The fate of our climate depends on much more than just which party controls Washington. Despite their current celebrations, polluters will remain vulnerable under President Trump.
“The struggle against climate change is over” if Donald Trump wins again, tweeted Bernie Sanders before Election Day 2024. Presumably our fate is now sealed.
The conclusion is understandable. On our current course, we’re already set for about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating in the coming decades. That will kill tens of millions of people from heat stroke, starvation, and disease. Vast portions of the globe will be made uninhabitable while chaos spreads everywhere else.
With the fossil fuel barons now retaking the helm of the world’s most powerful government, changing course becomes harder. In addition to the carbon they’ll add to the atmosphere, their evisceration of laws governing air quality, water contamination, and toxic chemicals will kill tens of thousands in just the next few years.
Yet apocalyptic arguments are both paralyzing to our movement and scientifically misguided. Saving the climate isn’t an all-or-nothing game. We’re very likely to breach the dangerous 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. But there’s an enormous difference between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius, or even between 1.5 and 1.6 degrees Celsius. “Every fraction of a degree matters,” as climate experts often remind us.
Furthermore, the notion that we’re locked into a future of “runaway climate change” — a phrase commonly heard on the left — is wrong. As leading climate scientist Michael Mann writes, the best climate models indicate that atmospheric heating will all but cease “once we stop emitting carbon.” The grimmest ecological projections can still be avoided.
Despair also ignores the continued vulnerability of our enemies. Politicians can nudge the energy ship one way or another, but they don’t determine its cardinal direction. Although the White House, Republican Congress, and Supreme Court will do all they can to protect fossil fuel companies and undermine renewable energy, they aren’t the only three power centers in society. The climate’s fate also depends on many other actors, including our movement.
Another Look at Trump’s First Term
Despite Trump’s best efforts, some of the US climate movement’s most notable recent victories happened on his watch. More coal-fired power plant capacity was retired in the United States from 2017 to 2020 than from 2013 to 2016. That’s right: the coal industry took a bigger hit under a president who campaigned on reviving it than under a president who was supposedly waging war on it. Notice how Trump rarely mentions coal anymore?
The reason is that coal’s fate depends only marginally on national politicians. Since the early 2000s, hundreds of local environmental groups, acting largely independently of the big national organizations, have made it much harder for coal plants to be built or remain in operation. The natural gas boom has also undermined coal, but the market shift has been amplified by the movement.
Oil and gas also faced setbacks in Trump’s first term. In his last year, the pipeline industry was dealt a string of defeats, for instance, in the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast gas pipeline slated for West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Barack Obama had appeared to support the project, Trump had championed it, and the Supreme Court had blessed it. Yet through a combination of protests and lawsuits, the locals were able to “threaten the economic viability of the project,” as the companies reported in their cancellation announcement.
Trump suffered many quieter defeats too. His efforts to enact extra subsidies for coal and nuclear energy, to expand offshore oil drilling, to end tax credits for the wind industry, and to force banks to fund drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all were blocked.
The movement was a key force in these victories. Polluters certainly think so. Midway through Trump’s term, a pipeline CEO complained of the “rising tide of protests, litigation, and vandalism” facing the industry, warning that “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”
In 2020, industry representatives warned that a barrage of unfavorable court rulings could lead to “a tipping point” where it becomes “incredibly difficult for anybody to invest in any kind of [fossil fuel] infrastructure.” More and more lenders, meanwhile, were “folding to activist environmental groups’ pressure.” These complaints all came under Trump, not Obama or Joe Biden.
Conversely, renewable energy continued to expand. More US wind farm capacity was installed under Trump than during any other presidential term, including Biden’s. Renewables still didn’t grow nearly fast enough, but the point is that Trump wasn’t the key variable. State and local governments, corporate and institutional consumers of energy, the financial sector, and foreign governments all help to shape energy investments. They will remain crucial targets for climate organizers in the coming years.
Another factor in Trump’s defeats was resistance from within the ruling class. Carbon pollution endangers many other capitalists, who at times mobilized against plans that would boost dirty energy at their expense. The tourism and seafood industries protested the plan to expand offshore drilling. Financial institutions began to curtail support for fossil fuels due to “reputational” concerns — that is, popular opposition — as well as the investment risk. This pattern was especially visible in the coal sector, much more uneven in oil and gas.
Another source of elite resistance came from corporations that had already sunk large investments into renewables. They resisted Trump policies that would harm those investments. The growing wind industry threatened disinvestment if its tax credits were repealed. Automakers resisted the rollback of tailpipe emission limits since they had already begun investing the capital needed to comply with the tighter rules, and for the same reason they’re now lobbying Trump not to roll back Biden’s rules.
More recently, it appears that the deluge of “anti-ESG” (environmental, social, and governance) legislation in Republican-led states has not significantly impeded renewable energy. In a 2023 survey, most investors and developers reported that those laws have had no impact on their investment choices. Renewables still face headwinds, but the 2024 election results won’t make or break the sector.
On the governmental side, regulators and judges who weren’t personally beholden to polluters sometimes sided with the movement. Trump won’t be able to purge all of them. Even Trump’s own appointees were not uniformly reliable servants of the fossil fuel companies.
The Real Guardrails
The record of Trump’s first term can help us predict the sources of polluters’ vulnerability in his second. Yet the restraints on Trump in 2017–21 are sometimes misunderstood.
It wasn’t the sage counsel of Trump advisers like John Kelly, whom candidate Kamala Harris lauded as a “guardrail,” that restrained Trump in his first term. Nor were congressional Democrats the key guardrails in most of the battles mentioned above. This is good news for us, considering the maniacs who will advise Trump in his second term, the Republican stranglehold on Congress, and many Democrats’ willingness to collaborate with Trump.
Our movements were the more important guardrails. It’s important to understand how we played that role. It wasn’t through the unfocused outrage of occasional mass marches nor through lobbying or electing Democrats. We were most powerful when we put sustained, disruptive pressure on capitalists and state elites whose interests diverged from Trump’s.
Misunderstanding that causation can lead to demoralization. Noting the limited impact of marches and petitions in Trump’s first term, some analysts have glumly wondered if all resistance is now futile. Partly for that reason, many liberals and leftists have remained in a stupor since Election Day.
Our fight will likely be harder in a second Trump term. Project 2025 is ready for detonation, legal processes are now more favorable for polluters, and Trump is assured of personal impunity. The damage will be severe.
We can’t predict who will prevail in each battle. But that uncertainty is itself cause for optimism. We do know that Trump, and the parasitic interests he serves, are still vulnerable. They’d love for us to forget that.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
