Trump and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for its war on the environment | Alexander Hurst

Europe punished Russian billionaires over the war in Ukraine. It should do the same to those abetting an ecocidal regime

The ecological disasters of the US-Israel war with Iran are already bad enough. The noxious smoke from bombed oil facilities, spills in the Gulf’s waters, the contamination of farmland and groundwater with toxic chemicals unleashed by explosions and their debris, the millions of additional tons of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. But as bad as it is, the Iran war hides another conflict: the ecological war that Donald Trump’s US is waging against the rest of the world.

When the EU and UK imposed individual sanctions, travel bans and asset seizures on Russian oligarchs, it wasn’t because most of them were individually responsible for Vladimir Putin’s colonial war of aggression against Ukraine. They were targeted because, as a class, they were viewed by many as inextricable from the apparatus of corruption and levers of power of the Russian state threatening global stability.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now