The second Trump administration has hit the ground running. The president has signed a flurry of executive orders targeting everything from birthright citizenship to pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. This is a far different moment from the first Trump term. The president is more focused, his team is more focused, and energy policy is at the top of their action list. So what does that mean for people who care about the climate crisis?
“I’d predicted that there would be a lot of civil disobedience on the day of the inauguration,” says Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University. But the polar vortex in Washington D.C moved the inauguration indoors and muted most planned acts of civil disobedience. The People’s March prior to the inauguration was significant but fell far short of the historic turnout the Women’s March had prior to the first Trump term.
President Trump has spoken of his desire to punish those who participate in civil disobedience. That could lead to escalation of violence – regardless of political affiliation. Fisher explains, “In October, the American Values Survey found that 8 percent of Democrats... felt that political violence may be necessary to protect America. When we fielded the same question… the week before the election, 24 percent of left leaning individuals reported the same thing: that they thought that political violence may be necessary to save our country. And when we did this survey at the People's March, we asked the exact same question. 33 percent of the people in the crowd reported that they believe that political violence may be necessary to save our country.”
Candidates don’t care about an issue when the voters don’t seem to care. And according to Nathaniel Stinnett, Founder and Executive Director of the Environmental Voter Project, “Only 7 percent of voters in November said that climate change was their top priority…No matter how you slice it, that's just not enough voting power.”
Reframing the narrative around climate could be one way to grow support for climate action. Stinnett says, “The greatest trick the fossil fuel industry ever played was convincing us that the climate crisis is a suicide, rather than a homicide.”
The fossil fuel industry cleverly framed the narrative first with their carbon footprint marketing campaigns that put the spotlight – and the blame – for the climate crisis on the individual rather than the corporations. That’s the story that Nathaneil Stinnett believes needs to be changed, “By defining a villain and coming together as a cooperative group to reach a collective goal against that villain, I mean, that's how we, that's how we win world wars. That's how we cure diseases. That's how we land on the moon. This is our species superpower.”
“Fossil fuels will continue to be produced as long as people need energy and demand it, And so, rather than focusing on the supply, I would say, focus your activism, your efforts, on the demand side,” says Arnab Datta, Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Institute for Progress.
The good news is that the world is not in the same place it was in 2017. We are farther along on the transition to clean energy, and the Inflation Reduction Act helped pour investments into renewable energy projects in primarily red districts. Arnab Datta, says, “Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act there has been over a half a trillion in public and private investment in clean energy.” Investments that massive are going to make it more difficult to repeal the law, despite the President’s desire to do so.