Climate protestors march in Washington D.C. during Trump’s first term in April, 2017.

 Bloomberg/Getty Images

On Monday night, a new coalition of progressive and environmental groups held a call outlining a strategy to "fight Trump and the oil oligarchs." "We’ve been on defensive for the last three weeks, but it’s time for us to go on the offensive," said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica. "We can’t keep drinking out of the firehose," said host Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, an organizing group born out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The call was one of several recent signs that, after laying low for the first few weeks of the Trump administration, environmental groups are suiting up for battle. The United to End Polluter Handouts coalition—which among its over 30 members includes the youth-focused Sunrise Movement, NextGen America, and Zero Hour; senior-focused Third Act; consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen; and social justice grassroots organization Hip Hop Caucus—is embracing a particular strategy, organizers on the call explained: to target the budget reconciliation process in March with a demand to end fossil fuel subsidies. 

The goal, organizers say, is not just to strike a blow against the oil and gas industry. It’s also to hit oil executives in a way that undermines Trump’s entire platform.

The reconciliation process needed to pass the tax bill, Pica argued, is where the rubber of the Trump administration meets the road. "They want to pass this tax cut bill so they have to cut other types of social spending. They want to increase defense at the cost of SNAP, increase oil and gas subsidies at the expense of Medicaid. This is their big plan," he said. "It’s their plan because they don’t have the votes in the Senate to pass anything other than a tax bill." So that’s where environmental and other progressive groups "can pick a fight," he said. "And if we don’t win, we will use this moment to gum up the reconciliation package." A significant part of the task, he and others on the call agreed, would be forcing Democrats to "hold the line."

That’s easier said than done. As several people on the call acknowledged, politicians typically look for deals in these sorts of negotiations. Democrats so far have not indicated much willingness to fight via all available means. And at the end of the day, the GOP does have the votes to push a reconciliation package through, with or without Democratic cooperation.

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But the groups on the call Monday aren’t the only ones unveiling new strategies in the coming weeks. The Center for Biological Diversity, for example, launched 266 lawsuits against environmental rollbacks under the last Trump administration alongside other environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council—winning a striking majority of them. "Because [Trump and Elon Musk] have moved with such speed it has taken a little bit of time for us to catch up," Center for Biological Diversity Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl told me by phone. "But I think we expect to have at least one or two more lawsuits against DOGE," he said, in addition to those already filed by such groups as Democratic attorneys general, "and I think there’ll be other lawsuits challenging aspects of some of the executive orders in the next, I would say one to three weeks."

Despite the widely reported absence of "the resistance" this time around, these groups emphasize that they haven’t gone anywhere. And there’s another common theme: While the opposition is at a significant disadvantage given Democratic minorities in the House and Senate, the dizzying pace of the administration’s opening weeks, they argue, masks vulnerability—which Trump’s opponents can exploit.

"President Trump and the Republicans are weak," Pica said Monday, pointing to the thin GOP majority dictating a need to pass legislation via the budget reconciliation process. "This is an opportunity to lay out and expose Trump for who he really is," Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay said. "The reason he has such a high approval rating is that he was able to fool people into thinking that he fought for everyday people." Attacking his "oligarch" allies, she and others on the call argued, undermines his core appeal to certain voters.

Environmental advocate Bill McKibben recently proposed a similar approach in his newsletter The Crucial Years. "Our job is not to stop what Trump is doing, because we can’t," he wrote to fellow activists. "Our basic job is to make what he’s doing is deeply unpopular, because that will stiffen the backbone of the courts and any remaining moderate Republicans, and set us up for possible gains if and when we next have elections. So: witness, communicate, ridicule, amplify strong voices."

And if the would-be activists reading that newsletter are still sitting stunned on their sofas, uncertain what to do with the barrage of news over the last few weeks? When I asked Hartl what he would say to environmentally concerned readers who might be feeling more overwhelmed than empowered at present, he pointed to the need to distinguish substance from show.

"Make sure that elected officials and your representatives and people know when [Trump’s] actions are causing real harm, as opposed to the noise and chaos that he is so good at generating all the time," he said. "That is his one true superpower, is flooding the news with nonsensical chaos." While many of the spectacular Week One executive orders on environmental matters were ultimately symbolic requests for agencies to produce reports, (which is part of why groups were slow to sue, Hartl explained) halting Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, disbursements is another matter. "People are going to lose their jobs, because the money’s not going to be there so they’re not going to be able to do the work they were promised to do," he said. 

Like many in the past week, Hartl questioned whether Trump actually has the political support for these sorts of moves. "He promised to have the cleanest air and cleanest water in the world. He told everyone RFK Jr. was going to fix our broken food systems and get chemicals out of the environment. He didn’t run a campaign on utterly destroying the environment and killing people’s jobs," Hartl said. "So folks need to bring all that to light, because they’re deeply unpopular. And his one vulnerability is that he is actually incredibly thin-skinned and sensitive to public opinion. The only thing that really makes him change his mind is when things are going bad—and then he’ll just change on a whim cause he doesn’t really have any principles."

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

That’s how likely it is that the target set by the Paris climate agreement—limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—has already been crossed, according to a new study. Read CNN’s report on this study and two other grim ones here.

The Washington Post paints a portrait of utter chaos following the president’s Day One order to halt disbursements from the IRA. While the White House "repeatedly said the freeze of agriculture funding and other federal financial assistance would not affect benefits that go directly to individuals, such as farmers," the Post reports that farmers were still unable to access funds—including reimbursements for projects already completed—as of last weekend.

[Last] Wednesday, National Farmers Union President Rob Larew testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee that the Trump administration’s sweeping decisions on federal funding were creating concern for farmers across the country.

"No one knows what funding will be available or if key programs will have the staff needed to operate," Larew said. "Freezing spending and making sweeping decisions without congressional oversight just adds more uncertainty to an already tough farm economy."

Skylar Holden, a cattle farmer in eastern Missouri, said he signed a $240,000 contract in December under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to share costs on investments for his farm.

With the funding, Holden erected new fencing and installed a well. He had planned further improvements to his farm’s water system and spent $80,000 on materials and labor contracts that he expected would be partly paid back by the government.

This month, a USDA representative told him the funding was paused because of Trump’s executive order.

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