible point.

First, domestic violence? No big deal. Trump uttered one in a long line of lifetime insults to women on Monday at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. (Really? At a site celebrating the bible? Has the guy no decency? Well, I guess we already knew the answer to that.) He claimed that offenses that “take place in the home” are separate from real crime in Washington, DC. He elaborated that “a little fight with the wife” — more commonly known as domestic violence — doesn’t count in his fake war against crime in our nation’s capital.

Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican political strategist, wrote on social media that Trump’s remarks amounted to “just a casual dismissal of domestic violence as a crime.”

Second, sexual abuse = millions of dollars in damages. As the longtime gender analyst Jackson Katz writes, more than two dozen women have made credible allegations against Trump of sexual assault and harassment. “It is clear that a revitalized multiracial, multiethnic coalition led by moderate, liberal, progressive and feminist women remains one of the best hopes to counteract Trumpism in the years ahead,” Katz argues.

The person who was not elected by the majority of US voters has been found liable by a jury of his peers for sexually abusing a woman and ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages. This week a federal appeals court upheld an $83.3 million jury award against Trump for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019. Trump was found liable for raping her in a Manhattan department store — an attack for which he was separately found liable for sexual abuse. Trump’s claim of immunity as endowed by the Supremes was rejected in an unsigned, unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan.

The final court ruling cited one statement that Trump uttered two days into the trial. He “proclaimed that he would continue to defame Carroll ‘a thousand times.’” The appeals court said “the jury was entitled to find that Trump would not stop defaming Carroll unless he was subjected to a substantial financial penalty.” Carroll has not yet received any damages that the juries awarded in the two trials.

Third, the Epstein files continue to haunt. Trump is threatening a lawsuit against the NY Times on their reporting about a drawing of a young girl’s body that is attributed to him in the Epstein Birthday Book. The celebratory poem to pedophile Epstein that bears Trump’s name is outlined by a silhouette drawing of a prepubescent girl with small breasts. The signature has been confirmed by handwriting analysis as Trump’s.

A spokeswoman for Times, Danielle Rhoades, responded on Wednesday. “Our journalists reported the facts, provided the visual evidence, and printed the president’s denial. It’s all there for the American people to see and to make up their own minds about.”

It’s not just Trump, either. As Paul Josephson writes on Common Dreams, “Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy.”

What should women — especially climate activists — do with the backdrop of all these blatant anti-female actions by the POTUS and his regime?

Women are Taking the Lead on Climate and Democracy

Women around the world are bearing the brunt of climate change — exploited with cheap or unpaid labor, left hungry due to food insecurity, abandoned to rebuild lives after floods, debilitated by droughts, pushed into poverty. Policy frameworks generally omit or disregard women’s specific needs.

Women aren’t succumbing: they are fighting for climate action and intersectional issues.

Research analysts at the UN suggest that feminism offers a paradigm to understand how inequalities structure our world and drive the climate crisis — and other pressing global concerns. So that raises a question: What if we approached climate from a feminist perspective? Moreover, since women are already at the forefront of climate action, what will happen if more women stand up against the tyranny and terror of the debaucher-in-chief?

The list of women fighting for human and climate rights is quite extensive.

• Greta Thunberg was part of the Gaza flotilla that was attacked by a drone yesterday to fight against genocide.
• Longtime peace activist Jane Fonda was arrested several times during her Fridays for Future movement. She founded a PAC that is fighting “to unseat politicians in the pocket of Big Oil and replace them with climate champions willing to fight like hell for the planet we call home.”
• As someone who redefined species conservation to include the needs of local people and the environment, Jane Goodall went on to found the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to ensure that her vision and life’s work continue to mobilize the collective power of individual action to save the natural world we all share.
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi professor and botanist, wrote Braiding Sweetgrass, which asks us to dismantle western concepts of human superiority and approach plants, animals, and the world as our teachers rather than our inferiors.

The midterms are not far off, and nervous Republicans know they will have a lot of explaining to do about rubber-stamping a failed agenda that forces women into a subservient role. It will be especially powerful if more and more women climate activists rise up and make Trump’s cruelty to women transparent in conjunction with environmental degradation.