ELC 2025: Modernizing Climate Advocacy for the Twenty-first Century by Paul Rink
The climate movement is facing a reckoning. Time is running out to prevent catastrophic outcomes from the climate crisis, prompting advocates to reevaluate long-standing approaches, propose ambitious new ones, and even consider triaging strongly held environmental priorities.
Attempts to revamp advocacy methods in the face of increasing urgency are understandable and even admirable. However, such efforts will only be successful if they account for both our decreasingly egalitarian society and our increasingly polarized political system. Given these considerations, the most tactical path forward is to lean away from convincing people to care about climate change and toward strategically capitalizing on disparate individual interests that align with climate action.
To many in the United States and globally, weighing strategic approaches may feel like whistling past the graveyard as the Trump Administration leads core climate laws and policies to slaughter. Since taking office in January 2025, the President has rejected long-standing scientific consensus on the existence of climate change, doubled down on fossil fuel production, withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and heralded withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, revoked federal approval for wind farms, eliminated policies promoting electric vehicles, threatened to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and much more. Amidst this blitz of rollbacks, one could easily dismiss proposals to adjust efforts aimed at securing a climate-responsive future as exercises in fool-hardy optimism.
Yet, climate advocates should be thinking optimistically about the future. After all, hope persists. High demand for electricity and the relatively rapid process for developing profitable wind and solar projects has ensured that renewable energy continues to expand in the U.S. despite the Trump Administration’s immense opposition. Indeed, courts have repeatedly overturned President Trump’s attempts to obstruct progress on wind farm development. Efforts to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases have encountered serious roadblocks. State and local initiatives aimed at bolstering climate change mitigation and resiliency continue to move forward. Notwithstanding the current federal antagonism toward such activities, political tides can shift quickly and unexpectedly (just ask 2016). It behooves the environmentally engaged to aim for bringing about and taking advantage of such an eventuality by strategically erecting a broader tent of support, courting allies who may even be climate deniers but who are willing to support climate-responsive initiatives out of pure self-interest.
Like it or not, climate change is a highly divisive topic. The position you take on climate change is one of the best predictors for which political party you fall into in the United States, with three times more Democrats than Republicans considering it a priority issue. In our modern era of identity politics, just mentioning the word “climate” can turn someone whose incentives align with environmental protection initiatives into a disinterested or even antagonistic opponent of such policies.
Looking at the country as a whole, about half the population sees climate change as a major threat, while a little over one-third considers it a top priority. However, two-thirds of the U.S. feels that the government should prioritize the development of renewable energy through tax incentives and regulatory streamlining. Studies have shown that Republicans are more likely to support adaptation policies and programs intended to address the tangible impacts of “extreme weather” rather than the seemingly distant concept of climate change (although, notably, the opposite is true for Democrats). Relatedly, further evidence suggests that communities garner higher levels of bipartisan support for climate change-responsive adaptation projects after they experience damaging weather events.
These trends reveal that there are many who are not inclined to prioritize climate change per se but who are nonetheless willing to support climate responsive actions and policies that align with their more front-of-mind concerns such as electricity prices and weather resilience. Environmental advocates should focus on these non-climate-based incentives, encouraging people with wide-ranging interests to join an inclusive coalition in opposition to federal policies that are harmful to more than just the climate.
Opportunities in this arena abound. For example, the Trump administration’s decision to cancel funding for and otherwise obstruct offshore wind farm development comes at a time when stagnating job creation has thrust the unemployment rate upward, pushing those without a consistent, full-time job into an elevated state of precarity. Opposing these construction projects undermines the Trump Administration’s promiseto open up well-paid industrial positions for the U.S. workforce. In addition, higher demand for energy has pushed up electricity prices at more than twice the rate of inflation, leaving many households struggling to pay for essential utilities. Completing new wind farm development projects would provide an influx of energy and bring utility costs down. These observations provide fodder for environmentalists attempting to convince even the most climate-skeptical households that supporting wind and solar power projects is tantamount to supporting job creation and more affordable monthly expenses.
Similar opportunities exist to persuade specific demographics that climate action projects are worthwhile. For example, AI data centers represent a large slice of the increasing demand for electricity in the United States. In addition to pressuring those in charge of these centers to consciously and equitably mitigate their environmental impacts, climate advocates should enlist the AI industry’s support for renewable energy development projects and policies, highlighting the benefits that will ensue from expanded sources of electricity.
To persuade people to get behind specific climate action projects (such as wind and solar farms) as well as larger climate action policies (such as subsidies for wind and solar farms), advocates must tailor their approach to each context. For climate-denying individuals and groups, even mentioning climate change at all may be counterproductive. Yet, as discussed above, there is a chance to persuade these skeptics without reference to “the topic that must not be named” by focusing on the labor and cost-saving benefits of renewable energy. Alternatively, some may be less averse to hearing about climate benefits, but community-centric, household-based, or bottom-line concerns will be more pertinent – and, thereby, more persuasive – for them. In such scenarios, advocates can lay out all benefits, including climate action as one item on a long list of reasons to back renewable energy (for example) and framing climate-related advantages as reinforcing those more closely held interests.
Advocates should use this tailored approach to promote a wide array of climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives. For example, environmentalists can campaign for seawalls to protect communities from storm surges and sea level rise while either carefully tailoring or completely eschewing information about how climate change is exacerbating these problems. Public officials that are already facing shoreline flooding will likely have enough buy-in for such solutions based on their lived experiences and the desire to protect property in their locality. Instead of pressuring these elected representatives to care about climate change, advocates should encourage them to enact efficient and effective adaptation policies that align with their political incentives while simultaneously solving infrastructure problems holistically and with sufficient foresight.
Focusing on how climate actions and policies assuage specific local difficulties will require a large amount of community buy-in and engagement. As such, national organizations will be most successful if they locate, fund, and empower regional and city-based advocacy groups with the requisite authenticity and credibility to communicate effectively with their neighbors and local leaders.
This bottom-up advocacy approach has the potential to build out a robust coalition of supporters for renewable energy projects with a broad range of political beliefs on both environmental and non-environmental issues. To maintain such alliances, climate advocates must leave behind a purity test mentality in favor of big tent thinking. Individuals, including voters and politicians, do not need to agree on every issue to provide meaningful, and even essential, support for climate action policies and programs. If bringing many of them into allyship means not preaching about the dangers and moral imperative of climate change, so be it.
The Biden Administration capitalized on this realization when it enacted the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Focusing almost exclusively on carrots rather than sticks, this law created government-backed incentives for development programs with real potential to create jobs, reduce energy prices, and create more resilient infrastructure in addition to combating climate change. Although the Trump Administration has taken large steps to undermine this legislation, the instinct behind it was right on target for rapidly responding to climate change through market mechanisms that align with numerous other widely shared priorities across society, such as economic prosperity and disaster risk reduction.
Currently, there is a lot of justifiable concern over the Trump Administration’s threat to reverse the endangerment finding that serves as legal justification for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emission. If the Trump Administration successfully rolls back this policy, important restrictions on greenhouse gas pollution from motor vehicles, power plants, waste landfills, and more will be vulnerable to repeal. Justifiable, important, and successful legal action is being taken to contest this arbitrary and capricious action. That said, the twenty-first century calls for more than defending and reinforcing the regulatory strategies that defined the twentieth century environmental movement.
Because climate change is an issue that impacts everyone, advocates need to recruit and work with a wide swath of constituents, meeting each community and interest group on its own terms. This means providing people with localized reasons to care and vote for the policies and programs necessary to address the problem, whether that involves calling such initiatives “climate action” or not. Twenty-first century climate advocacy must make this crucial pivot lest we all suffer the consequences of failed cooperation amidst the fundamental collective action problem of our time.
Paul Rink is anAssociate Professor at Seton Hall University School of Law.