What now for climate under Trump? Act locally.

City governments, citizens, it's your time to shine. ✨

Hey y’all. What a horrifying doozy these first two weeks of the Trump administration have been. YOWZA. I’ve been pacing myself by focusing mostly on climate policy, since it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything. Such an intense ”flood the zone” scenario. Well, you know what else is flooding? Our coastlines. So, I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone expanding on the post-inauguration thoughts I shared with you last week:

To respect the paywall (support outlets doing good reporting!), I won’t drop the whole piece here, but I’m sharing few snippets to entice you to click through and read the full thing here. It starts:

By the end of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, sea levels will be higher, weather will be more extreme, and the urgency for implementing climate solutions will be even greater.

Then I offered up my summary the horrors of the Day 1 executive orders, as I shared here in my last post. And I went on to ask, and attempt to answer, the big question on many of our minds right now: So, what’s a citizen of Planet Earth to do?

Gaining traction for climate solutions at the federal level seems increasingly unlikely. So, from my marine biologist/policy wonk perspective, answers include:

• City governments, step up, we need your leadership. Globally, cities account for over 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 1-in-5 people in the U.S. live in a coastal city. That’s a lot of exposure to climate risks, and a lot of potential for mitigation and adaptation. This is our focus at Urban Ocean Lab, the nonprofit think tank I co-founded and co-lead, which supports coastal cities in becoming more resilient. (See: Our Climate Readiness Framework for Coastal Cities and our open-access resource hub, which now includes documents we archived before they were just deleted from federal websites.)

• Citizens, join a local environmental group. In other words, find a home, a community, for your planet-protecting, life-sustaining work, and settle in for the long haul. This is no trite step. More of us must find more ways to speak with a collective, coordinated voice — at city council meetings and planning board meetings and utility commission meetings, and in support of local climate candidates. Push your locality to do more. If you don’t know where to start, seek out your local climate justice group or local chapter of: Sunrise Movement (for youth), Third Act (for seniors), and (for all) Citizens Climate Lobby, 350.org, Surfrider, and the Sierra Club.

• Everyone, turn to the ocean for climate solutions. From offshore renewable energy to decarbonizing shipping to regenerative ocean farming to protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems, the ocean has the potential to provide 35% of the emissions reductions needed by 2050.

As I was writing the Rolling Stone piece, the Trump administration was making increasingly concerning, authoritarian moves — from deleting the term “climate change” from government websites, to letting Elon Musk have the keys to U.S. Treasury’s payment system, to beginning a mass purge of federal civil servants, to freezing federal funds, including billions for climate solutions. So I added this paragraph right before publication:

To be clear, federal resources would obviously be a massive help, and we absolutely must hold the executive branch accountable. Fundamentally, preventing this administration from destroying our democratic institutions is critical to addressing the climate crisis. Still, there is so much city and state governments can do to implement climate solutions without federal support.

We can expect the tornado of destructive activity in this new White House to continue, and when there are key chances to weigh in on climate and ocean policy, I’ll be back to let you know. For now, get cozy with your fave local climate organization, and hear these clarion words from poet June Jordan: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”