The Wrecking Crew Goes to Washington: Fractured Communities and the New Landscape of Energy Risk in the Reign of Trump

Anthony E. Ladd, Ph.D. Department of Sociology & The Environment Program. Loyola University New Orleans.

With the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency, fossil fuel interests are rapidly advancing their entire energy agenda on a number of important fronts. Trump has vowed to increase oil and gas fracking, deregulate the energy industry, create more energy infrastructure projects, ramp up foreign fossil fuel exports, and bring back coal production to western and Appalachian communities. Yet, he has dismantled many of the signature policies of the Obama administration to fight the effects of climate change. More importantly, he has surrounded himself with key cabinet members and advisors who are not just indifferent to environmental problems, but openly hostile to their remediation through government regulations and policy-making.

In this presentation, Dr. Ladd will draw on his forthcoming edited volume, Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions (Rutgers University Press, 2017) to highlight some of the ongoing technological risks and socio-environmental impacts surrounding UGOD and HVHF operations. He will then turn to a discussion of how these existing threats are likely to be exacerbated by the policies and cabinet appointments of the Trump Administration—as well as the larger congressional Republican energy and environmental agenda—over the coming months. Finally, he will offer some observations about what these neoliberal shifts in U.S. energy policy could mean for the future.

Sponsored By: Natural Hazards Center, CU Department of Sociology, National Science Foundation, and Colorado Collaboratory for Induced Seismicity.