Donald Trump has promised to demolish the country’s domestic and international climate policies at a crucial moment, when climate scientists say the window is closing on the world’s ability to avoid the most dangerous impacts of global warming.
But in the eight years since Trump’s shocking 2016 win, environmental groups have built more organized, collaborative coalitions and say they won’t be caught off guard by Trump’s second term in the White House.
“This is much less of a surprise than it was the last time,” said Jonathan Pershing, the former special envoy for climate under the Obama administration, who helped oversee the transition to the first Trump administration. “It’s not been a question of the kind of shock that the system collectively saw when it was expected that Hillary Clinton would win.”
“The consequence of that,” Pershing added, is that there’s been “a great deal of planning, a great deal of scenario work, a great deal of thinking on how to reflect on the last time this happened.”
Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season.
Despite the challenges posed by a clearly anti-climate-action administration, the groups have some momentum behind them and say they plan to strategically capitalize on it. The world’s seemingly inexorable transition away from fossil fuels will continue with or without a Trump White House, they say. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest-ever investment in climate action, has already disbursed billions in tax credits and subsidies to clean energy programs, cities and states, the majority of them led by Republicans who could be skittish about rescinding any funds. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the country will see a swell of young voters in coming elections who, regardless of party affiliation, have felt the impacts of climate change-fueled disasters and understand the realities of global warming.
“We know the climate crisis under the Trump administration could be accelerated,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, a youth advocacy group founded by billionaire Tom Steyer. “We are determined to do everything possible to stop that from happening, to make sure that the incredible gains under the Inflation Reduction Act will be defended. … We’re not going to let progress be rolled back without an absolute fight.”
This week, many of the country’s major environmental and climate advocacy groups held calls with reporters, voicing their resolve, outlining specific plans and, perhaps, giving themselves a public-facing pep talk.
“We’re ready. We have a plan to fight against any and all efforts to harm public health, climate action and the environment,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a call with reporters Thursday. “We’re going to use every lever we have to defend people and nature.”
Less publicly, they’ve been meeting for months to strategize. Staff have been told to expect longer hours and more work ahead.
“Let’s be honest, we can’t sugarcoat it, we’re deeply disappointed in the results,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters. “It’s very clear that the big polluters have friends at the White House again.”
One analysis, by the group Carbon Brief, found that Trump’s plans to roll back Biden climate policies could wipe out the greenhouse-gas reductions of the last five years of clean energy growth worldwide—twice over. Thursday morning, in a quarterly earnings call, the chief financial officer of Duke Energy said the Trump administration’s plans are prompting the utility to consider burning more coal.
“The fossil fuel industry is already at it,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This is the enemy that we’re fighting.”
The groups acknowledge that a second Trump administration is also going to be better organized and will have learned from its mistakes, particularly in its legal challenges of climate and environmental laws, the majority of which were overturned in the courts because of administrative missteps.
Trump appointed three of the sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices, making that body more hostile to upholding environmental protections or laws that undergird climate regulations.
“We’re going to play defense at the federal level,” Karpinski said. “We’re going to have to do it better this time.”
The Uncertain Fate of the Inflation Reduction Act
When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law in 2022, the bill directed $369 billion in spending on climate action and programs over a decade. Tens of billions of that have been distributed, but in the months before the new Trump administration takes office, advocacy groups say they’re going to push to get as much of the remaining funds distributed as they can.
“Between now and the end of the year, it’s important to get all that money, obligated and under contract, disbursed,” said Jill Blanchard, director of the climate change and environmental justice program at Lawyers for Good Government, a coalition of legal experts that formed after Trump was elected in 2016. “The main concern is that you can’t rely on this administration following the norms.”
Blanchard said the coalition and other groups are focusing on “making sure there are no unfounded claims of non-compliance and illegal attempts to take the money back.”
Though every Republican in Congress opposed the IRA, many Republican districts have become its beneficiaries. As they’ve attended groundbreaking ceremonies and heard from constituents who support the law, some of the Republicans lawmakers who voted against it have since pressed back against talk of a total repeal.
Karpinski and others said this week that they regret the IRA wasn’t passed sooner. If it had been, more voters would have experienced its impacts.
“The price and cost impact is just beginning,” Karpinski said. “People will see it over time, but they haven’t seen enough yet.”
“The main concern is that you can’t rely on this administration following the norms.”
— Jill Blanchard, Lawyers for Good Government
So, advocates said, another job in the coming weeks and months is to ensure that voters connect the IRA and the transition to cleaner energy with jobs and their own economic gains—something the Biden administration and the Harris campaign failed to do.
“The clean energy boom is just getting started,” said Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power. “If Republicans come after the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s not going to be about some abstract law or acronym. It’s going to be about whether they’re going to destroy thousands of jobs in their own districts.”
A Sharp Right Turn on International Policy
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement in his first administration and has vowed to do the same again. He has suggested he might also pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—the underpinning of the entire Paris process. His election came just as world leaders are preparing to meet next week in Azerbaijan at the annual UN gathering on climate change, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP, casting an anxious shadow over the proceedings.
“The mood music changes after a U.S. election,” Pershing said.
All of this, potentially, throws global progress toward limiting emissions into turmoil. Still, many environmental and climate advocacy groups believe it’s beyond this administration’s power to appreciably slow the world’s acceleration toward a green energy economy.
“Even with the shock, not a single other country followed the United States in withdrawing from the agreement,” Pershing said. “No one followed suit, and I don’t think anyone else will follow suit at this point, either.”
Pershing and others noted that China, the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S., currently derives 40 percent of its economic growth from green technology.
“The most consequential thing for the climate going forward really comes down to how quickly China peaks its emissions,” said Dan Lashof, director of World Resources Institute. “Eliminating the role of the U.S. [in] encouraging China to articulate and commit to more rapid emissions reductions over the next 10 years could have major consequences. … It creates an imperative for the rest of the world to keep pressure on China.”
In other words, if the U.S. leaves the Paris agreement, it will be up to other countries to take up the slack. But either way, the move toward lower emissions technologies will likely happen anyway, so advocacy groups say they will try to make that case to the new administration.
“The United States matters,” Pershing said. “But countries are basically saying: You can’t get in our way, and we won’t stop just because you guys at the moment have decided not to play.”
Domestic Policy: There’s Still Time Left
“There are still some important steps that can be taken during the lame duck,” said Bapna, of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In addition to fast-tracked IRA funds and tax credits, advocacy groups say they’re going to be pushing for the Biden administration to finalize tax credits for “tech-neutral” electricity generation, to ensure that grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and environmental justice programs are awarded and to issue its “national determined contribution” plan under the Paris climate agreement.
“Biden has a number of environmental protections in development, has several incomplete proposals to increase environmental protections that he’s been working on for some years,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We certainly want him to finalize those as is his right as president.”
Suckling said these include designating several new national monuments and finalizing rules to protect old growth forest and revamp how the Bureau of Land Management handles its conservation programs.
Going into the next administration, environmental groups say they’re already poised to ensure the new government’s moves are clear to the public.
“We have a massive FOIA operation underway now,” said Jealous, of the Sierra Club.
They’re also sharpening their legal strategies, some groups say, noting that environmental groups won the vast majority of legal cases they brought against the Trump administration.
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“We brought 163 cases against Trump,” Bapna said. “We won 90 percent.”
The groups say they will watchdog actions in the quietest corners of government agencies, particularly the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where the Trump administration not only gave top positions to chemical and oil industry executives, but also stacked scientific advisory panels with industry loyalists, not independent scientists.
“These are newer coalitions, but we’re not starting from Day One,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network. “From a national policy standpoint, we’re going to follow what’s happening—what’s on the regulatory agenda of EPA. We’ll follow the science and what’s coming out of the science advisory committees.”
“We’ve built deep coalitions and we understand each others’ strengths now,” Roos added. “We can lean into them.”
State and Local Efforts
In the days following Harris’ defeat, many advocacy groups said they had failed to convince voters that clean energy generation and technology would benefit them personally. They said they are reexamining their strategies.
The Biden administration’s green economic policies resulted in a “dramatic shift to build our economy that was hugely successful,” said Gina McCarthy, a former EPA chief. “But clearly people didn’t feel it on the ground.”
Or, amid a surge in jobs the spending has already triggered, voters simply didn’t make the connection.
The Sierra Club, Jealous said, is now training its outreach staff to focus on how lower-emission energy generation or clean energy manufacturing can benefit voters. “We need to meet people where they are and take them where we need them to go,” he said. “We need to convince them that removing a coal-fired plant will reduce asthma and heart attacks. … Four years from now, you’ll see a green movement that is more clear.”
The continuing shift to a green economy, though, will put additional pressure on Indigenous lands that are being targeted for lithium and other precious metals used in clean energy technologies.
“When it comes to the election for us as Indigenous peoples, we were always going to be facing this existential threat,” said Taylor Gunhammer, a local organizer for Protect He Sapa, a campaign under NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based tribal rights advocacy group. “We were always going to have to confront this fear and dread about our homelands and sacred lands being destroyed.”
Gunhammer added, “The substance of what is happening, which is to continue the process of extracting from and profiting from Indigenous lands—that would have occurred either way. And so, in many respects, we’re doing the same work we were doing.”
As advocacy groups brace for the return of the Trump administration, they say they also plan to work more strategically at the local, state and regional levels.
“State work is going to be incredibly important,” said David Kieve, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, “especially in states with clean energy policies and goals.”
Lodes, of Climate Power, points to some new advantages for advocacy groups at the state level. “In January 2025 there will be 23 Democratic state governors, compared to just 16 in 2017,” Lodes said. “In January 2025 there will be 15 Democratic state government trifectas compared to just six in 2017.”
“We were always going to have to confront this fear and dread about our homelands and sacred lands being destroyed.”
— Taylor Gunhammer, Protect He Sapa
Lodes also noted that 23 states will have a Democratic attorney general.
For some states, though, federal action is uniquely important.
“So much of Nevada is public lands and therefore managed by the federal government, which means who is in office really dictates the state’s environmental future,” said Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club’s Toiyabe (Nevada) Chapter, noting that public lands account for about 80 percent of the state.
“Our ground game has to be really good,” Tanager said. “We have no other option if we’re going to do anything to [solve] the climate crisis and extreme heat and the threat to our public lands.”
Elsewhere, though, the local and state levels offer a chance of forward momentum—the only chance, in some cases.
“One of the most effective ways that we can counteract the lack of action on climate that we’re going to see from the federal government for the next four years, and not even the lack of action, but the actively attacking the transition that we’re likely to see from the administration … is to push blue state allies in state and city governments to go further than they would have otherwise,” said Alec Connon, director of Stop the Money Pipeline.
“It’s a f—ing disaster, and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by not being real clear-eyed in that,” Connon said, referring to the election result. “The climate fight has certainly gotten a lot harder.”
Inside Climate News’ Dylan Baddour, Bob Berwyn, Keerti Gopal, Lee Hedgepeth, Wyatt Myskow and Noel Lyn Smith contributed to this story.
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Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, which she shared with Inside Climate News colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
