As the pretender to the imperial throne that exists only in his mind, Trump is working hard to overturn the order of the world, to steal a phrase from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 composition The Future. And the immediate consequences? “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,” Cohen wrote.

A case in point. The very day that Trump was inaugurated he signed an Executive Order pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Summit Agreement.

The Paris agreement was the last ditch effort of the global community to finally set a cap on how much global heating was too much (2 degrees C) and the signatories agreed to increase their emission reduction efforts to ensure the world stays below that threshold. In fact, the aspirational cap on global heating was 1.5 degrees C. That was nearly 10 years ago.

Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Agreement to secure a future without runaway climate change poses a huge problem for the world as the United States is one of the largest sources of carbon pollution in the world. And it is having a snowball effect.

In January, five Canadian banks followed some big American ones in abandoning the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. These big banks had committed to directing their lending and investment with net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. No more. Not since Trump was inaugurated. His reckless withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is giving an excuse to others to bail from their responsibilities. Burn baby burn.

A couple of weeks back, Poilievre Conservative strategist Chad Rogers was interviewed on CBC, just months before a federal election. He said, “We can care about the environment when the economy is good. The economy is not good.”

Breaking news; the environment is not somewhere out there, but we’re embedded in it. Just like our minds are embedded in flesh and bone.

This absurdity was hilariously captured in a satirical interchange between Australian comedians Bryan Dawe playing a journalist interviewing John Clarke as the Minister of Shipping about a Greek oil tanker spill off the coast of Western Australia in a skit entitled “The Front Fell Off.”

When Dawe asks the fake Minister of Shipping about what he was going to do to protect the environment from the massive oil spill, he responded that they towed the tanker outside the environment, that it is no longer in the environment.

Newsflash. The only way to get outside of the environment is to leave the planet. Perhaps that explains Elon Musk’s obsession with going to Mars.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and his threats to wage economic warfare against Canada through tariffs and God knows what else, has Alberta’s Premier joining crowds that believe they live outside the environment. It has taken her no time at all to exploit Trump's tariff threats to call for a frenzy of pipeline construction that will only facilitate the production of more climate disrupting oil.

We even heard a hint of this in the New Brunswick Premier’s State of the Province speech last week. Her Minister of Environment said we need to balance the environment and the economy. What does that even mean? The economy is embedded in the environment. It draws its sustenance from the environment and dumps its waste into it.

The environment has run out of room to absorb the wastes from the burning of fossil fuels, so our climate is breaking down and our oceans are acidifying. Yet in her State of the Province speech, Premier Holt told the assembled crowd that she might permit more carbon emissions in New Brunswick, replacing our old emission reduction targets with squishy ones, so more fossil-fueled growth can happen.

The content of growth and its actual purpose matter. For example, we need to grow our public transportation network of trains and buses to provide affordable, safer and lower carbon transportation options to driving. Growing the number of cars on the road only speeds up climate change and places a financial burden on the drivers that many can ill-afford. Growing public transportation does the opposite.

We must resist Trump’s efforts to transform the clear and present danger of fossil-fueled climate change into a chimera, the mythological fire-breathing Greek monster that never really existed. It won’t be easy, as the fossil fuel giants and their political allies seize the opportunity Trump has provided to tell us the fire-breathing monster of climate change is all in our heads.

• David Coon is the Leader of the New Brunswick Green Party and the MLA for Fredericton Lincoln