With Trump’s Second Term Looming, the Climate Movement Is Putting Class Issues Center Stage

NEW YORK—Standing outside of Citibank’s Manhattan headquarters on a blisteringly hot day in late July, New York activist Rachel Rivera spoke to a crowd of nearly 300 about the dangers her children have faced growing up in a warming world.

Earlier that week, Rivera—an organizer with New York Communities for Change and a Hurricane Sandy survivor—had to take her 10-year-old daughter to the hospital for a respiratory seizure: an asthma attack that caused her to stop breathing. Her asthma was exacerbated by the heat waves that hit New York City over the summer, Rivera said.

She called out Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser before the group walked from the bank’s headquarters to the executive’s home.

“As a mother, Jane Fraser should walk a mile in my shoes, with my income and my kids,” Rivera told the group. “Families like mine that are on the front lines have to suffer the most.”

Rivera was speaking at a rally for the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, a nonviolent direct action campaign targeting banks and insurance companies for enabling continued fossil fuel expansion. Over 13 weeks, the campaign racked up 700 arrests and turned out nearly 5,000 participants to 46 protest actions, more than half of which were at the Manhattan headquarters of the campaign’s main target, Citibank, one of the top financiers of fossil fuel expansion since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The campaign brought activists fighting fossil fuel projects around the world to New York City,  where they joined a diverse cross-section of the U.S. climate movement, including climate refugees and disaster survivors like Rivera, campaigners from the Gulf South living in hotbeds of pollution from the LNG buildout and groups focused on ending the financing of fossil fuels. The campaign also emphasized the class dimensions of the climate crisis and positioned the climate movement as a people’s struggle in opposition to the oligarchal, moneyed interests of Wall Street and the fossil fuel companies it supports.

Now, as Donald Trump’s second term approaches, activists are planning what’s next. At a post-election virtual debrief in mid-November, Summer of Heat organizers framed Trump’s election as an opportunity to recruit sympathetic bystanders.

“When I get nervous about the state of the world, I lean into organizing,” said Marlena Fontes, a leader of the Wall Street campaign. “I feel better when I’m taking action…and we want to give people that community…so they don’t have to be alone in their fears and anxiety.”

Fontes and other organizers also reflected on the economic anxieties that many feel contributed to Trump’s election. Going forward, campaigners say they are looking to more clearly articulate links between climate change and everyday concerns like the cost and availability of housing, increasing insurance rates or how policies like unrestricted LNG exports could lead to rising energy bills.

“It is really exciting to see people from all across the country on this call, really thinking about the way that we frame climate…as an issue for working class people, an issue of economic justice [and] of ending the fossil fuel industry as something that is broadly essential for many, many communities across this country,” Fontes said. “The more that we can push this in different parts of the country, the stronger that we will be.”

U.S. climate and environmental activists are preparing for an uphill battle during the coming Trump administration, and many are advocating for an increased focus on state and local opportunities for climate action given the new barriers that are likely to hinder federal progress. Some are also looking to expand the base of the climate movement by building on recent campaigns like the Summer of Heat and seeking deeper solidarity with communities enduring persisting economic inequities.

Building on the Movement’s Momentum

Given the breadth of the coalition that the Summer of Heat brought together, as well as the scale and sustained nature of the campaign, it could be a marker of the direction climate activists will take in coming years.

The efficacy of activist campaigns is notoriously difficult to measure, so although the banks did not agree to the Summer of Heat’s specific demands on fossil fuel financing and human rights, both organizers and social movement researchers note that it’s still too early to call the Summer of Heat a success or a failure. It would take longer than a few months to get a global bank to budge on something as sweeping as fossil fuel investment. 

“It’s, of course, a monumental task that the climate movement has set for itself to shift the business practices of the largest financial institutions in the world,” said Kevin Young, a historian studying social movements at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “To expect victory in the short term would be unrealistic.”

That’s left climate activists in a catch-22: the scale of their demands are impossible to deal with rapidly, but the accelerating climate crisis requires speedy responses.

Still, campaign leaders see other measures of success: the mobilization of thousands of activists, a growing capacity for civil disobedience and public engagement, increased perceived attention on the role of banks in enabling carbon emissions and building of community.

From the start, the Summer of Heat was meant to be a kick-off campaign: a “statement of ambition,” said Alice Hu, one of the campaign’s lead organizers. The summer campaign built a “movement container,” Hu added: a tight-knit community of NYC-based climate activists who are better equipped than before to plan and execute disruptive protest demonstrations.

“There’s now hundreds of people who know and trust each other in the climate movement in a way that you just don’t build if you’re not part of a sustained, long-term campaign,” Fontes told Inside Climate News. “This just creates the type of relationships that I think long-term power is built on.”

Since the campaign ended in September, activists from the Summer of Heat have organized related, spin-off actions that have built on the network and strategies of the summer campaign. Several disruptions targeted New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, pressuring him to divest the city’s pension funds from asset managers with investments in fossil fuel expansion. At the end of October, Lander announced a proposal to expand existing climate commitments to exclude future investments from pension funds in infrastructure like pipelines and LNG.

Summer of Heat alumni also participated in the December sit-in at New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Albany office, urging her to sign legislation to require oil and gas companies to bear some costs of climate adaptation.

Now, organizers are looking to ride that momentum outside of New York. 

“This idea of having sustained, targeted campaigns that are really going after elites for their role in the climate crisis, and are really clear in their demands, is something that can be replicated across the country,” Fontes said. “And frankly people seem really hungry for it, they want this type of campaign.”

Recruitment is crucial in the aftermath of the election, said Stop the Money Pipeline director Alec Connon, another leader from the Summer of Heat.

“Now is a really important moment for the climate movement to really be organizing people and absorbing all of those people who maybe haven’t been as active over the last four years into a variety of campaigns,” Connon said.

According to a 2021 study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 14 percent of U.S. adults have said that they would “personally engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse,” if recruited by someone that they “like and respect.” 

This suggests untapped potential for civil disobedience focused movements like the Summer of Heat that are looking to recruit. Young, at the University of Massachusetts, said that climate activists need to dig into their existing social relationships to mobilize that 14 percent identified by the Yale survey, which amounts to about 36 million potential climate activists.

“We don’t need a majority to win, but we need a bigger movement than we have right now,” said Young, who recently argued that social movements will be a crucial guardrail against backsliding on climate change under Trump in the next four years. 

Repercussions for civil disobedience may be more severe under Trump, and watchdogs have raised concerns about possible excessive law enforcement and surveillance, or use of executive powers to quell protests like the 2020 deployments of the National Guard against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Experts also raise concerns about the oil and gas industry’s increasing use of legal retaliation to deter environmental activists.

But these risks are already a reality for climate activists engaging in civil disobedience. Over the summer, the campaign attracted the attention of Mary Lawlor, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights defenders, who made public her outreach to the U.S. government this month raising concerns about the treatment of two activists who were given restraining orders and prevented from protesting at the Citibank headquarters for part of the summer.

Summer of Heat organizers said that while they are discussing concerns about possible repression in the coming years, it won’t deter them from doubling down on nonviolent civil disobedience.

“It would be a mistake to let fear dictate our tactics,” Fontes said. 

“We will still be utilizing the tactics we utilized this summer on Citi and other Wall Street actors that are making the climate crisis worse,” Connon said.

“When in Doubt Strategically, Knock on Doors” 

According to 2023 Pew Research Center data, two-thirds of Americans support federal government incentives for wind and solar energy, and prioritizing renewable energy development over expanding fossil fuels. About three-quarters of Americans believe the U.S. should participate in international efforts to reduce the effects of climate change. 

But despite broad support for some climate actions, it was not a top issue in the voting booth. And according to AP VoteCast, voters who ranked economy and jobs as their most important issue, expressed concerns about housing, food and health care costs or who felt their own family finances were falling behind, tended to support Trump, a climate skeptic who has promised to ramp up fossil fuel extraction and deprioritize the transition to renewable energy.

For Kaniela Ing, former Hawaii congressman and director of the national Green New Deal Network—a national network of climate and economic justice-focused organizations—Trump’s election is a signal for the climate movement to reach out to people who haven’t been included in determining its priorities.

“When in doubt strategically, knock on doors, and you’ll learn really quick what to do, because people will tell you,” Ing said. “Let’s try something new, let’s get new people at the table…I think when the environmental movement [is] at its best, is when we’re actually talking to new folks.”

The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group on GNDN’s steering committee, plans to focus the next four years on what it sees as the possibility of collaborative environmental action and labor reform, potentially broadening the climate coalition and prioritizing jobs and worker’s rights. The group—mostly made up of high school and college students and young people who have recently joined the workforce—is working to deepen its connections with labor unions and build up to a 2028 general strike coordinated between unions in different industries to exercise maximum pressure from labor. Sunrise hopes to use the threat of mass disruption to push for significant government investments in renewable energy, climate resilience and worker protections in the following year, which will coincide with the end of Trump’s second term.

“It’s a wild plan, but we have to try,” said the group’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, on a Zoom call with more than 1,600 participants after the election.

Ing said activists who see climate change as their primary issue need to be more intentional about building solidarity with communities that may feel threatened by Trump’s proposed policies—people like immigrants, union workers and transgender individuals across the political spectrum. But they’ll also need to court Trump supporters who may still align with climate justice coalitions like GNDN on issues like the unaffordability of necessities like housing and energy bills, and barriers to economic opportunity.

“Let’s try something new, let’s get new people at the table … I think when the environmental movement [is] at its best, is when we’re actually talking to new folks.”

— Kaniela Ing, Green New Deal Network director

“We don’t take the lane of ‘why doesn’t everybody care about climate?’” Ing said. “I try to look, like, how can I care about their issues, and build trust and then go from there.”

In Lahaina, the Maui community that was devastated by a wildfire in 2023, Ing said he saw rising support for Trump this year. But the community has also been enthusiastic about prioritizing nature-based and renewable energy solutions in its recovery. Efforts are already underway in Lahaina to build community-solar—an array of photovoltaic panels owned collectively by community members—and invest in Indigenous-led land stewardship to combat the extractivism of the tourism and agriculture industries, which had long rerouted water away from the community, priming it to burn.

Lahaina’s redevelopment could provide a blueprint for how local efforts to build climate resilience and community-controlled renewable energy can transcend electoral disagreements to get things done.

“I hope we don’t need [another] climate disaster to destroy a community before other folks get there, but it does give me a lot of hope,” Ing said.

These efforts to broaden the climate movement’s base by framing climate action as a means to address economic anxieties relate to the Summer of Heat’s thesis that standing up to fossil fuel companies and financial institutions is about economic justice as well as climate. 

That message mobilized activists from around the world—including oil and gas extraction-impacted communities in Peru, Uganda and Canada—to travel to New York City and rally outside of one of Wall Street’s biggest banks. 

“I believe the climate transformation is so big that it requires a movement at the scale of civil rights or women’s suffrage,” Ing said. “It can’t just be liberals and lefties, it has to be all kinds of folks.”