How to save the planet under Trump

Where does the climate movement go with Trump back in the White House?

Anya Kamenetz is a writer and editor covering climate change, education, and mental health issues; you can find her on Substack at The Golden Hour.

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For decades, the environmental movement has been counting down. 

Groups with names like Zero Hour, We Don’t Have Time, and Last Generation have spoken of having “12 years left to save the world,” based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 recommendation that to limit warming to “safe” levels of 1.5 degrees above historical baseline, humanity would need to reduce CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030.

But after we pass 1.5 degrees — all but certain after the re-election of Donald J. Trump — what happens to the world, and to the hopes of the climate movement?

By most accounts, we’re already in that world. 2024 may be the first full year spent at or above the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark. And 80 percent of climate scientists surveyed by the Guardian earlier this year predicted at least 2.5 degrees of warming — and that was even before the reelection of a climate denier who has promised to withdraw the U.S. from international climate cooperation. 

“The climate movement is in disarray,” Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University and the author of the 2024 book Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks To Climate Action, told me. “They’re tripping over themselves figuring out what to do. Just a couple of weeks ago they were thinking about how to get IRA 2.0,” an even more ambitious version of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s industrial policy legislation that is the nation's biggest ever clean-energy funding bill. 

The new reality requires new tactics and new thinking.