President-elect Donald Trump has promised to increase drilling on federal lands, kill subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels, repeal or roll back countless environmental regulations, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency. As climate watchers search for hope, state governments have often been discussed as an important node of resistance. Democratic governors like JB Pritzker in Illinois and Gavin Newsom in California have pledged to fight back against many of the agenda items in Project 2025 (environmental and otherwise). And on social media—especially on the liberal archipelago of BlueSky—it’s become a refrain that anyone feeling angry or threatened by Trump’s victory should start organizing at the state and local levels.
So far these calls have been mostly short on details. The question remains: Organize for what? When it comes to climate in particular, what can state governments actually do?
To answer this question, The New Republic interviewed a number of advocates and law professors around the country. The scope of their suggestions was vast; it ranged from the conventional (e.g., lawsuits by attorneys general, regulation of power utilities) to the innovative—including measures that could force changes on multinational companies and reverberate through the global economy. The biggest takeaway is that states can do far more than simply “stand up to Trump.” Collectively, they have the power to achieve more on climate than the federal government has done under any single president, whether Republican or Democratic.
“States are where it’s at,” said Bethany Davis Noll, the executive director of the State and Environmental Impact Center at NYU’s law school. “We don’t get anything out of the federal government until states start agitating. They’re the ones who are more in touch with what you and I really want.”
Of course, whether state governments will seize that power is another question.
Since Barack Obama’s presidency, state attorneys general have been suing the federal government at a much higher volume than they used to. Obama faced 80 multistate lawsuits. The first Trump administration faced 160. The Biden administration has experienced 137. Nearly all of these have been partisan—filed by red states against Democrats, or vice versa.
It’s easy to think of these cases as a kind of political theater, but they’ve actually had significant effects on policy. Democratic attorneys general won 83 percent of their lawsuits against Trump, and these ended up halting some of his administration’s more disastrous plans. A telling example was the Trump administration’s effort to delay the Chemical Disaster Rule, which was designed to limit the damage from chemical disasters at industrial plants. The rule was inspired by an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas that killed 15 people. Scott Pruitt, the first leader of the EPA under Trump, tried to delay the policy (with plans to ultimately rescind it). But the administration lost in court, partly because it failed to show that the public benefits of this delay would outweigh the harms, as the law required. This was typical, Noll said. “On many occasions, they left out the side of the equations that showed the harms, and they thought they could get away with that.”
Climate watchers were distressed this past spring at the outcome of the Supreme Court’s big “Chevron deference” case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The court overturned a precedent that said the judiciary had to defer to the expertise of federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes. This was bad news for Democratic administrations that wanted to use agencies like the EPA to advance climate goals. However, with a Republican back in the White House, the ruling could actually benefit environmentalists. It will limit the ability of federal agencies to roll back existing protections. “In that context, it’s going to be even harder for them to justify these harmful things under their statutes,” Noll said. “The judges will be like, ‘What?’”
Then there are ways states can drastically reduce their own emissions, apart from what the federal government is doing. Two dozen states have passed laws requiring a conversion to 100 percent clean energy (or some similar benchmark) by a certain date. Eight states have set their deadlines at 2040 or earlier, another five have set it for 2045, and 11 have set it for 2050. Getting these objectives passed and signed into law has been a huge achievement—but still, on their own, the laws don’t guarantee anything. Meeting the deadlines will require aggressive action, on many fronts, in the immediate future. Some of the necessary measures already face resistance, from both industry and lawmakers within these states.
Illinois makes a useful case study. In 2021, its legislature passed a law that says 40 percent of the state’s energy must come from renewables by 2040, and all of its power must be emission-free by 2045. Under this law, local governments across Illinois have been stripped of their power to block wind and solar projects. The state also set aside $580 million per year to subsidize solar and wind energy, and it created rebates for residents to buy electric vehicles. Besides these incentives, the law imposed restrictions on power utilities, requiring them to close most of their coal plants in the state by 2030 and to stop using natural gas by 2045.
The law has certainly helped. But so far, Illinois has been failing to meet its benchmarks. To speed up the progress, several new measures are being considered. One involves the buildings sector, which accounts for 15 percent of Illinois’s emissions, according to Madeline Semanisin, Illinois policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. The state may target those emissions next, by changing the laws around building codes—for example, forcing developers to use electricity in new buildings instead of gas.
The state is also having trouble getting new wind and solar projects onto the electrical grid. Grid capacity is limited, mainly because there aren’t enough transmission lines in place. Supply chain issues and inflation over the last few years have made this problem more difficult to solve. Advocates in the state are pushing for legislation that would lower the barriers for building new transmission lines.
But making matters worse, many renewable projects are at the mercy of PJM, one of two companies that operate the electric grid in Illinois—and PJM has been widely accused of making decisions that effectively slow down the green energy transition. (PJM has denied this, blaming the aforementioned market factors instead.) “I think a lot of it revolves around incumbent fossil fuel plant operators—especially gas power plants—having too much influence within PJM and avoiding this kind of transmission planning that we need,” said James Gignac, Midwest senior policy manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists. However, Illinois is one of several states trying to pressure PJM to change its practices.
Every state that has a climate law in place is facing its own particular challenges in executing it. As legislatures and state agencies try to work out solutions, Noll believes pressure from constituents can have major effects. “I look at this as a really important process that is helped by advocates—organizers and grassroots people demanding things.”
The transportation sector also deserves a mention. Unlike with power utilities, or building codes, there’s not much states can do to regulate vehicles. California has emerged as an exception, with its nation-leading auto emissions rule (which Trump has already vowed to challenge). But in most cases, when it comes to cutting car emissions, states and city governments can only take indirect approaches—like subsidizing public transit and electric vehicles.
However, New York City’s congestion pricing program is an example of how states can maximize the power they do have. Assuming the plan takes effect in January, drivers will pay $9 to enter Midtown and Lower Manhattan during peak hours. In London, a similar policy has helped reduce carbon emissions from surface transport by nearly 30 percent, while also channeling an extra $3 billion into local public transit. If New York’s program works well, it could lower the barrier for other American cities to try similar experiments.
Finally, there are measures states can take that have reverberations far beyond their borders. There’s no uniform playbook for these, because they depend on the unique conditions of each state. They require policymakers to think creatively. But they’re arguably the most high-leverage way for states to cut emissions.
Some of these center on purchasing and investments. Take the deforestation bill that was passed by the New York state legislature earlier this year. If Governor Kathy Hochul signs it, New York will cease doing business with any companies that are involved in cutting down tropical forests around the world. This would mean that Sysco (for instance), the world’s largest food distribution company, would have to stop sourcing its pork and beef from companies that are involved in deforestation of the Amazon—or else lose its contracts with New York’s state agencies (which are currently worth some $234 million).
Only a few states wield this kind of purchasing power. New York’s gross domestic product is so large that if it were an independent country, its economy would be the tenth-largest in the world. (In California, which has an even larger economy, the legislature passed a similar law in 2021—but Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying it would “create a significant burden on California businesses.”)
Deforestation is the second-largest source of carbon emissions (after the burning of fossil fuels), accounting for roughly 10 percent of global warming, so it’s hard to overstate how big a difference a change in this area could make. Hochul vetoed a similar bill last year, but advocates remain hopeful that the idea will get traction, if not this year then in the future.
Another way states can sometimes sway industries is by clamping down on manufacturing practices. North Carolina and Virginia, for instance, have become hubs for biomass companies, whose business model is to cut down forests and convert trees into wood pellets. Most of the pellets are then shipped to Europe, where they’re used in power plants, as an alternative to fossil fuels. It’s a misguided practice, not only because of the deforestation but also because wood is often a dirtier form of energy than coal.
Enviva, the world’s largest biomass company, had four plants in North Carolina before it declared bankruptcy earlier this year. Numerous other biomass companies still operate there. The state has reportedly given the industry at least $10 million in subsidies over the years—and Drew Ball, the Southeast campaigns director for NRDC, sees this as a potential pressure point. “It’s a market that’s propped up by subsidies,” he said. “These false solutions need to be under a microscope.”
In TNR’s interviews with advocates, a common theme was that these state-level policies can provide new organizing opportunities, even in polarized environments. No one likes cronyism, and conservatives can sometimes be persuaded that subsidies for inefficient industries are a bad idea. Likewise, conservatives are being won over to renewables as they become cheaper, and Republican voters can often be enlisted to fight new industrial projects that threaten to pollute their land, water, and air—all the more so as the effects of climate change become more pronounced. In fact, local environmental issues have often served as entryways into activism for people who had never engaged much in politics before.
“People want their lives improved meaningfully,” said Dawone Robinson, the managing director of the NRDC’s team of regional climate advocates. “And there is space for us within the environmental advocacy movement” to contribute on that front, while also advancing more abstract, long-term goals. “There are multiple paths to success on climate.”
