Zero-Based Extinction: Nature’s Life Support Gets a Sunset Clause

Executive Orders Unravelling The Few Environmental Protections That Remain

The forests are burning, the oceans are dying, and the sky itself groans under the weight of a warming world. Species vanish by the hour. Rivers are choked with poisons. Entire ecosystems teeter on the brink of collapse. And yet, while the Earth screams for mercy, the architects of our destruction double down.

Enter the latest chapter in this death-march economy:
“Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy.”

The name reads like a dull accounting memo. Harmless. Forgettable. But don’t be fooled—this executive order is anything but benign. Beneath the bureaucratic buzzwords lies a radical escalation in the war against life, a calculated move to gut environmental protections and bulldoze the last fragile barriers that hold back corporate plunder.

This is not an isolated policy blip. It’s the logical next step in a long lineage of industrial pathology, one that spans parties, decades, and administrations. If we want to understand the full scope of what this EO represents, and why it must be opposed with everything we've got, we need to zoom out, dig deep, and tell the truth.

Neoliberalism Laid the Groundwork for Deregulated Destruction

Long before this executive order, the foundation was being poured with concrete made of corporate compromise and ecological betrayal. Neoliberal Democrats—masters of symbolic gestures and hollow reforms—talked green while expanding fossil fuel exports, passed climate bills while subsidizing pipelines, and prioritized GDP over planetary boundaries.

They governed with a velvet glove, but the fist underneath was always serving capital. Agencies were defanged. Regulations were whittled down. The market was enshrined as savior… even as it devoured the future.

“Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting” Isn’t Reform, It’s a Death Knell

This executive order demands that every energy-related regulation (no matter how vital) be automatically set to expire unless actively renewed. It’s bureaucratic necromancy, built on the twisted idea that protecting ecosystems must be justified again and again or be left to die.

This isn't just lazy governance… it’s calculated sabotage. It strips memory from the law, imposes a death sentence on rules that keep air breathable and water drinkable, and replaces precaution with profit.

It turns environmental protection into a countdown clock, ticking away toward annihilation.

The Cost Is Planetary

Every rule targeted here exists for a reason. Emissions limits. Species protections. Land use boundaries. These aren’t red tape… they're life support. And this order treats them like obsolete junk in a warehouse, to be purged unless someone fights to save them.

And who’s fighting? The same agencies already captured by industry? The same officials who see deregulation not as disaster, but as opportunity?

This is not about “cutting costs” or “streamlining.” It’s about accelerating collapse, under the banner of “unleashing” energy—as if what the world needs now is more oil, more coal, more pipelines tearing through the last wild places.

They’re not just eroding regulations. They’re erasing the future.

Do They Know the End is Coming?

If this feels like a death cult running the state, that’s because it is.
Don’t think for a second that the people writing these orders, gutting these regulations, and looting the planet’s last reserves are ignorant. They know. They see the climate data. They know the glaciers are gone. They know the forests are thinning, the oceans are acidifying, the insects disappearing. They know that collapse is not decades away—it’s already begun.

And rather than confront the consequences, they’ve chosen acceleration.
Burn it all before it burns us. Extract every last drop before the collapse gets in the way. Build bunkers, fund private security, seed offshore bank accounts—this is the logic of the doomed ruling class. It’s not denial. It’s hedging.

They’ve abandoned any pretense of stewardship. What we’re witnessing now is the terminal stage of industrial civilization—the looting of the hospice, the final feast before the lights go out.

So what does that mean for us?

It means we must stop waiting. There is no savior on the ballot, no breakthrough technology coming to patch the broken sky. The time for preparing and resisting is now. Not when the grids go dark. Not when the last tree falls. Now.

We must build networks of mutual aid, of food resilience, of local power and ecological memory. We must resist every step of the machine’s forward crawl—not just with words, but with our bodies, our art, our rage, our solidarity.

Because the collapse isn’t just coming. It’s here.
And whether it ends in silence or resistance is up to us.

Resistance Must Match the Crisis

We are past the point of polite dialogue. This is not governance—it’s looting. It’s arson with a law degree. And the only response that matches the moment is organized, uncompromising resistance.

The Earth is bleeding, and the state has chosen to sharpen the knife.
What are we going to do about it?

Further reading:

Total Resistance: Why We Must Learn to Fight Back Now