The Climate Fight That Doesn’t Depend on Washington

Washington may be retreating from climate action, but communities across the country are building a movement that doesn't depend on who's in the White House.

Michael Richardson, campaigns director at the nonprofit Third Act, is annoyed about data centers—and not just because of their high energy consumption and environmental impact. It’s because “every hour I spend on data centers is an hour I don’t spend on the build-out of solar energy,” he says.

Stopping data centers and accelerating the adoption of solar energy are two ongoing  campaigns. The work is propelled by thousands of Third Act volunteers, the majority of whom are 60 and older. They lobby local zoning boards, circulate petitions, host workshops, and win votes. They do the work where they see they can make the most impact, says Richardson. That’s not on Capitol Hill—that’s in their neighborhood.

“When the Trump administration came back, Third Act and many other organizations made the decision that we were not going to focus on the federal government,” Richardson says. “Everything is a matter of urgency, and we have to get results now—not four years from now.”

In Donald Trump’s second term, his administration didn’t waste any time returning to rolling back climate protections. After a landmark scientific finding that classified greenhouse gases as a threat to public health was overturned, similar decisions swiftly followed: canceling billions in funding for green energy projects, removing environmental protections to expand fossil fuel extraction, and offering funds to coal plants. Experts say these rollbacks disproportionately harm poor and minority communities and lead to substantial economic and health damages across the country. While billionaire donors and the fossil fuel industry stand to benefit, these changes have confused other economic sectors and jeopardized progress toward combating the climate crisis.

And yet, as Leah Stokes, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the upcoming book The Carbon Wave, explains, all is not lost when it comes to climate activism. “The story is more complicated than everything is lost, and everything is terrible,” she says. This is, in part, because not all progress was reversed. For example, in 2026, solar generated more energy than coal in the United States for the first time. While there have been some dips, Americans continue to buy electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. Individual states are stepping up to fill the void of rolled-back protections. We are further along in the “decarbonization trajectory” than we would have been otherwise, without now-scaled-back policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, says Stokes. Those advances matter, and they underscore a larger lesson: climate action becomes more durable when it’s not reliant on who is in office.

That durability is reinforced by another kind of natural resource: people. These could be community volunteers or individuals who might not even see themselves as climate activists, but who know they care about preserving the natural world. A 2025 study published in Environmental Science & Policy found that 53 percent of Americans support climate justice, while a 2026 report from the Johnson Center for Philanthropy found that community-led movements are driving climate action as federal support diminishes.

Solving the climate crisis isn’t something that one government or technology can do alone. It will require many people to work together and commit to long-term plans. Strategies need to be adaptable and responsive and prioritize justice and equity, says Karen Bailey, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado–Boulder who researches climate adaptation and resilience. “When we have a coalition of communities, we can start to say, ‘This is what we want for our climate. This is what we want for our community,’” Bailey says.

From carbon footprint to carbon wave

The “carbon wave” is Stoke’s counterpoint to the carbon footprint. Instead of focusing on one-time consumer choices, there’s a need to join with others to change structures. This could look like working with others to replace a fossil fuel-powered infrastructure, such as a school or church, with an electric alternative. It could be advocating with your community for a law that makes it easier to adopt solar panels.

Stokes points to the work by UndauntedK12 as an example. The nonprofit successfully pushed for funding to electrify schools through the CalSHAPE program across California, and—after the program was later frozen—continues to fight for more schools to get the upgrades necessary for battling extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and indoor air quality. The nonprofit also created a guide for any community that’s interested in changing its schools’ infrastructure to be more climate-compatible.

Greenlight America is another nonprofit that helps people advocate for utility-scale solar and wind farms in their communities. According to the group, its work in 2025 helped avoid more than 369 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution, while providing economic benefits.

“It’s real work, but creating infrastructure change is how we actually will change the system,” says Stokes. “Yes, Trump took us out of the Paris Climate Agreement. But you can still electrify your house. You can campaign to change a law. This is work we can do regardless of who is president.”

It’s a shift in thinking toward collective action, rather than individual action. The former, Stokes observes, is way more empowering. For example, research on students suggests that those who engage in collective activities to address climate change, such as community outreach and peer education, are less likely to feel hopeless.

Collective action, in turn, is more likely to happen when people can really grasp how their actions will be effective. A criticism of the Inflation Reduction Act was that the relative benefits weren’t delivered fast enough, says Malcom Araos, an associate professor at New York University, whose research focuses on climate policy and politics. Subsequently, it didn’t sway communities positively at the polls.

But change is possible through ground-up work. Take New York as an example: In the state, grassroots organizers were the designers and organizers of New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, “one of the world’s most ambitious decarbonization legislative efforts,” says Araos. Other grassroots groups, like Public Power NY, were key to passing the Build Public Renewables Act, while others, like RISE Rockaway and Red Hook Initiative, continue to support their communities through climate resilience and emergency preparedness projects.

It can be useful, says Araos, to design and support collective measures that facilitate long-term change while also showing immediate benefits. This could look like “low-carbon leisure”—investing in transit infrastructure to enjoyable public spaces, like the beach.

Fun is a feature of Third Wave’s Solar Advocates Project; planning meetings take place at Rotary Clubs, church groups, and house parties. There’s a desire to “celebrate” the economic, air quality, and environmental benefits of solar, says Richardson: “We want people to know what’s going on, and we’re here to spread the ‘yes’ narrative.”

Aaros also points to the possibility of the four-day work week, which curbs carbon emissions and lowers energy consumption while providing employees with greater bandwidth. Small-scale experiments with the four-day work week suggest it can improve work-life satisfaction and physical and mental health. Meanwhile, a pilot program in the United Kingdom showed that the adjustment led to a 21 percent reduction in employees’ car miles traveled and a 22 percent increase in daily productivity.

But what is especially helpful for facilitating community buy-in is learning what individual issues people want to address in their neighborhoods, says Araos. From there, it’s about developing interventions and responses that are tailored to those threats. “It’s an opportunity to make new infrastructure something that people also really enjoy and love,” he says.

Climate resilience beyond politics

The term “climate change” can, too often, feel like jargon, says Bailey. What people can understand is that they are struggling because of water and temperature. She’s seeing that, in regions with more traditional conservative perspectives, particularly in rural areas, people are having more conversations about how to be resilient to factors such as higher temperatures, increased flooding, and drought. They are responding to those individual issues and are eager to find solutions.

“Even if rollbacks are going to worsen or exacerbate the climate crisis as a whole, at the individual and household level, there are lots of communities that are working to continue to address those changes,” she says. Richardson has observed a similar trend with Third Act, especially with the work concerning data centers. The people stepping up to halt data center construction aren’t just liberals—there are libertarians, there are folks who would otherwise identify as MAGA. But they all agree “that they don’t want environmental damage in their backyard,” he says.

Meanwhile, while withdrawing from the Paris Agreement certainly wasn’t a good thing, “these agreements only work if governments commit to them over a period of decades,” says Bailey. “And with the political winds shifting in the way that they do, we can’t necessarily rely on that, unfortunately.”

Instead, there’s a need for progress that doesn’t radically change depending on who is in office. But while it’s understood that collective action is necessary to survive the climate crisis, the logistics of how to facilitate it effectively are still being worked out across the country. Addressing the less tangible impacts of climate change is one way in.

“We need to think about what it means for our mental health, our relationship to others in our communities, and the potential for conflict within and beyond communities,” says Bailey. For meaningful resilience, individuals need to feel they have the capacity to adapt, or the skills and resources to cope.

Fostering that capacity can’t solely rest on individuals. It requires institutions that are equipped to understand and address the social dimensions of climate change. “What we likely need is an increased capacity within existing offices to be able to ask these questions,” says Bailey. This could involve creating new positions for people trained in the social sciences who understand how to conduct community-engaged outreach and planning grounded in relationships.

Active participation and solidarity also rely on democratic decision-making processes, says Araos. But too often the sort of participatory democracy that happens in the U.S., like community planning meetings, ends up in NIMBYism—something Aaros witnessed while conducting his own research. One way around that is to incorporate citizens early in the process, so they can have a say in what happens, rather than waiting to give feedback on a finished product. But even then, the success of a project can depend on maintaining relationships at each level: In his study on public participation on a coastal project, Aaros found that, “After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible… As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the ‘frontline community.’”

“Communities aren’t anti-expert,” Araos reflects. “They are anti-being told one thing is going to happen, and then another thing happens.” He’s also interested in adopting something like France’s Citizens’ Convention for Climate, in which randomly selected people were brought together to draft proposals to cut climate emissions. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was an interesting experiment in using a representative group to deliberate on issues.

Ultimately, the broader lesson is that people are more likely to support climate action when they have a genuine role in shaping it. Even if the government moves away from federal climate protections, states, cities, and neighborhoods have the power to decide what they want.

This agency, in turn, can combat feelings of hopelessness, says Bailey. When people feel like they’ve had a meaningful say, they can be more resilient moving forward, even when they don’t quite see the results they want.