As Trump Takes Office, It’s Time for a Mass Climate Movement

This is a jarring time for our country: A far-right autocrat is taking office on a holiday many misrepresent and trivialize as vacation day, obscuring the revolutionary actions of one of the historical greats of the civil rights movement, while whole communities of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles are burning to the ground. Instead of talking about the lives lost and how to support those who will have the most trouble rebuilding, and instead of connecting the dots of these fires to climate change, the incoming administration is intent on spreading disinformation. They are threatening to undo decades of hard-fought progress with lies and deregulation.

Yet, it is often when things seem most bleak, amid grief and heartache, that we reevaluate on the scale the moment demands. That is where the climate movement is right now: The status quo is not working. We are rapidly surpassing many of the planetary thresholds, including the threshold of 1.5°C. As our climate changes, we continue to see an increasing number of catastrophic weather events, as witnessed over the last week in Los Angeles. And despite these climate disasters and massive advances in renewable energy, fossil fuel use also continues to increase; this was true even under former President Joe Biden’s more progressive presidency. Data centers for artificial intelligence and logistics have only added to this increased demand.

We urgently need to change our orientation to how we affect change and what is required. Survivors on the Titanic talked about why they didn’t move: Electricity was still functioning; it didn’t feel like the ship was going down. Being in power can feel like that. But losing power feels different—and we have to be clear-eyed that we will not succeed by lobbying President Donald Trump or his administration, or finding the right words to plead with them. So we must evaluate the levels of power that are available to us, and how we can collectively accept and redistribute the heightened risk that comes in resisting the far-right and their fossil-fueled agenda on the scale we need to.

Rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.

There’s hopeful news: Not only do we know that there is opportunity in how we meet this moment, but there are sparks suggesting that we may actually be on our way.

First, we will see, and are already seeing, an increase in exciting local organizing efforts. Groups in the 350 network have been doubling down on organizing against the power of utility companies. Many of our utilities are hurting the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels, while simultaneously gouging customers in the realm of profits. Many groups are holding utilities accountable by banning them from using ratepayers money for lobbying, intervening in hearings, and running bold corporate campaigns to get them to change their practices.

We are also seeing organizers in more and more states pass Make Polluters Pay legislation, which forces the corporations responsible for the climate crisis to pay for its cleanup.

Second, once we’ve accepted that we cannot change the initial moves Trump will make to gut climate progress, we can move into action to create the kind of reaction that might prevent further moves and bolster the local governments and courts’ ability to have an impact. We have seen this work: When Trump issued his infamous “Muslim Ban” order, tens of thousands of people disrupted business as usual at the airports, creating the popular dissent to allow the courts to throw the order out. I suspect we will see similar moves around potentially leaving the Paris accords, mass drilling on public lands, or the overturning of regulations.

The sad reality is that, no matter what Trump does, we know we will see more climate impacts that bring the climate crisis to more and more of our front doors. Amid the grief at all we have lost in the process, we have also seen people rise to the occasion in ways they’d previously been unwilling. In response to the Los Angeles fires, we have seen rapid, creative, and far-reaching mutual aid organizing spreading rapidly: a little ad hoc window into the social protections we are calling for. Data shows that most people now know that fossil fuel companies are responsible for climate change, so alongside strengthening our mutual aid infrastructure, we suspect that we will see an uptick in calls for accountability for those responsible.

Finally, the key to a broad-based movement is, quite simply, a broad base of people. As people think about the climate conditions in LA that caused fires and displacement, we can help them connect the dots to similar conditions that people faced in their home countries, causing them to migrate. We will see support for the immigrant struggle from the climate movement, support for labor rights and government workers for all sectors. In short, rather than a patchwork of different issue-based fights where each issue area elbows the other out of the way to be heard by the administration, we will see the power that is possible through a coordinated movement protecting each other.

None of this will be easy. As befits the true Martin Luther King Jr. who, along with many of his co-organizers, spent countless weeks in jail and braved white supremacist violence which killed so many during the civil rights movement. But we collectively know that this level of organizing and intensification of our struggle is necessary. Conditions change, and we change, and so, we are optimistic that out of what is hard right now, we will finally build something beautiful.