As the realities of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a Republican trifecta in Washington began to set in on Wednesday morning, climate and clean energy advocates mostly did not sugarcoat the result or look for a silver lining. But in press releases and interviews, reactions to the news coalesced around two key ways to think about what happens next.
Like last time Trump was elected, the onus will now fall on state and local leaders to make progress on climate change in spite of — and likely in direct conflict with — shifting federal priorities. Working to their advantage, though, much more so than last time, is global political and economic momentum behind the growth of clean energy.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable,” former White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already underway.”
“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”
Reached by phone on Wednesday, the climate policy strategist Sam Ricketts offered a blunt assessment of where things stand. “First things first, this outcome sucks,” he said. He worried aloud about what another four years of Trump would mean for his kids and the planet they inherit. But Ricketts has also been here before. During Trump’s first term, he worked for the “climate governor,” Washington’s Jay Inslee, and helped further state and local climate policy around the country for the Democratic Governors Association. “For me, it is a familiar song,” he said.
Ricketts believes the transition to clean energy has become inevitable. But he offered other reasons states may be in a better position to make progress over the next four years than they were last time. There are now 23 states with Democratic governors and at least 15 with Democratic trifectas — compare that to 2017, when there were just 16 Democratic governors and seven trifectas. Additionally, Democrats won key seats in the state houses of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will break up previous Republican supermajorities and give the Democratic governors in those states more opportunity to make progress.
Spears also highlighted these victories during the Climate Cabinet press call, adding that they help illustrate that the election was not a referendum on climate policy. “We have examples of candidates who ran forward on climate, they ran forward on clean energy, and they still won last night in some tough toss-up districts,” she said.
Ricketts also pointed to signs that climate policy itself is popular. In Washington, a ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s emissions cap-and-invest policy failed. “The vote returns aren’t all in, but that initiative has been obliterated at the ballot box by voters in Washington State who want to continue that state’s climate progress,” he said.
But the enduring popularity of climate policy in Democratic states is not a given. Though the measure to overturn Washington’s cap-and-invest law was defeated, another measure that would revoke the state’s nation-leading policies to regulate the use of natural gas in buildings hangs in the balance. If it passes, it will not only undo existing policies but also hamstring state and local policymakers from discouraging natural gas in the future. In Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the movement to ban gas in buildings, a last-ditch effort to preserve that policy through a tax on natural gas was rejected by voters.
Meanwhile, two counties in Oregon overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot measure opposing offshore wind development. And while 2024 brought many examples of climate policy progress at the state level, there were also some signs of states pulling back due to concerns about cost, exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s major reversal on congestion pricing in New York City.
The oft-repeated hypothesis that Republican governors and legislators might defend President Biden’s climate policies because of the investments flowing to red states is also about to be put to the test. “I think that's going to be a huge issue and question,” Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “You know, not only can Democrats close ranks to oppose any changes, but is there any kind of cross-party Republican base of support?”
Josh Freed, the senior vice president for the climate and clean energy program at Third Way, warned that the climate community has a lot of work to do to build more public support for clean energy. He pointed to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, driven in part by the perception that the transition away from fossil fuels is hurting real people at the expense of corporate and political interests.
“We’ve seen, in many places, a backlash against adopting electric vehicles,” he told me. “We’ve seen, at the local county level, opposition to siting of renewables. People perceive a push for eliminating natural gas from cooking or from home heating as an infringement on their choice and as something that’s going to raise costs, and we have to take that seriously.”
One place Freed sees potential for continued progress is in corporate action. A lot of the momentum on clean energy is coming from the private sector, he said, naming companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have invested considerable funds in decarbonization. He doesn’t see that changing.
A counterpoint, raised by Rabe, is those companies’ contribution to increasing demand for electricity — which has simultaneously raised interest in financing clean energy projects and expanding natural gas plants.
As I was wrapping up my call with Ricketts, he acknowledged that state and local action was no substitute for federal leadership in tackling climate change. But he also emphasized that these are the levers we have right now. Before signing off, he paraphrased something the writer Rebecca Solnit posted on social media in the wee hours of the morning after the electoral college was called. It’s a motto that I imagine will become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the next four years. “We can’t save everything, but we can save some things, and those things are worth saving,” Ricketts said.
