The day the Biden administration celebrated the first major piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, the weather happened to be sublime. The White House’s South Lawn, a billiard-table green, stretched out beneath a cerulean sky. Ben Beachy, who served as a special assistant to President Biden and would help oversee the law’s implementation, told me that “it felt like the dawn of a new era.” The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was set to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in federal investments to clean-energy programs, and to those partying in Washington, the law was a major step toward a long-sought goal: a plan for America’s future that addressed the realities of climate change.
Four years on, the Republican Congress has mostly dismantled the IRA, electric-vehicle sales are in a slump, and the Trump administration is accelerating oil and gas development while axing environmental protections. The U.S. climate movement, Beachy said, “is currently experiencing a bout of dysphoria.” That’s putting it lightly. Longtime allies in the Democratic Party seem to be losing interest. Corporate America has all but ghosted climate advocates after making big pledges to go greener. Philanthropic support has gone squishy. Meanwhile, the planet is on track to speed past a 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in average global temperatures, the threshold that has been considered the bright line of danger since the Paris Agreement.
Climate leaders have sought to project a keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude. “I would characterize this moment in time as just a moment in time,” Michael Brune, the former head of the Sierra Club and the CEO of the Clean Break Fund, told me. This is just an ebb tide, advocates insist, not all that different from past periods when climate slipped to the margins of the political conversation.
There’s no doubt, however, that the dysphoria is real. I spoke with more than a dozen climate leaders spanning the academic, advocacy, and philanthropic sectors who told me, in different ways, that the American climate movement is unsure where to go from here. Having sunk to such lows so soon after climbing to such great heights, climate activists are scrambling to find the movement’s next big idea—some path that will lead them back out of the political wilderness. But right now they’re lost.
If the Inflation Reduction Act managed to be one of most tepidly—and confusingly— titled laws in American history, it also represented a genuine breakthrough for climate action, an opportunity to begin reorganizing the U.S. economy around climate goals.
Previously, the climate movement had two strategic strands, broadly speaking. The first focused on policy: pushing for international agreements (such as the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified) and national laws that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions (such as the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill that died in the Senate). Advocates scored their clearest win in 2015 with the signing of the Paris Agreement—though the signatories have failed to meet the accord’s lofty goals.
The second strategy was to attack fossil fuels directly, along with the financial institutions underwriting them. The movement had some victories: The Keystone XL pipeline died; hundreds of U.S. colleges and churches divested from fossil-fuel companies; coal plants across the country were scheduled for closure.
Then came the Green New Deal and its vision of an American manufacturing renaissance. After the neoliberal consensus that markets could manage carbon emissions fell apart, advocates and their allies in the Democratic Party got behind the idea that the best way to ratchet down emissions would be to build things: solar farms, electric-vehicle factories, high-speed rail. It was technocratic, sure, but also bold, a callback to the FDR era. Under industrial policy, the invisible hand of the market would be enclosed in a tight glove of federal priority-setting. The now-deflated Inflation Reduction Act was the wonky and somewhat less bold version of this ambition.
Today, the overriding theory of change remains the same as ever: Back fossil fuels into the grave and drive a transition to renewable energy marked by speed and scale. But within the movement, there’s little consensus on how to do that. The climate movement does not lack for clever proposals—state-level cap-and-invest programs, grid modernization, make-polluters-pay laws, greater investments in climate-change adaptation. What it lacks is support that’s as resolute as it is broad.
This has always been the climate movement’s Achilles’ heel, even at the high-water mark of the Greta Thunberg–inspired school strikes and mass marches in the years leading up to the pandemic. Climate change doesn’t score well on what public-opinion pollsters call “salience.” A majority of Americans are worried about climate change; in fact, the number of people who say they are concerned is near an all-time high. But when asked to rank climate change among other issues such as the cost of living, immigration, and health care, it turns out that most Americans aren’t very worried.
This is a structural hurdle. For decades, climate advocates have anchored their efforts in grand ideals of generational responsibility, international solidarity, and care for other species. Although inspiring, those ideals might also sound—how to put this?—abstract. So, desperate for a way to connect with Americans and their immediate concerns, climate-movement leaders are searching for some political wave to surf.
The most talked-about notion for a climate-action banner is the same issue everyone seems to be talking about: affordability. In this, the climate movement has a new ally—economics. As recently as a decade ago, “wind and solar were not cheaper. Period. Full stop,” Pete Maysmith, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “There were a bunch of reasons to do it, but it wasn’t affordability.” Now solar-plus-battery storage has become the cheapest form of new energy generation, as well as the quickest to build. Despite President Trump’s attacks on wind power, more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity that came online in the U.S. in 2025 was from renewables.
That technological and market reality means that advocates can argue, for really the first time, that a clean-energy transition is good, not just for the planet, but also for pocketbooks. This is especially true as Trump’s war against Iran spikes household energy costs. The hope among advocates is that solar, batteries, and wind can go from being coded as liberal to being coded simply as cheap—the Costco of energy as opposed to the Whole Foods of energy, as Bill McKibben likes to say.
This emphasis on cheap, clean energy is mostly a messaging strategy, but it does have real potential as policy. Environmental groups have used the clean-as-cheap argument to push public utilities commissions to approve renewable-energy projects, and Democrats in Congress have floated legislation, such as the Energy Bills Relief Act, that seeks to use the affordability argument to revive portions of the doomed IRA.
But some climate advocates caution, usually off the record, that crowing about how cheap clean energy is risks overpromising. Even a full utility-sector embrace of renewables is unlikely to cut most Americans’ monthly bills in the short run, and will merely slow the projected increase in costs. “Cost plateau” is a tough political sell, and recent polling suggests that the clean-as-cheap message isn’t breaking through.
So many climate advocates are looking to hitch the clean-energy future to populist concerns about AI, which is driving U.S. energy-demand growth and, in case you missed it, is strikingly unpopular.
Some climate leaders think the AI boom could be a way to underwrite the transition to renewables. “We’re going to make the hyperscalers pay for it, and that’s what I think is going to likely catch on with Democratic presidential candidates,” John Podesta, a consigliere to the last three Democratic presidents and a longtime climate-action champion, told me. BeYONCE is the cringeworthy acronym for this idea—bring your own clean energy. A parallel notion is to force the AI giants to offset their electricity guzzling by paying for household energy upgrades—putting heat pumps in every home in exchange for being allowed to build data centers
But that would ultimately ally the climate movement to one of the least popular industries in America. A community that is organizing to stop an AI data center because of its impact on local landscapes or the area’s rural character is unlikely to change positions because the AI facility comes with a giant solar farm. And for more radical climate activists, the notion of getting cozy with the AI bros raises major red flags.
Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate group that helped popularize the Green New Deal, floated the idea that challenging AI build-out could be a political bank shot. She’s less interested in using the AI boom to also build renewable energy—à la Podesta—than she is in exploring whether antipathy to the tech giants can be married to antipathy to oil giants. “It’s basically a question of whether or not corporations get to control the land and the air and water around us, or whether ordinary people get to,” she told me.
Leah Stokes, a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the new book The Carbon Wave, also proposed a political bank shot—connecting high energy costs and the data-center blowback to anger with Trump-administration corruption. Frustration with elites and “throw the bums out” populism could, in theory, lead some people to focus on the profiteering, and the massive political influence, of oil and gas companies.
“People don’t like fossil-fuel companies,” Stokes told me. “It’s quite intuitive for a normal person to understand that those people are profiting and making billions while the rest of America can’t even pay their energy bills.”
The climate leaders I talked with believe that Americans are thinking about climate change differently these days. They have a clearer understanding that it is contributing to painful increases in grocery costs and beginning to directly weigh on some families’ most valuable asset—their home; as homeowners in disaster-prone areas of California, Florida, and Louisiana are finding it more difficult to get insurance. It is time, some climate advocates believe, for a wholesale pivot from a morally centered movement to one centered on people’s material conditions—to reframe climate change as a kitchen-table issue for the first time. “You’ve never had more people who are experiencing climate change as a reality, not as a future problem,” Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, an environmental-law nonprofit, told me. “Real people at actual kitchen tables are talking about extreme heat, extreme weather, the insurance crisis.”
Real talk among real people is, no doubt, essential for any political movement. It’s also insufficient. If a climate message begins with energy affordability or the simmering insurance crisis or the health impacts of wildfire smoke, it then needs to build to the ultimate goal of limiting carbon pollution, whether through the supply-side strategy of stopping future oil and gas projects or through the demand-side tactic of installing more solar panels that are hooked up to EVs. Perhaps that’s a bridge too far?
The climate movement’s best ideas these days are little more than communication plays. The movement has a pile of white papers big enough to practically fuel a power plant’s boiler. But nearly 40 years after the NASA scientist James Hansen warned Congress of the dangers of global warming, a brutal mismatch exists between the number of Americans for whom climate change is priority No. 1 and the scale of the task at hand.
All political movements go through times of boom and bust, and even the bust moments can be a fertile time for experimentation and visioning. On that point, Beachy, the former Biden-administration official, likes to quote (with no small amount of ironic self-knowing) the advice of the arch free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman, to keep developing alternatives to favorite policies, “until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Inevitable, though, can take an awfully long while to arrive, and addressing climate change is, infamously, a timed test. Despite its many bright ideas, the one thing the climate movement doesn’t have is time.
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