How to keep the climate fight alive through a second Trump term

Leah Stokes and Adrian Deveny helped craft the Inflation Reduction Act, the most consequential climate law in U.S. history. Now they’re planning how to keep it alive through the next four years of a Donald Trump administration. 

That plan starts with pushing through as much climate funding and regulation as possible in the waning days of the Biden administration and fighting attempts from a hostile Trump administration to claw that progress back after Inauguration Day. 

It continues with pushing federal, state, and local policymakers to ensure the clean energy projects and factories financed by the law’s hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits create jobs in Republican-controlled states and districts. Those jobs must make a difference in people’s lives to give them a personal stake in fighting for the energy transition — and to give their lawmakers an incentive to protect the climate law making them possible. 

And unfortunately, the plan will require coping with ​“some really devastating losses in that fight in the next four years,” said Stokes, a professor and climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who worked with groups such as Rewiring America to help craft key energy provisions of the law. 

“I am not 100 percent doom and gloom,” she said during a Thursday event hosted by The 2035 Initiative, the university-affiliated think tank she helped launch two years ago. But then, she conceded, she’s an optimist — ​“I thought Kamala Harris was going to win.” 

Deveny, founder of policy advisory firm Climate Vision and former director of energy and environmental policy for U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), admitted that he’s ​“less optimistically predisposed.” 

That’s largely based on his 13 years working on climate issues in Congress, the first 10 of which yielded no progress on federal climate legislation. But the patience and preparation paid off with a raft of achievements during the Biden administration — the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the IRA and CHIPS and Science Act in 2022. 

“The Biden administration has had some incredible successes,” Deveny said, not just in terms of investment in clean energy projects and manufacturing facilities, but also in booming employment in the clean energy sector. The U.S. Department of Energy reported in August that clean energy employment increased by 142,000 jobs in 2023, growing twice as fast as the U.S. economy overall. 

Still, even the laws on the books are not sufficient to bring the U.S. in line with the Biden administration’s climate commitments, including halving greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and shifting to carbon-free electricity by 2035. ​“We would have had to have passed another IRA-sized bill next year to be on track to meet our 2030 goals,” he said. ​“To be on track to meet our 2035 goals, we would have had to pass a bill two to three times the size of the IRA next year.” 

But ​“the truth about climate is that doing nothing is not an option, and every ton reduced is a future that’s a little less bad,” Deveny said. ​“And so we always have to fight to eke out every ton that we can.” 

Here’s how Stokes and Deveny think advocates can keep climate progress moving in the right direction in the years to come. 

From Biden to Trump 2.0

Between now and January 20, when Trump will be sworn in for his second term, the directive is clear: Lock in as much of the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda as possible. 

Over the last few years, the federal funding created by the IRA and other major bills has not flowed as quickly as its backers had hoped. That’s because the federal government moves slowly, Deveny said.

“They have already been working at lightning speed for federal agencies — which is not really lightning speed — but they’re moving as fast as they can,” he said. 

But with Trump pledging to claw back any unspent funds from the IRA, ​“getting that money out the door is critical, because any unspent money is at risk of not ever getting spent,” Deveny said. 

That rush is already underway. In the past few months, the pace of federal funding announcements has accelerated, with DOE grid-modernization grants and loans for distributed solar and clean fuels manufacturing, U.S. Department of Agriculture grants for rural electric cooperatives, and financing from the Environmental Protection Agency’s ​“green bank” program for community solar, electric trucking, electric school buses, and building efficiency. Two days after the election, the DOE’s Loan Programs Office finalized a $475 million loan for a battery recycling facility. More can be expected between now and Inauguration Day. 

Federal agencies are also finalizing rules and regulations at a breakneck pace, Stokes said. ​“There are civil servants working in the IRS, in the White House, and the DOE and EPA who have already been working very long hours for months and years, and that’s only going to ratchet up.” 

The goal of that work is to cement the legal standing of key Biden administration policies, including EPA rules limiting methane flaring and leaks from oil and gas operations, restricting carbon emissions from fossil-fueled power plants, and setting emissions standards for light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles.

“Regulations can’t just be thrown out,” Stokes said. The last Trump administration’s efforts to undo Obama administration climate and energy policies ran into a buzzsaw of legal and administrative challenges. 

“There are just a ton of organizations with exceptional lawyers who have an incredible track record of success catching any sloppiness” in drafting regulations, Deveny said. 

To be clear, a second Trump administration may choose to violate legal and administrative guidelines and statutory obligations, Stokes warned. ​“When we start thinking about anti-democratic institutions, we have to start thinking about coloring outside of the lines.” 

Leaning into the Inflation Reduction Act’s non-climate benefits

It’s not yet clear whether Republicans will retain a majority in the House of Representatives, and if they do, by what margin. If they end up controlling both houses of Congress, the industrial-policy theory built into the Inflation Reduction Act could be key to keeping the law alive. 

“If you actually make stuff in America, like solar panels and electric vehicles and batteries, you have jobs here in this country,” Stokes said. ​“And if those jobs flow to Republican and rural districts, it’ll be much harder to repeal.” 

That’s precisely what’s happening with the clean energy manufacturing investments boosted by the IRA and other federal policies. The DOE expects those investments to create more than 210,000 jobs — the majority of them in Republican-leaning states and congressional districts.

The main question is whether that jobs boom will happen quickly enough to cement support from members of Congress who would fight efforts to repeal some or all of the IRA tax credits, Deveny said. 

“Political power grows the more time it has to build in the economy,” he said — and the IRA has only had about two years. Of the roughly $270 billion in clean-energy manufacturing facility announcements since the IRA passed, about $80 billion are under construction, but few are yet open and employing people. 

“Members of Congress care a lot about manufacturing jobs, more than just about any kind of job,” Deveny said. ​“When there’s a manufacturing facility in your district or in your state that employs 2,000 people, you defend that to the death.” 

“The faster those facilities get built, the better chance we have to really build a case to members to defend certain policies within the Inflation Reduction Act on a parochial basis, on the basis of protecting jobs in their state and in their district. And that’s going to be really important to the stickiness of those policies.” 

That dynamic is already playing out with some Republicans in the House of Representatives. In an August letter, 18 House Republicans asked current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to spare IRA tax credits that have ​“spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference.”

As large portions of the 2017 Trump tax-cut package come up for reauthorization in 2025, each representative will be ​“put in a position to vote for a bill that delivers on President Trump’s agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy,” he said. ​“One of the ways they’re [considering] paying for those tax cuts is by cutting the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.”

“That’s very doable for some provisions” of the IRA, but ​“it’s going to be really hard for others.”

Hope for bipartisan gains? 

Even if Democrats can take control of the Senate and House in the 2026 midterms, any congressional climate progress will need to be bipartisan in nature. That’s not as unlikely as it might sound, Stokes said. 

“Of course, the bipartisan infrastructure law was done in the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. And Democrats and Republicans teamed up to pass an energy law in 2020 in the waning days of the first Trump administration. 

That 2020 bill is emblematic of what can happen when climate advocates are ready to seize unexpected opportunities, Deveny said. The energy provisions tacked onto a $1.4 trillion federal spending package included $35 billion in energy research-and-development programs and extensions of solar and wind tax credits. 

He also pointed to U.S. competitiveness in international trade as a key area where Democratic and Republican lawmakers can find common ground. 

The funding for climate and energy science in the CHIPS and Science Act, for example, was set by ​“benchmarking against the levels that China invests in R&D domestically,” he noted. ​“There’s really a lot of bipartisan appetite to do more in that space, whether it be on the R&D side, or whether it be on shoring up industrial manufacturing.” 

One key climate win from Trump’s first term also provides support for this thinking. In 2020, Trump signed a Covid relief package that contained a law giving EPA the authority to phase down production and use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a climate super-pollutant used in refrigeration and air conditioning. The law got Republican backing not because of its climate benefits, but because of ​“domestic manufacturers who went to Republicans to say this is about competition with China,” Deveney said. 

Stokes noted that during the October 1 vice-presidential debate, JD Vance called for boosting U.S. manufacturing of clean energy technologies in order to compete with China. ​“We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States of America,” Vance said. 

Said Stokes, ​“There might be some spaces for these unexpected wins.” 

Looking to states for action

Climate advocates also need to focus on the state level, where ​“progress is incredibly important for several reasons,” Deveny said. ​“One reason is that it just delivers tons,” especially action by California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. California’s climate progress ​“matters for its own sake, and it often will have a secondary effect, where a lot of other states will adopt those policies.” 

As it stands, two dozen states have aggressive clean energy and carbon-cutting goals, almost all of them passed by Democrats, but a few passed with bipartisan support. Yet not many of the states are on track to hit their targets for 2030 and beyond, which means they’ll have to redouble their efforts in the coming years. 

State leaders can also build the groundwork for federal action, as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee did when he campaigned for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. ​“Inslee ran on his climate record in Washington, and developed a plan that was largely built off of what he had accomplished in the state,” he said. ​“A lot of other candidates then were copying his ideas and other ideas that were coming out of states.” 

These types of plans and policies could be wrapped into future IRA-sized bills that will need to be passed for the U.S. to do its part to combat climate change, Stokes said. 

But any plan that has a chance of succeeding in the years to come must bring along not just today’s climate advocates, but some of the people who voted for Trump this year, she and Deveny said. 

“These are not bad people,” Stokes added. ​“And we have to think about how they’ve been left behind, and how we bring them back into our coalitions — because we have to win if we want to deliver on climate.”