12 Ways We Can Exploit Fossil Fuel Industry Vulnerabilities — Even Under Trump

Part of the Series

Communities Beyond Elections

Already widespread before, climate despair has likely reached new levels following former President Donald Trump’s reelection. With good reason: Trump is committed to policies that are projected to kill tens of millions of people and unleash unprecedented chaos everywhere.

But the climate war isn’t an all-or-nothing affair. Each fraction of a degree of heating that we can prevent will save many lives. Similarly, everything we do to build a more equitable world will provide some insulation against the heating that we fail to prevent.

Furthermore, the fossil fuel industry is much more vulnerable than most people realize, its current profits notwithstanding. This was true in Trump’s first term and will remain true in his second. We can exploit its vulnerabilities.

To do so, we need strategies that don’t require majority support at the national level. Though the United States public overwhelmingly supports environmental protections, clean energy and climate justice, most people don’t grasp the magnitude of the emergency and obviously don’t prioritize the climate when voting.

What we do have is tens of millions of potential activists, including millions in many individual states. According to a 2024 Yale/George Mason University survey, large minorities say they feel angry (38 percent), fearful (38 percent) and anxious (36 percent) about the climate. In polls from the past five years, between 13 and 20 percent say they would definitely or probably “engage in nonviolent civil disobedience (e.g. sit-ins, blockades or trespassing) against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse” if someone they “like and respect” recruited them. About twice as many say they would visit politicians’ offices to pressure them. It’s these millions whom organizers should target.

Drawing from the recent history of the climate movement, here’s a nonexhaustive list of ideas for organizers. My focus is on the U.S. since that’s the context I know best. None of the following require us to persuade a majority of voters or politicians at the national level.

1. Protest Every Fossil Fuel Project

Public protests, from rallies to civil disobedience, are essential for generating public scrutiny of fossil fuel projects. Building large coalitions of stakeholders can increase their potency. Some confrontations, like the campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline, can galvanize broader public consciousness and action. This is especially true when they intertwine with related fights for Indigenous sovereignty, racial equity and economic justice, which the climate movement has also prioritized in recent years.

This type of protest is getting riskier almost everywhere, including in the United States. In the past decade 21 U.S. states have passed 56 new laws to criminalize or more harshly punish nonviolent protesters. Amid this authoritarian turn organizers must proceed carefully. In some cases, they will choose to defy those laws, and we should support them however possible. In other cases, they may choose disruptive forms of protest that are not (yet) illegal. Some of the most disruptive tactics are not very flashy. Leafletting against a company, if persistent and widespread, is potentially more disruptive than blockading a pipeline.

2. Flood Them With Lawsuits

Legal filings against companies or regulators can be highly disruptive. As industry spokespeople warn, more lawsuits can mean “further capital cost increases and longer overall pipeline approval and construction timelines.” A gas industry executive recently complained that “the number of lawsuits being filed to challenge pipeline construction” has added “costs and time to the development of a pipeline, which in some cases has just forced the pipelines to throw up their hands and walk away from projects.” Lawsuits against polluters for past damages are also important, both for the compensation they can deliver and for the potential long-term impact on the industry.

The efficacy of litigation will partly depend on future legislative and judicial changes. Reforms to the permitting process, which could simultaneously facilitate fossil fuel infrastructure and renewables projects, would make it harder for the movement to obstruct polluters through the courts.

3. Target Financial Institutions and Investment Funds

Oil and gas companies may never reallocate their investments to other sectors, but financial institutions like banks, insurers and large institutional investors may. They could do so without jeopardizing their returns (fossil fuel financing comprises just over 1 percent of total assets at Bank of America, Chase and Citigroup), and their long-term financial stability would be more secure if they did. Public pension funds are potentially more vulnerable to our pressures, since they have a mandate to protect the long-term viability of their investments.

These campaigns can take various forms. The most effective involve tying financial institutions to specific frontline struggles and getting institutions — city councils, universities, faith institutions, labor unions, and so on — to close their accounts or demand that their money managers reallocate investments. For instance, in 2017 the city of Seattle voted to close its $3 billion account with Wells Fargo due to the bank’s financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Divestment campaigns have traditionally targeted only stock holdings, but recent years have seen more action targeting banks, insurers and asset managers. Banks were also central targets in the South Africa divestment campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s.

As always, polluters are finding ways to fight back. Some state governments have penalized financial institutions that “discriminate” against fossil fuels. This backlash only makes it more urgent that we build up a counterweight that imposes costs of our own on financial institutions.

4. Fight for State-Level Legislation

States have tremendous power to promote renewables, slash demand for fossil fuels, and even directly limit fossil fuel production. One climate expert estimates that “three-quarters of the country’s Paris Climate commitments can be achieved by state and local policy.” Recent state laws have mandated public investment in renewables, the phaseout of gas-powered vehicles, corporate pollution disclosures and “make-polluters-pay” penalties linked to climate disasters. All these laws stand to have powerful national impacts by altering corporate investments, as state legislation has often done.

The prospects for building electoral coalitions around climate are far greater at the subnational levels. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication provides detailed opinion data by county, state and congressional district. Since some of the most progressive states are also among the most important economically, reforms in those places can have outsized impacts at higher levels.

A rare bright spot in the 2024 election was a referendum in Washington State, where 60 percent of voters rejected an effort to repeal the state’s climate legislation. That win followed a coalitional mobilization by almost 600 organizations.

5. Fight for Local Legislation

Also important are local-level laws that ban new gas hookups, improve energy efficiency standards, build community solar and otherwise cut fossil fuel demand. Those projects face challenges, particularly since this type of initiative is still new in the U.S. But they are clearly worrisome to gas companies for the signal they send investors about the industry’s long-term outlook. Predictably, polluters have directed their proxies in friendly courts and state governments to prohibit local restrictions on fossil fuels.

6. Pressure Large Institutions to Stop Burning Fossil Fuels

For those who work, study, travel, or otherwise participate in institutions that consume lots of dirty energy, decarbonizing them is an important contribution to the climate fight. When universities replace gas boilers with heat pumps and solar panels, they deprive gas companies of some of their biggest customers. When school districts or local transportation authorities switch to electric buses, they do the same to the oil industry. Republicans will cut federal funding for many of these projects as soon as they can, so state, local and private sources of funding will become more important.

7. Punish the Dirtiest With Boycotts

Boycott campaigns could take various additional forms beyond divesting from dirty financiers and phasing out fossil fuel use. They might target specific companies that rely on sales to household consumers, such as a meat or dairy corporation linked to deforestation. They might involve the targeted punishment of companies that operate in political jurisdictions where governments allow polluters free rein, potentially including global penalties on U.S. companies. They might target businesses that operate in our towns and cities but oppose climate measures. (These municipal-level boycotts were another crucial piece of the South Africa campaign.) Any campaign with a national or global scope would need buy-in from major organizations. Serious boycotts campaigns are rare today but their potential remains great.

We could muster the numbers necessary to win. Even without outreach, 26 percent of U.S. consumers already try to “punish” companies with the worst environmental records. An organized campaign by just 26 percent could wipe out many companies’ profit margins.

8. Clog Up the Recruitment Pipeline

In addition to investors and consumers, polluters need a workforce. As many progressive analysts have stressed, the movement needs to build bridges with fossil fuel workers, namely by fighting for reforms that properly compensate laid-off workers with money, retraining and/or new jobs.

In the more immediate future, the movement could dedicate more energy to countering the recruitment of workers, particularly on college campuses. Companies’ fear of becoming less attractive to talented young graduates could become a significant force for internal change.

Recent trends suggest the potential. Between 2017 and 2022, graduation from U.S. petroleum engineering programs plunged by 83 percent. This happened even as oil prices were rising, as Trump was trying to prop up the industry, and as other engineering programs were flourishing. Whether their concerns are moral or pragmatic, it appears few students see a future in the industry.

More powerful, perhaps, would be a counterrecruitment campaign targeting one or more of the financial institutions that invest in fossil fuels. Again, those companies are more likely to abandon dirty energy than companies that specialize in it. There are growing hints of climate discontent among bank employees, which could be nurtured by organizers.

9. Organize the Workplace

Building a bigger, more combative labor movement is important to the climate struggle for at least two reasons. First, strikes are the most potent weapon for forcing the transformations we need. Climate strikes on a large scale aren’t yet plausible, but in the meantime, workers can fight for immediate workplace improvements like air-conditioning, water breaks and better ventilation. They can refuse to work in unsafe temperatures. This can be done by unionized and nonunionized workers alike, as recent workplace walkouts have shown. More ambitiously, they can force employers to reduce their own carbon pollution and to put pressure on dirty financial institutions. These actions also make employers more likely to demand policy reforms from government, including ones that restrain the fossil fuel industry.

Second, labor organizing can also protect workers against the austerity and inflation that the ruling class will try to impose as the economic costs of climate destruction explode. Forcing capitalists to absorb more of those costs may also push them into political confrontation with the fossil fuel industry.

10. Stand With Refugees

The Hitlerian rhetoric of Trump’s 2024 campaign — undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — is but a glimpse of the cruelty we’ll see as more fossil fuel refugees flee unlivable tropics and coastlines. Racist scapegoating will be central to the effort to shield polluters from accountability. And it will find fertile ground: Thirty-four percent of U.S. residents explicitly agree with Trump’s statement about “poisoning,” and over half now say they want more restrictions on immigration (nearly double from just a few years ago). In addition to organizing sanctuary campaigns, we’ll have to work constantly to redirect popular hatred onto the capitalist culprits while cultivating empathy for their victims.

Standing with refugees is part of the larger imperative of international solidarity. Stabilizing the climate is impossible unless the Global South gets the resources it needs to decarbonize and adapt. The rich countries, led by the United States, have refused to offer adequate compensation for their carbon pollution, a stance they reaffirmed at the November 2024 COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan. On this count U.S. public opinion is more sympathetic, with most respondents supporting “aid to developing nations” for those purposes. That support would be much stronger if the public knew the true gravity of the crisis or the miserly stance of the U.S. government. (The public drastically overestimates the generosity of U.S. foreign aid, but also supports far more aid than what the government actually gives.)

11. Build Community Agriculture and Mutual Aid

Climate disasters are already a significant source of inflation, including for food. We’ll see more dramatic spikes as climate breakdown causes more crop failures. Developing sustainable local agriculture and mutual aid projects of all kinds can cushion the working class while also fostering stronger community cohesion. The movement should also demand that governments create international reserves of essential commodities like food. These “buffer stocks” would buy up goods when they’re available in excess and sell them off at noninflated prices in times of shortage, thereby cushioning both producers and consumers against price shocks.

12. Talk About It

We have to talk about our climate reality much more, with everyone we know and meet. Biblical hurricanes, droughts and wildfires simply have not made the climate crisis a topic of daily conversation for most U.S. residents. Two-thirds “rarely or never” discuss climate with friends or family. While some people have severe climate anxiety, most aren’t nearly anxious enough: Only 28 percent are “alarmed” by the crisis. (The rest range from “concerned” to “dismissive.”) In this context politicians find it easier to ignore the emergency or label it just another “issue.”

For the minority who suffer high anxiety about the unfolding crisis, offer them ideas for collective action. For the majority who aren’t freaked out enough, urge them to tune in, and show them how the solutions will benefit them and their children.

Republicans will do whatever they can to crush resistance. Protesters will be met with greater state violence. Refugees will face new levels of state terror. Public officials and employees will be fired. New laws and regulations will further criminalize “discrimination” against fossil fuels by lower levels of government.

Yet two reminders are in order. First, conditions won’t be one-tenth as bad for U.S. citizens as they have been for foreign peoples, from Vietnam to El Salvador to Palestine, who have heroically resisted (and sometimes defeated) U.S. empire.

Second, Trump will remain subservient to capital, and capital depends on our labor, our consumption and our quiescence. That gives us power. We will continue to have power, in 2025 and beyond, if we organize ourselves and use it.