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March 7th 2025
Feature story

Donald Trump’s driving motivation

At least we know what we’re up against. No pretense anymore — Donald Trump’s driving motivation is dominance. 

Dominance over neighbours; dominance over allies; dominance over opponents as well as the disenfranchised, the poor, the embattled. The United States has elected a distorted Nietzschean Übermensch intent on dominance of nature. Rarely do we see the drive for dominance with such naked clarity.

But there was President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, cornered by a primate dominance display that any field biologist would instantly recognize. On the savannah, it might win a few seasons at the top of the troop. In the modern world, it’s a seething mess of tortured masculinity. 

This dominant male shreds agreements at whim, roiling Canada and Mexico with punishing tariffs. Not so much overturning the compacts he, himself, had made — just pompously disinterested in them. Dismissive and resentful towards restraints or reciprocity. Oblivious to interdependence. Contemptuous of kindness. 

His posture toward the natural world sums it up. Rip bare the Earth and drill, baby, drill. Trump has ordered chainsaws into millions of hectares of public lands, endangered species be damned. And he declared emergency powers to block renewable energy and pump up the extraction of “black gold,” future generations be broiled.

Canadians are furious at the betrayals and economic warfare. Our political leaders agree we will respond to Trump with “matching retaliation.” 

The risk is that we succumb to the drive for dominance here at home, clearcutting even more of the land and driving pipes into the Earth harder and faster. Canada is no paragon of environmental protection as it stands, but things could get much worse.

It may seem bad timing to invoke interdependence. Our better angels are battened down  against the hurricane blasting from the south. But dominance is not working out so well and our actual interconnectedness is more evident by the month.

Take last month, for example: our planet’s temperatures continued the hot streak running higher than 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. 

It wasn’t the hottest February on record (2024 holds onto that title) but 19 months of the past 20 brought temperatures exceeding the symbolic 1.5 C figure.

Moving from the symbolic to the tangible: global sea ice fell to a record low in February. Sea ice doesn’t raise sea levels when it melts, but it’s one of those nasty feedback loops because it reduces the planet’s reflectivity and more heat gets absorbed. 

Antarctic sea ice cover was 26 per cent below average last month. At the other end of the Earth, February saw temperatures more than 20 C above average at the north pole, touching the melting point in the dark depths of the polar winter. 

"February 2025 continues the streak of record or near-record temperatures observed throughout the last two years,” said Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at Copernicus. “One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice, and the record or near-record low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice cover to an all-time minimum.” 

It passes for reassuring news these days that a different group of scientists produced a study forecasting that the great ocean currents of the Atlantic probably won’t totally collapse in the lifetime of kids that are already born. They predict that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) may only partially collapse this century. 

The Amoc is already weakening because of global warming. Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said, “Even a weakening that is not due to a tipping point could have similarly severe impacts on, for example, tropical rains ... One could even go as far as saying that, in the short term, it doesn’t really matter if we have a strong weakening, say 80 per cent, or a collapse.” 

Other Amoc researchers warn that we’re playing with definitions and statistical probabilities here. Stefan Rahmstorf says bluntly that “a collapse cannot be considered a low-probability event any more.” If we’re going to reject Trumpian nihilism, we might extend consideration to the kids born in the coming years, who will live with the impacts of fossil fuel dominance well into the next century.

Canadians are understandably a lot more focused on economic forecasts than environmental ones these days, but they still get the gist. Polling just conducted by Abacus Data finds that 69 per cent of Canadians are worried about the impact of climate change, even over the next five years, let alone the coming decades. Among younger Canadians and those with kids under 12, the results are even higher — over three quarters say they’re concerned or “very” concerned.

“Many are left wondering how climate-related disruptions — such as extreme weather, rising insurance costs, and potential food shortages — could affect their financial and personal security,” the Abacus pollsters conclude. “The uncertainty is not just about the severity of these risks but about how well Canada is prepared to navigate them in the coming years.”

How we navigate the future is indeed the question. Do we match Trump’s drive for power through fossil fuels? Will the rich nations of the world match his “America first,” beggar-the-future approach? When it comes to the real world of oceans, ice and heat, “my country first” might just be code for putting our kids last.

The roundup

Dark money propaganda

Many of the online ads boosting fossil fuels across Canada can be traced “back to a single PR firm with deep ties to both conservative parties across Canada and the oil industry,” writes Taylor Noakes, following an investigation by Canada’s National Observer. 

“Despite no clear sources of income, they spent $153,000 on pro-oil and anti-regulation social media advertising, focused on eight postal code regions in just one month.”

Electric leverage

Doug Ford says Ontario will charge 25 per cent more for electricity exported to the U.S. and threatened to shut off power completely by early April. “We have to follow through until (Trump) drops tariffs completely," Ford said. But experts caution that using electricity as leverage carries major risks.

The low-carb path

Canada’s response to the American “economic predator” will require strategic choices, John Woodside reports. Clean Energy Canada is calling for governments to go beyond “buy Canadian” and establish a “buy clean” policy. 

The Pembina Institute argues, “Canada should pursue a coordinated policy of electrification, a true nation-building endeavour that will reap rewards that endure well beyond the current dispute with our southern neighbour.” 

The gas industry’s math problem

“Renewable natural gas,” may show up on utility bills in B.C. but “very little of that RNG is actually produced and consumed in the province,” write Nancy Olewiler, Kathryn Harrison and Kate Harland. 

Over two-thirds is actually a “credit” claimed in B.C. for RNG used in U.S. states like Iowa or Pennsylvania. And there is currently “no credible mechanism to prevent the same environmental benefit being counted twice — once in the U.S. and again, in B.C.” 

Robin Wall Kimmerer on reciprocity

“The language of natural resources suggests that we own them, that we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer, discussing her new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.

“We haven’t earned berries. We have not earned oxygen to breathe. We can’t buy it. It is not a commodity. It’s not a natural resource. To me, it’s a gift from the natural world. And I wanted to imagine what a gift economy would look like.”

North America's biggest wind turbines to rise in Nova Scotia

The wind turbines being built for Goose Harbour Lake are 180 metres tall – “higher than any building in Atlantic Canada,” writes Darius Sniekus. Their blades will turn 175 m in diameter, part of a global trend towards bigger, more efficient turbines.

“Wind power’s economic case is growing stronger by the year, with a 2023 report published by Clean Energy Canada finding that onshore wind farms could be built for $50 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in Canada versus new gas-fired generation which cost between $150-230 MWh.” 

Half of Europe’s new buses now zero carbon

“City buses are one of the early success stories of the European Green Deal,” reports CleanTechnica. 

“Nearly half (49 per cent) of all new EU city buses were zero-emission in 2024 … At this growth rate, city buses are on track to reach fully (zero emission) sales by 2027.

Tesla owners get creative

Tesla owners “are now removing Tesla logos from their vehicles, replacing them with badging from other automakers,” according to long time Musk-watcher Fred Lambert at Electrek. It’s a step up from the surge in bumper stickers like “I bought this car before I knew Elon was crazy.” 

North Sea

The U.K. says it will not issue new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. While companies can continue extraction under existing licences, the U.K. has set up a North Sea Transition Authority. The government also announced a 2030 end date for the “windfall tax,” which was placed on fossil-fuel company profits when they skyrocketed in 2022.

Both the business and environmental worlds are welcoming the announcement. Tania Kumar, at the Confederation of British Industry, said: “Today’s consultations highlight the Government’s commitment to a managed transition.” The announcement was also applauded by Mel Evans, climate team leader at Greenpeace UK: “The only way forward for a secure future means ending our reliance on oil and gas,” she said.

“The Government clearly recognises that creating a renewable energy system can provide this country and its energy workers with economic opportunities and stable, future-proofed jobs.”

US coal-fired power retirements to double in 2025

Don’t anyone tell the president but “U.S. power generators plan to remove about 8.1 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power generation capacity this year,” reports Reuters. “Roughly double the amount that was retired in 2024.”

“As fossil-fired plants retire, the EIA said it expects the addition of 63 gigawatts of new utility-scale power generating capacity in 2025. Solar power is expected to make up the largest share of those new additions, followed by battery storage, wind and natural gas.”

‘Wildly ambitious’

Let’s end off this week with a visit to the largest planned carbon-neutral community in North America. It’s in Alberta, right in Edmonton’s city core and it’s roughly the size of the existing downtown. In fact it’s the site of the old Edmonton airport and David Dodge, host of Green Energy Futures says that Blatchford is a “visionary project … ahead of its time when it started, but now it’s taking off and leading the way.”

You can read about it but it’s even better to see what’s going on and Dodge has produced a video tour. It’s the first in a special series about the Blatchford Carbon Neutral Community, built around a district energy system drawing from beneath a lake to heat and cool the homes. 

“The vision is 30,000 Edmontonians living a sustainable lifestyle, carbon neutral, using renewable energy,” says Tom Lumsden, who heads up the City of Edmonton development project.