Survival of the richest: Trump, climate and the logic of the doomsday bunker

The climate crisis created the setting for Trump’s economy-first win and it’s the global south that will suffer most

Donald Trump’s election is a triumph for the politics of the doomsday bunker, which is bad news for the world’s environment.

This is the idea that in an age of climate disruption, nature extinction and ever wider social inequality, the best chance of survival for those who can afford it is to construct a personal shelter, where they can keep the desperate masses at bay. It is survival of the richest.

Apocalyptic thinking like this may once have been the stuff of science fiction but it has been normalised by billionaires such as the Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others who have been building underground bunkers or buying superyachts and private jets to whisk themselves away to remote islands.

Tech billionaires were instrumental in Trump’s victory, particularly the Tesla boss, Elon Musk, who poured millions into the campaign and used X as a loudspeaker, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post, blocked its editorial staff from endorsing Kamala Harris.

Once you get into a bunker mindset, you become invested in apocalypse. Out goes any idea of looking for solutions to the cause of the world’s problems, and in comes the idea that you survive by amassing wealth and weapons, throwing up higher walls and asset-stripping the wasteland outside.

From the perspective of the global south, such thinking in the most powerful country on Earth is a disaster. Survival in the Amazon rainforest, where I live, or the African savannah or the flood plains of Asia depends on a stable climate, abundant nature and peaceful cooperation.

The first Trump administration diminished environmental protections. Trump 2 has the capacity to take this to a new level because there are fewer constraints. Voters have given Trump the authority of an emperor. This is cause for multiple alarms, not least a US exit from the global climate fight.

Polls suggest this was not high in the minds of most voters, and the climate and nature crisis barely featured in election debates and speeches. But the climate created the setting for Trump’s economy-first win: the devastating impacts of hurricanes such as Helene and Milton making the federal government seem impotent, droughts worldwide adding to food price inflation, and higher temperatures everywhere creating more stress and foreboding. Throughout the world, ever more extreme weather is sparking ever more extreme politics.

Those who think of the climate challenge solely in terms of an energy transition may be inclined to see Trump 2 as a mere four-year setback. After all, the world weathered his first term. They may believe the momentum for solar and wind is already unstoppable because these forms of power generation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. Others could ask what difference a change of president will make, given that the US under Joe Biden had already ramped up oil and gas output to record levels.

But this misses the bigger picture. Carbon Brief estimates that a Trump presidency will add 4bn tonnes to US emissions by 2030. Every extra tonne means higher temperatures, more floods, more droughts, more fires, higher food prices, more deaths and a greater risk of hitting catastrophic tipping points for ocean circulation, polar ice melt or forest die-off.

Nowhere will escape – though, as usual, the global south will suffer first and worst. This is home to the populations most vulnerable to deadly heatwaves and crop-crippling droughts. It is also where developing countries were last year promised hundreds of billions of dollars in “loss and damage” compensation payments for the climate catastrophes they have done the least to cause. If Trump goes ahead with his threat to pull the world’s richest country out of the Paris agreement and the entire UN climate process, it will become extremely difficult to persuade other wealthy nations to find this money. Environmental justice now looks a more distant prospect.

An already dire situation in regions such as the Amazon rainforest will deteriorate. Trump’s denials will not affect the physics of climate disruption, which is already drying up sections of some of the world’s once mightiest rivers such as the Solimões, Negro, Tapajós, Xingu and Madeira. But they will prolong and intensify the breakdown of this globally important ecosystem, which plays a vital role in the water cycle of South America.

Trump’s rhetoric and example will also embolden the extreme right across the world to reduce protections for nature and people. In Brazil, this will increase the likelihood of a resurgence of the forces that gathered around the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged invasions of the Amazon and oversaw a record level of deforestation. The former army captain has been banned from running for office until 2030 after attempting a Trump-esque insurrection in the wake of his 2022 election defeat, but his allies dominate Congress and will be keen to replicate their American idol’s example of overturning punishments. Money buys power. Power buys safety. That is the logic of the bunker.

This is not sustainable. Deal only with the consequences and the causes will grow worse. Those who reveal this truth, such as scientists and journalists, come under attack. This is particularly true in the field of climate. The authors of the far-right Project 2025 wishlist are encouraging Trump to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s most important centres for climate research.

When bunkered minds also throw up walls against truth, they imply might is right. In a normal, stable world, this can be shaken off as the dangerous nonsense it is. But when old certainties about the climate start to wobble, so does everything else and frightened voters seek supposed “strongmen” leaders, such as India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the growing cast of far-right figures who have emerged in Europe.

Their denialism has deadly consequences, as the world saw during the Covid crisis, and as Valencia learned when more than 200 people died in flash floods after the rightwing local authorities ignored warnings from meteorologists and voted down efforts to strengthen disaster preparations.

Those looking for positives must grasp at straws. The US retreat to the bunker may be a sign that two centuries of fossil-fuelled industrial expansion are coming to an end, that late-stage capitalism is showing its true rapaciousness, and that this will finally stir a shake-up of a status quo that was, in any case, failing to halt emissions, prevent biodiversity collapse and tackle horrendous inequality.

Those looking for alternatives point to China as the real winner of the US election because its model is proving more stable, more intelligent and more effective in transitioning away from fossil fuels. It has built up a world-leading renewables industry, achieved its 2030 climate goals six years early and is on course for emissions to peak as early as next year.

And of course, nobody should forget that almost half of US voters rejected Trump, Europe is pushing ahead with emissions reductions, South America has more progressive leaders promising changes, and many cities and companies have bold plans. Somewhere in this may be the basis for a new era of clean, cheap, peaceful energy, smart leadership and healthier relations with nature.

Maybe. But in Trump 2, the ancien regime of dirty fossil fuels now has a belligerent, newly empowered defender. The fight will be messy.

In the years ahead, the logic of the doomsday bunker threatens to become suffocating. And if we are not careful, this could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The best antidote may be to remember what we are surviving for, why it is worth fighting for every fraction of a degree, every tonne of carbon, and to prove life is so much better outside than in.

Cover photo: By The Guardian