Trump’s second Presidency is life imitating art — a 1989 fictional prophesy of 2025, in which an ultra-rich cabal causes irrevocable environmental damage then flees the Earth in rocket ships, writes Dr Norm Sanders.
IN 1989, English comedian Ben Elton (The Young Ones, Blackadder) published a book called Stark – definitely not a comedy – it was a prophetic vision of the situation in 2025.
Ben Elton’s fictional world is ruled by an ultra-rich cabal known as the Stark Conspiracy. Sound familiar?
The Stark Conspiracy has long been aware that its profit-seeking activities have caused irrevocable environmental damage. They realise that total environmental collapse is imminent.
Their solution is to build rockets called Star Arks to take them to the moon which they have purchased from the U.S.
The book begins with the words:
The earth was dying. To be more specific, the earth was being killed. Done to death by its fond owners. Killed by the pursuit of money. For the men gathered round the table it was utterly frustrating to have inherited the earth and then have the damn thing die on you.
Donald Trump would be welcome in Elton’s cabal. They would applaud the way he has installed a cabinet of unqualified loyalists and stacked the Supreme Court.
But they would be most impressed by his plans for the next four years.
Trump is a slow learner — but he can’t forget his failures to ram all of his agenda through during his first presidency.
He is now systematically removing all the impediments which kept him from running a bulldozer through the guardrails. Environmental restrictions will be the first to go.
The Sierra Club is America’s oldest environmental organisation — founded by pioneer environmentalist John Muir in 1892.
The Sierra Club has been a thorn in the side of the exploitative industries ever since. In May 2024, they published a comprehensive analysis of Trump’s agenda.
It makes chilling reading:
Conservative policy-plotters and backers of former President Donald Trump have assembled a sweeping battle plan to dismantle federal agencies and public health standards, including vital environmental protections.
Trump and his political allies are prepared to take a sledgehammer to U.S. climate and environmental policies.
While Trump wines and dines with oil and gas executives, a proposed policy agenda put forth by dozens of right-wing organisations threatens to squander the narrow time window we have for climate action and actively fan the flames of a world on fire, climate scientists and advocates warn.
This agenda serves as a fitting backdrop to recent revelations that Trump has promised – in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions – to save the fossil fuel industry billions of dollars with regulatory rollbacks.
Industry lobbyists are already drafting ready-to-sign executive orders to help Trump implement that pledge. In response to these revelations, several high-ranking Democrats in Congress have launched investigations into what they say is a troubling quid pro quo.
A scientist’s warning: ‘Game over for climate progress’
Far-right policy advisers and think tank staffers, working under the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, are organising nothing less than a dismantling of the administrative state.
Project 2025 is essentially a death sentence for federal climate and environmental protections. Everything from rules to curb hazardous air pollutants to programs that help make cleaner and more energy-efficient purchases affordable would be on the chopping block.
Agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could be gutted.
Peer-reviewed science would be sidelined — and, polluters’ economic interests would be prioritised in government decision-making.
The federal government would focus on authorising fossil fuel production and projects while eliminating funding and programs supporting renewables — like wind and solar.
According to the Project 2025 website, the goal is to be prepared to execute this agenda ‘on Day One of the next conservative Administration’.
Trump has promised to expand oil and gas drilling on his first day in office, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “other than day one” with immediate priorities including shutting down the southern border and “drilling, drilling, drilling.”
Should the Project 2025 policy agenda actually be implemented, Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania said:
“It would be game over for climate progress in the U.S., turning the reins of our government over to the polluters…And, in the absence of American leadership, global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and avoid catastrophic warming will likely fail.”
Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 includes a comprehensive conservative policy agenda – a playbook for the first 180 days of an incoming Republican presidential administration – and personnel recruitment and training.
The $22 million initiative involves over 100 right-wing organisations — many with track records of disseminating climate disinformation and with documented ties to big corporate donors and industrial polluters like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries.
The policy agenda offers no strategies for reining in the carbon pollution causing planetary heating. Project 2025 and Heritage Foundation did not respond to Sierra’s inquiries.
But Heritage’s Paul Dans, former Director of Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, told The New York Times that one of its aims is to “investigate whether the dimensions of climate change exist”.
In terms of the role of fossil fuels in driving climate breakdown, he told The Times: “I think the science is still out on that quite frankly”.
That is simply not true. Mann told Sierra these comments should raise alarm bells:
“It underscores the threat posed to our planet by a political party that actively promotes anti-science and would sell out the entire planet for the short-term profit of the polluters and plutocrats that now rule their party”.
The Stark Conspiracy eventually blasts off in their Star Arks only to find their existence on the moon frustrating and lonely.
To where are Trump and his oligarchic friends going to escape? Abandoned missile silos in Nebraska or gated and guarded communities in Western American deserts?
Why not the moon? Some of the oligarchs already have the rockets.
Ben Elton’s depictions of global environmental destruction by the very rich were years ahead of their time.
The novel ends with a resigned indictment of society’s unwillingness to make environmental change:
‘Too much money was involved, it simply wasn’t economical. Nothing had been done and now the reckoning was upon them all.’
Dr Norm Sanders is a former commercial pilot, flight instructor, university professor, Tasmanian State MP and Federal Senator.
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