In 2020, a source shared a presentation with me from an internal branding workshop they’d been asked to attend for bp. It was fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because it indicated that the oil major felt genuinely threatened by a surprising new enemy: young people. There have always been ebbs and flows in the climate movement, and there have always been young people involved in it, but a new wave came roaring to life in 2016 during the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and really caught fire in 2018 in response to the most aggressive warning yet from global climate scientists. Suddenly every country had a Greta Thunberg–driven not by Thunberg herself who seemed to mostly find the attention annoying, but by the media’s penchant for young, blonde activists, despite the fact that in many cases the “Greta” of this or that country had been organizing for longer. Structural racism and media groupthink aside, it was a rare moment of heightened attention on the climate crisis and globally the climate movement went on to build real political power over the next five years, driven in large part by the youth climate movement.
Climate litigation exploded during this time, too, bolstered by new science that could accurately attribute the likelihood and ferocity of extreme weather events—from heat waves to fires, hurricanes to floods—to climate change, and by journalistic investigations that brought documentation to light of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change, when, and what it did with that information. From the courtroom to the streets to the ballot box, it was the sort of momentum that the climate movement hadn’t seen since the early 1990s, when the real threat of binding global emissions reduction treaties prompted the fossil fuel industry to spend billions spreading climate denial. It felt like maybe this time things would be different.
Then the backlash came, swift and overwhelming, and helped along by a global pandemic that put an end to protest of all kinds for a while. Even before Trump’s election to a second term, talking heads on the right and the left chastised youth climate activists for being out-of-touch, elite, or just annoying. They became alternately a terrifying threat of anarchism or a laughable bunch of kids who didn’t understand economics and should get back to school. Segments of the climate movement itself criticized youth activists for being “too disruptive,” and the more progressive wing of the movement for “confusing” the climate issue with too many other issues, from democracy to civil rights. As we’ve covered extensively at Drilled, this didn’t just happen and wasn’t solely people’s personal reactions to the protest, much as various pundits may choose to believe otherwise. There was a concerted effort beginning in earnest in 2016, as a reaction to the Standing Rock movement, to paint climate activists with a particular brush in order to then justify criminalizing their protests. This took the form of fake news sites and corporate surveillance and propaganda, white papers and strategic narratives from think tanks, and hundreds of talking heads going on a wide range of news shows to wring their hands or lecture about how the climate kids were doing protest wrong.
Then came the 2024 Trump campaign, during which Trump promised oil majors he would do their bidding for a billion dollars. True to his word, the second Trump administration has moved to criminalize climate action of all kinds.
It has mostly worked. 350.org massively reduced its U.S. operations, Greenpeace U.S. could disappear entirely under the weight of a more-than-$300 million judgement against it for allegedly orchestrating the Standing Rock protests, a ruling that managed to punish Greenpeace and insult the actual Indigenous organizers of the protests at the same time. All it took for foundations based outside the U.S. to withdraw their support of climate organizations was the threat of angering the Trump administration. Now rightwing foundations are targeting academic researchers who have participated as experts in climate litigation. Meanwhile Republican politicians have proposed a liability shield for the fossil fuel industry, something the industry has been pushing for for years, first as part of a carbon tax and then as a line-item they attempted to smuggle into the Covid relief legislation. Today, there’s no need to hide, the bill’s sponsors—Ted Cruz in the Senate and Harriet Hageman in the House—have said explicitly that the point is to protect oil companies from climate liability cases. They hope to follow in the steps of New Zealand’s right-wing government, which moved to pass similar legislation earlier this year to block a legal threat to the industry from proceeding in court.
Then there’s the Trump administration’s simultaneous rollback of environmental regulations and climate policies, crackdown on campus protests, axing of research grants for anything related to science, and near-criminalization of the word “climate,” coupled with Department of Justice and now House investigations into various climate organizations and the threat to strip organizations the administration doesn’t like of their nonprofit status. These are the same tactics Modi has used in India, Bukele in El Salvador, and Duterte in the Philippines to go after environmental and human rights defenders that threaten the profits of their backers.
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It is an all-out assault and in response, the climate movement has gone dormant almost as swiftly as it gained momentum. The only stalwart from the 2018 wave that seems to be weathering the storm is the Sunrise Movement, which pivoted in late 2025 to broadly fighting authoritarianism as opposed to strictly climate battles. They were criticized for it by many, just as they were in 2024 when they withheld support of Biden for a time in the hopes that they could use what leverage they had to encourage him to stop funding a genocide. Sunrise turned out to be prescient about how much that issue would impact voter turnout, and their pivot to saving democracy as the first step towards saving the planet seems like a smarter move every day. Climate organizations should be broadening their scope to include fighting fascism, but few are and fewer still seem to think it’s a good strategy. Instead, many in the movement are encouraging activists to put away the idea of linking climate with other justice movements and go back to stumping for batteries. Greta Thunberg, once championed by the movement for her moral clarity is now chastised for applying that same clarity to the genocide in Gaza.
With all the chaos in the world now—democracy under threat around the world, wars waging and AI waiting in the wings—some are saying that it’s “not the time” to talk about climate. It’s the same lecture we heard during the Covid pandemic, that we hear any time a new crisis arrives. But now is exactly the time, not just to talk about climate but also to make clear that a fight for a livable planet absolutely includes a fight for a just planet. Climate is not a side issue, separated from the rest, to be picked up and put down when we have spare time and energy. On the contrary, it is fundamentally an issue of democracy and fairness that touches everything else.
Trump was elected for a second term, yes on the backs of an army of podcast bros, but also with more funding from Big Oil and Big Tech than any president before him. The creeping corporate-backed authoritarianism we’re facing now began the moment Trump promised the fossil fuel industry the keys to the kingdom for $1 billion and then delivered for less than half that a lifelong wishlist for the industry, ranging from the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act to the gratuitous cancelling of renewable energy projects already underway, and gutting of the EPA. His use of immigration policy and anti-terrorism policy to target dissidents, too, began as a strategy during his first term to punish those involved with the Standing Rock movement; it’s now been expanded to effectively target anyone the administration has a problem with and to create a low-level fear humming in the background of American life.
Nor is climate separate from the cost-of-living crisis and the punishing impacts of inflation. Extreme weather, fueled by climate change, is already driving up the cost of food, a problem that will be exacerbated by what promises to be a punishing El Niño season. Wars of choice fought on behalf of oil majors, and government intervention on behalf of dying industries like coal aren’t helping Americans either: they’re raising the price at the pump, at home, and across the supply chain, making life harder for everyone and keeping the country stuck in the past while the rest of the world moves on. When the administration does look to the future it is with the naivete of a little boy in space pajamas, dreaming of life on Mars and AI girlfriends or, worse, with the same sort of crass transactionalism with which the U.S. government has long approached the oil industry, happy to sell American privacy, property, and freedom to the highest bidder.
Climate has always been part of every story, but it’s no longer remotely subtle: Authoritarianism, affordability, corruption, these are issues American voters care deeply about and they all have a clear climate component, but neither the climate issue nor the climate movement is anywhere to be found in political discourse as we head into a critical election cycle.
In a way, the right has always been more intersectional than the left in the U.S. Where the left has different groups and organizers for women’s rights, trans rights, climate action, workers’ rights, and so forth, the right has organizations that fight against all of the above and then some, all at the same time, together. At this moment, with the world literally on fire and the U.S. government throwing fuel on it, we desperately need a climate movement and, just as desperately, it needs solidarity.
No one group or policy will solve everything or appeal to everyone, and building a movement that can sustain requires tolerance of a wide range of approaches. The radical flank is crucial to expanding what’s deemed politically viable; the centrists and politicos are necessary for getting policy written and passed; and the movement as a whole has to show up for other movements. The key civil rights battles in this country have never been won only by the group whose rights were in question. The climate movement is battling the same exact organizations and people that oppose immigration, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, and increasingly those organizations are being funded and amplified by the very same industries the climate movement is working to hold accountable, Big Oil and Big Tech.
In the deafening silence where climate protest chants used to be, many public voices on climate are calling not for a fight against fascism or solidarity with immigrants targeted by the ICE crackdown, not for a resurgence at all, but for retreat. Stick to batteries, they advise. Sell people on the glories of clean energy. But what good is clean energy in a fascist technostate kept in line by AI-powered 24-hour surveillance drones?
This week’s must-reads
[stream] “Families Like Ours” on Netflix – I know I’ve recommended it before, but I found myself telling everyone I met about it at Climate Week last month, so here to recommend it again. The Danish show follows a wealthy Danish family as they suddenly become climate refugees. It’s mindblowingly good!
[read] “Interpol crackdown on illegal mining, logging and wildlife trafficking leads to 233 arrests,” by Steven Grattan for the AP
[listen] Dan Tabersky’s Manifestofrom Audible – A fast-paced and super fun listen through the history of various manifesto as Tabersky builds his own and encourages listeners to do the same.
[read] “‘Knowing our opponents’: how a pro-oil-and-gas group tracks journalists, First Nations and environmentalists,”by Carl Meyer for The Narwhal- A look at new research by Greenpeace Canada that lays out a web of pro-oil-and-gas groups working together to influence public opinion on climate change.
[read] “The bi-partisan energy bill tearing the climate movement apart,” by Jake Bittle and Austin Corona for Grist. The fight over “permitting reform” and what it means for climate action.
