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A peek inside the playbooks of four climate advocacy orgs.
A new Trump administration’s climate agenda will be much the same as the old one.
Project 2025, the 920-page instruction manual for an incoming Republican administration from the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, its Loan Programs Office, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) — and so did its 2017 equivalent. Every Trump budget included cuts to these programs. The Trump administration rewrote emissions standards, attempted to prevent states from enforcing more stringent guidance, and reduced the social cost of carbon. Project 2025 outlines most of these same changes and more.
Environmental and climate-focused groups played a key role in fighting those climate policies last time around. Along with state attorneys general, these groups filed lawsuits against regulatory changes and worked with business groups to build support for federal action on climate. The game plan, say people working for some of those same climate advocacy groups today, would be much the same for round two.
At the same time, though, the political questions have grown more complex, even for programs once considered ideologically neutral. If Republicans control one or both houses of Congress, in addition to the White House, how will climate advocates convince Republican lawmakers even to preserve existing law, let alone continue advancing a decarbonization agenda?
After talking with four different climate-focused groups — the Sierra Club, Evergreen Action, Third Way, and the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation, each of which has a different approach to clean energy advocacy — I was left with four takeaways for how they’ll attempt to handle a second Trump administration.
No organization I contacted provided a specific plan for a second Trump administration. But Sierra Club, Evergreen, and Third Way all said they’re working on dual tracks, charting a course to continue supporting the Biden administration’s climate policy both now, as the administration scrambles to finalize regulations, and under a potential second term from either Biden or Trump.
“There’s certainly planning going on amongst enviros, as there always is around these times, of what the next four years could look like,” both for a Biden and for a Trump presidency, Patrick Drupp, Sierra Club's director of climate policy, told me. “We should be prepared that every single thing we liked and praised in [the Biden] administration would come under fire” in the event of a Trump victory, he added.
A second Trump administration would, for instance, almost certainly attempt to scale back new rules on soot pollution, mercury and air toxics standards at power plants, and the recently tightened limits on tailpipe emissions, Drupp said — effectively “anything at EPA.”
Drupp’s team is working to game out what policies and rollbacks might come first. If and when they happen, the Sierra Club will swing into action to explain “what it means when you roll back these regulations,” he said. “They have important real-life consequences for folks.” Sierra Cub also has a whole legal team separate from Drupp’s policy shop, and he said his colleagues would very likely sue to block efforts like these, as well.
Evergreen will make its case against Trump — i.e. “explain why bad ideas are bad,” as Craig Segall, vice president at Evergreen Action, a climate policy and advocacy offshoot of Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign, put it to me.
“This is an election that matters on geologic timescales,” Segall said. “It’s our job to put forward that case — and also to talk about how the Biden administration and the states can and should do better in a second term.” Segall pointed to Michigan’s new clean energy standard as an example of aggressive state policy that would be difficult for a Trump administration to undermine. And he highlighted Georgia as a state less ideologically interested in climate change but still benefiting from clean power investment.
Then there’s the Inflation Reduction Act. Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Energy lists repealing IRA as its first specific policy goal. While the IRA has helped drive the largest buildout of clean energy in American history, as of 2023, most Americans hadn’t heard of it, according to a Heatmap poll.
Without the IRA, growth in renewables would continue, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Third Way’s senior director of domestic policy for climate and energy, told me. But it wouldn’t continue at the same pace, putting the U.S. behind on emissions reductions targets and limiting its ability to keep up in a global competition to manufacture clean energy technology.
The IRA’s success — and survival — could depend on the extent to which Republican lawmakers are willing to quietly embrace it, as Emily Pontecorvo pointed out last summer. With significant investments flowing to the Republican-led Battery Belt states, one line of argument would posit that red state politicians have incentives to protect economic activity in their district.
Members of Congress might be enthusiastic about budget cuts in the abstract, but when those budget cuts come to their districts, those members lose interest, argued David Ellis, a senior vice president of policy and outreach at the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation. Given how much the uptake of IRA’s tax credits has outpaced initial projections, Ellis described it as among the most immediately impactful pieces of legislation passed in recent memory. That will make it “very hard to undo,” he said.
There are reasons to think that line of reasoning might not hold up — a University of Texas at Austin study showed that Texas state senators with renewable energy investment in their districts were no more likely to support pro-renewables policy than senators without. Republicans will likely try to overturn the IRA regardless of the political implications, Drupp said. “How long did it take before Republicans stopped trying to overturn Obamacare?” he said. “I think it's similar.”
It took until 2017, seven years after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, for that legislation to achieve majority approval in tracking polls. That uptick in sentiment came as Congress very nearly repealed the law, before a handful of Republican senators famously squashed those efforts.
But the ACA wasn’t just popular because Republicans were trying to repeal it. Its approval ratings also came from the fact that Americans were feeling the impact of the law, Sarah Kliff and Dylan Scott argued for Vox in 2017.
The analogy between the IRA and the ACA is imperfect, Fitzpatrick said. Still, it underscores the basic political principle at play. If more Americans can understand the benefits the IRA offers them, they’ll be more hesitant to overturn it.
“For that comparison to hold, the average American person, family, business owner has to be able to see a real impact on the things they care most about,” Fitzpatrick said. If Americans can understand the pocketbook and energy reliability impacts of the IRA in addition to its impact on climate, that could put it off-limits.
Third Way is trying to emphasize to Democrats that they, in turn, need to emphasize the benefits of the IRA when they talk to voters. “We also need to make sure that advocates, people who are influential in communities across the country, understand not just that this isn't just a lefty priority,” Fiztpatrick said, noting Third Way’s work with educational organizations aimed at grassroots audiences. “This isn't just about climate change. There are benefits that are reaching them in their communities.”
Along with labor groups, business will also prove to be another key constituency in any fight over the IRA, Segall told me. IRA repeal is “clearly a high priority” for some conservative lawmakers — but “there are now billion-dollar industries that are correctly reckoning they have to decarbonize to stay competitive,” he said. Nissan and General Motors, for instance, told the Financial Times that the end of the IRA might spell trouble for their American electric vehicle businesses.
The president cannot unilaterally eliminate either a department or a Congressionally authorized office within a department. But Congress can.
Republicans controlled at least one house of Congress for all four years of the Trump administration, and yet proposed cuts to EERE, ARPA-E, and other climate-focused offices in the Department of Energy never came to fruition. In 2017, six Senate Republicans — including Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Sen. Lamar Alexander, then chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for DOE — wrote a letter to express their support for the programs.
“Energy investment across the board came out of the first Trump administration, if not unscathed, certainly less damaged than other parts of the government,” Ellis said.
Next time around, Project 2025 calls for eliminating the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, its Office of State and Community Energy Programs, ARPA-E, the Office of Grid Deployment, and its loan program, and EERE. But just because things didn’t go according to plan last time doesn’t mean those programs are safe.
Ellis told me that Congressional Republicans are now much more beholden to the Trump platform than they were in 2017. “The early signs are not good that a Republican Congress would do anything to restrain Donald Trump, given the fact that they're falling in lockstep behind him,” he said. That leaves the offices that have served as incubators and provided funding for nascent clean energy technologies and projects more vulnerable than before.
Sen. Alexander retired in 2021. The new ranking Republican on the subcommittee that handles DOE appropriations is Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, who has criticized the Biden administration’s energy policy but has not called loudly for cuts.
Fitzpatrick said he’s hopeful that a bipartisan group of lawmakers will step in to prevent anything drastic — but he noted that could be more challenging given what he described as the “ideological bent” Trump has projected onto research and development funding for energy, which had previously enjoyed consistent bipartisan support. One example: The Energy Act of 2020, which Ellis described as a “smorgasboard of bipartisan energy innovation efforts,” which passed under Trump.
Third Way, he noted, will look to educate a wide range of policymakers — key appropriators included — on the benefits of various DOE programs.
Even if Congress holds budgets relatively stable, a Trump DOE will have bureaucratic levers to pull to slow the work, both Fitzpatrick and Drupp said. That could mean allowing workforce attrition, sitting on reports, gumming up the process of offshore wind approvals, rubber-stamping new fossil fuel infrastructure, failing to conduct research directed by appropriations, or slowing the pace of loans.
A Trump administration could also wipe out hallmark Biden policies by executive order, such as the Justice40 initiative to bring 40% of the benefits of federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities, Ellis added. (Project 2025 does not call for its elimination, but calls it an “innocuous”-sounding program that runs the risk of politicizing energy.)
Project 2025 lays out a long list of changes for the Environmental Protection Agency: Pausing any research contract worth over $100,000, closing the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, preventing California from enforcing emissions restrictions on greenhouse gasses, and making it easier for the agency to approve pesticides.
Many more regulations — surrounding ozone and particulate pollution, mercury and air toxin pollution, heavy duty truck emission standards — could be rolled back or changed, said Drupp.
“It becomes hard when everything you love and care about is under attack,” he told me. “How do you prioritize that?” Collaboration will prove critical, Drupp noted — different organizations will attempt to figure out how best to allocate their resources.
During the first Trump administration, the “big greens,” community groups, and dozens of states filed lawsuits that helped stifle regulatory changes, Segall pointed out. The length of the regulatory process will extend the time horizon of any possible regulatory change. Although the Trump administration announced its intent to repeal the Clean Power Plan in 2017, it failed to unveil a new plan before 2019. That plan, in turn, remained tied up in court until one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
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Trump called himself “king” and tried to kill the program, but it might not be so simple.
The Trump administration will try to kill congestion pricing, the first-in-the-nation program that charged cars and trucks up to $9 to enter Manhattan’s traffic-clogged downtown core.
In an exclusive story given to the New York Post, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that he would rescind the U.S. Transportation Department’s approval of the pricing regime.
“The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways,” Duffy told the Post.
He did not specify an end date for the program, but said that he would work with New York to achieve an “orderly termination” of the tolls. But it’s not clear that he can unilaterally end congestion pricing — and in any case, New York is not eager to work with him to do so.
The attempted cancellation adds another chapter to the decades-long saga over whether to implement road pricing in downtown New York. And it represents another front in the Trump administration’s war on virtually any policy that reduces fossil fuel use and cuts pollution from the transportation sector, the most carbon-intensive sector in the U.S. economy.
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump posted on Truth Social, the social network that he owns. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state agency that oversees New York’s tolling and transit system, has filed to block the cancellation in court. In a statement, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that Trump didn’t have the authority to kill the tolling program.
“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” Hochul said. “We’ll see you in court.”
Since it started on January 5, congestion pricing has charged drivers up to $9 to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. With its launch, New York joined a small set of world capitals — including London, Singapore, and Stockholm — to use road pricing in its central business district.
Even in its first weeks in Gotham, congestion pricing had seemingly proven successful at its main goal: cutting down on traffic. Travel times to enter Manhattan have fallen and in some cases — such as driving into the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey — have been cut in half during rush hour, according to an online tracker built by economics researchers that uses Google Maps data.
Anecdotally, drivers have reported faster drive times within the city and much less honking overall. (I can affirm that downtown is much quieter now.) City buses zoomed through their routes, at times having to pause at certain stops in order to keep from running ahead of their schedules.
The program has been so successful that it had even begun to turn around in public polling. Although congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular during its long gestation, a majority of New Yorkers now support the program. In early February, six of 10 New Yorkers said that they thought Trump should keep the program and not kill it, according to a Morning Consult poll.
That matches a pattern seen in other cities that adopt congestion pricing, where most voters hate the program until they see that it successfully improves travel times and reduces traffic.
While Trump might now be claiming regal powers to block the program, the toll’s origin story has been democratic to a fault. Although congestion pricing has been proposed in New York for decades, the state’s legislature approved the program in 2019 as part of its long-running search for a permanent source of funding for the city’s trains and buses.
The federal government then studied the program for half a decade, first under Trump, then under Biden, generating thousands upon thousands of pages of environmental and legal review. At long last, the Biden administration granted final approval for the program last year.
But then congestion pricing had to clear another hurdle. In June, Hochul paused the program at the last moment, hoping to find another source of permanent funding for the city’s public transit system.
She didn’t. In November, she announced that the program would go into effect in the new year.
It’s not clear whether the Trump administration can actually kill congestion pricing. When the Biden administration approved the program, it did so essentially as a one-time finding. Duffy may not be able to revoke that finding — just like you can’t un-sign a contract that you’ve already agreed to.
In his letter to Hochul, Duffy argues that congestion pricing breaks a longstanding norm that federally funded highways should not be tolled. “The construction of federal-aid highways as a toll-free highway system has long been one of the most basic and fundamental tenets of the federal-aid Highway Program,” he says.
That argument is surprising because federal highways in Manhattan — such as the West Side Highway — are excluded from the toll by design. Drivers only incur the $9 charge when they leave highways and enter Manhattan’s street grid. And drivers can use the interstate highway system but avoid the congestion charge by entering uptown Manhattan through Interstate 95 and then parking north of 60th Street.
Duffy also argues that the tolling program is chiefly meant to raise revenue for the MTA, not reduce congestion. The federal government’s approval of pilot congestion pricing programs is aimed at cutting traffic, he says, not raising revenue for state agencies.
In its lawsuit, the MTA asserts that Duffy does not have the right to revoke the agreement. It also says that he must conduct the same degree of environmental review to kill the program that the first Trump administration required when the program was originally proposed.
“The status quo is that Congestion Pricing continues, and unless and until a court orders otherwise, plaintiffs will continue to operate the program as required by New York law,” the MTA’s brief says.
Whether they will or not depends on whether all politics really are local, anymore.
JD Vance had a message recently for Germans uneasy about the way Elon Musk has been promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party ahead of their country’s upcoming elections: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference. It was supposed to be a joke, but apparently the vice president of the United States is still peeved at the fact that he had to see a Swedish teenager on his TV saying that we ought to do something about climate change.
Just a throwaway line meant to convey the Trump administration’s general belligerence and contempt for Europeans? Perhaps. But it also communicated that the administration has had it with scolding, not to mention any government actions meant to confront planetary warming; in its first month in power, it has moved swiftly and aggressively to suspend or roll back just about every climate-related policy it could find.
Now congressional Republicans have to pass a budget, and in so doing decide what the law — and not just a bunch of executive orders — will do about all the existing programs to promote clean energy and reduce emissions. That means we’re headed for an intra-GOP conflict. On one side is ideology, in the form of a desire by the administration and many Republicans in Congress to eviscerate government spending in general and climate spending in particular. On the other side are the parochial interests of individual members, who want to make sure that their own constituents are protected even if it means their party doesn’t get everything it wants.
Climate hawks got optimistic last summer when 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson imploring him not to push for wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 climate law filled subsidies for clean energy, since their districts are benefiting from the boom in manufacturing the law helped spur. About 80% of the green energy funding from the IRA is going to Republican districts; in some places that means thousands of local jobs depend on the free flow of federal funds.
While some of the largest spending is concentrated in the South, especially the areas that have come to be known as the “Battery Belt,” there are hundreds of congressional districts around the country that benefit from IRA largesse. That’s an old best practice of policy design, one the defense industry has used to particularly good effect: The wider you spread the subcontracts or subsidies, the more members of Congress have jobs in their district that rely on the program and the safer it will be from future budget cuts.
The IRA could have some other allies in its corner; for instance, automakers that are struggling to bring the prices of their electric models to an affordable level will be lobbying to retain the tax subsidy that can reduce the sticker price of an electric vehicle by $7,500. There is already a backlash brewing to the administration’s freeze on climate-related programs in rural areas. Many farmers entered into contracts with the federal government in which they would be reimbursed for land conservation and renewable energy projects; after taking loans and laying out their own money believing the government would honor its part of the agreement, they’ve been left holding the bag.
So will Congress step in to ensure that some climate funding remains? This is the point in the story where we inevitably invoke former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s dictum that “All politics is local.” No matter what issue you’re working on, O’Neill insisted, what matters most is how it affects the folks back home, and the most successful politicians are those who know how to address their constituents’ most immediate problems.
Like many such aphorisms, it’s often true, but not always. While there are many members of Congress whose careers live or die on their ability to satisfy the particular needs of their districts, today national politics and party loyalty exert a stronger pull than ever. The correlation between presidential and House votes has grown stronger over time, meaning that voters overwhelmingly choose the same party for president and their own member of Congress. Even the most attentive pothole-filling representative won’t last long in a district that doesn’t lean toward their party.
Which is perfectly rational: Given the limited influence a single House member has, you might as well vote for the party you hope will control Washington rather than splitting your ticket, no matter who is on the ballot. That doesn’t mean members of Congress have stopped working to bring home the bacon, but it does mean that the pressure on them to deliver concrete benefits to the voters back home has lessened considerably. And when the congressional leadership says, “We really need your vote on this one,” members are more likely to go along.
There will be some horse-trading and pushback on the administration’s priorities as Congress writes its budget — for instance, farm state members are already angry about the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which buys billions of dollars of agricultural products from American farmers to distribute overseas, and will press to get that funding restored. And with a razor-thin majority in the House, individual members could have more leverage to demand that the programs that benefit their districts be preserved.
On the other hand, this is not an administration of compromisers and legislative dealmakers. Trump and his officials see aggression and dominance as ends in and of themselves, apart from the substance of any policy at issue. Not only are they determined to slash government spending in ways never seen before, they seem indifferent to the consequences of the cuts. For their part, Republicans in Congress seem willing to abdicate to Trump their most important power, to determine federal spending. And if Trump succeeds in his goal of rewriting the Constitution to allow the president to simply refuse to spend what the law requires, Congress could preserve climate spending only to see it effectively cancelled by the White House.
Which he would probably do, given that it is almost impossible to overstate the hostility Trump himself and those around him have for climate-related programs, especially those signed into law by Joe Biden. That’s true even when those programs support goals Trump claims to hold, such as revitalizing American manufacturing.
What those around Trump certainly don’t want to hear is any “scolding” about the effects of climate change, and they’re only slightly more open to arguments about the parochial interests of members of Congress from their own party. As in almost every budget negotiation, we probably won’t know until the last minute which programs survive and which get the axe. But there are going to be casualties; the only question is how many.
A new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap shows steep declines in support for the CEO and his business.
Nearly half of likely U.S. voters say that Elon Musk’s behavior has made them less likely to buy or lease a Tesla, a much higher figure than similar polls have found in the past, according to a new Data for Progress poll provided exclusively to Heatmap.
The new poll, which surveyed a national sample of voters over the President’s Day weekend, shows a deteriorating public relations situation for Musk, who has become one of the most powerful individuals in President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Exactly half of likely voters now hold an unfavorable view of Musk, a significant increase since Trump’s election. Democrats and independents are particularly sour on the Tesla CEO, with 81% of Democrats and 51% of independents reporting unfavorable views.
By comparison, 42% of likely voters — and 71% of Republicans — report a favorable opinion of Musk. The billionaire is now eight points underwater with Americans, with 39% of likely voters reporting “very” unfavorable views. Musk is much more unpopular than President Donald Trump, who is only about 1.5 points underwater in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.
Perhaps more ominous for Musk is that many Americans seem to be turning away from Tesla, the EV manufacturer he leads. About 45% of likely U.S. voters say that they are less likely to buy or lease a Tesla because of Musk, according to the new poll.
That rejection is concentrated among Democrats and independents, who make up an overwhelming share of EV buyers in America. Two-thirds of Democrats now say that Musk has made them less likely to buy a Tesla, with the vast majority of that group saying they are “much less likely” to do so. Half of independents report that Musk has turned them off Teslas. Some 21% of Democrats and 38% of independents say that Musk hasn’t affected their Tesla buying decision one way or the other.
Republicans, who account for a much smaller share of the EV market, do not seem to be rushing in to fill the gap. More than half of Republicans, or 55%, say that Musk has had no impact on their decision to buy or lease a Tesla. While 23% of Republicans say that Musk has made them more likely to buy a Tesla, roughly the same share — 22% — say that he has made them less likely.
Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker, worth more than the next dozen or so largest automakers combined. Musk’s stake in the company makes up more than a third of his wealth, according to Bloomberg.
Thanks in part to its aging vehicle line-up, Tesla’s total sales fell last year for the first time ever, although it reported record deliveries in the fourth quarter. The United States was Tesla’s largest market by revenue in 2024.
Musk hasn’t always been such a potential drag on Tesla’s reach. In February 2023, soon after Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Heatmap asked U.S. adults whether the billionaire had made them more or less likely to buy or lease a Tesla. Only about 29% of Americans reported that Musk had made them less likely, while 26% said that he made them more likely.
When Heatmap asked the question again in November 2023, the results did not change. The same 29% of U.S. adults said that Musk had made them less likely to buy a Tesla.
By comparison, 45% of likely U.S. voters now say that Musk makes them less likely to get a Tesla, and only 17% say that he has made them more likely to do so. (Note that this new result isn’t perfectly comparable with the old surveys, because while the new poll surveyed likely voters , the 2023 surveys asked all U.S. adults.)
Musk’s popularity has also tumbled in that time. As recently as September, Musk was eight points above water in Data for Progress’ polling of likely U.S. voters.
Since then, Musk has become a power player in Republican politics and been made de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. He has overseen thousands of layoffs and sought to win access to computer networks at many federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, leading some longtime officials to resign in protest.
Today, he is eight points underwater — a 16-point drop in five months.
“We definitely have seen a decline, which I think has mirrored other pollsters out there who have been asking this question, especially post-election,” Data for Progress spokesperson Abby Springs, told me.
The new Data for Progress poll surveyed more than 1,200 likely voters around the country on Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15. Its results were weighted by demographics, geography, and recalled presidential vote. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.