Where is the U.S. climate movement?

In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism become household images, slogans, and policy goals. A few years later, as the second Trump administration guts environmental regulation, rejects proposed renewable energy projects, and accelerates the leasing of public lands for extraction, is there any “climate movement” to speak of? There’s no need to write the litany of recent socio-ecological disasters that would seem to necessitate organized outrage – and yet, organized mobilization remains shockingly, despairingly absent. What was the climate movement, after all? What might explain its retreat? What new features might it exhibit upon re-emergence? 

In what follows, I outline some political contexts and tendencies which might help us begin to answer these questions. First, I offer a brief periodization of the 2010s climate movement with an attention to the limits it faced. Next, I develop an analysis of what was lacking in this period, sketching the necessary elements for any future resumption of climate politics. Finally, I consider the escalating data center rebellion and ask whether it signals a welcome shift in the terrain of organizing to confront global warming. Because the US remains both the economic-material and political driver of climate chaos, it remains critical to consider the strategy and prospects of the US climate movement.  

Rise and denouement of the 2010s cycle of struggles

To understand what happened to the climate movement, we first need a sense of what it was. Here, the “climate movement” is an aggregate fiction constituted by a wide range of organizations and positions in some tension. The U.S. climate movement was a loose agglomeration of nonprofits, student and youth movements, foundations and donors, policy wonks and lobbyists, sympathetic unions (largely in the service sector), and grassroots mobilizations. As this catalogue suggests, the movement had a strong professional comportment, although it—like its fossil capitalist opponents—marshalled some working class and grassroots support which occasionally dragged its more conservative elements forward. 

Despite this heterogeneity, we can conceive of a movement consisting of several “wings" (nonprofit, populist, radical)—sometimes in provisional alliance, other times in antagonism—that emerged out of the growing recognition that only a severe transformation away from the status quo could sufficiently address the problem of climate change. The rising urgency of this movement contrasted with the glaring insufficiency of state and international leadership and gave rise to a cycle of struggles developing between 2008 and 2021. This cycle evolved in three phases. The climate movement of this period originated from disappointment in the 2009 Copenhagen agreement and the Obama administration’s tabling of climate legislation. It then swelled with place-based struggles over pipelines and ports for the export of liquified natural gas. Finally, it eventuated in a state-oriented climate populism that championed the Green New Deal, seeking to channel the energy of fossil fuel blockades into a positive policy platform. By the early 2020s, each of these lines of pressure had been exhausted.

By 2010, it was clear to many involved in climate politics that we had reached an impasse. While some had believed that Barack Obama would pass effective climate legislation and finally engage the US in a good faith effort at UNFCCC climate negotiations, the administration quickly tabled its climate legislation package. At the international level, climate activists had been “conference hopping” to various COP negotiations, but the experience was one of being increasingly cordoned off from impact; Cochabamba would be the last conference that many attended. If the Obama administration was not going to act, activists soon realized (like migrant advocates) that public shame-based opposition could force an image-conscious president towards action. Here, opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and the upsurge in hydrofracking emerged as key flash points, inaugurating a pronounced shift towards the targeting of specific fossil infrastructures. Civil disobedience, direct action, and blockading were back on the table, after having been sworn off by the “Big Green” groups. Instead of policy wonks, the movement’s orientation increasingly favored place-based opposition which had developed alliances outside of the usual tent: rural farmers, ranchers, and Native Nations were now critical subjects of struggle. The 2016 blockade of DAPL at Standing Rock marked the height of this phase, articulating a baseline climate goal of keeping fossil fuels in the ground with a broader anti-colonialism centering land, water, and Indigenous sovereignty.

In a third phase of struggle, a new climate populism took shape that hitched a climate populist message with increasing symbolic civil disobedience. The youth-led Sunrise Movement became the leading edge of this tendency, mobilizing young people to put pressure on politicians to refuse fossil fuel campaign donations and to endorse a sweeping legislative package they called a Green New Deal. The organization developed a cohesive visual language (sometimes seen derogatorily as “branding”) and operated supplely, its chapter-based structure enabling small groups to be quickly trained to “birddog” politicians (and share their insufficient reactions on social media). Moreover, Sunrise developed a descriptive moral language of a “clarion call,” understanding that the aesthetic form of Al Gore PowerPoints was counterproductive. Within short years, the social democratic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders had taken up the charge, with Sanders’ second presidential campaign an ambitious attempt to channel this zeitgeist. But once the Green New Deal became the subject of mainstream policy discussion and debated by presidential candidates, the organization that had elevated these concerns faced an inflection point. Some believed that an “outsider” position would be most effective, allowing the group to criticize the insufficiency of the Biden administration’s climate policy. Others felt that the invitation to rapprochement and “insider” status was necessary given the context of another Trump nomination. 

Even if the latter position temporarily held sway, any semblance that the state would accommodate either youth or the grassroots was quickly dissuaded. On one level, aspirations for the Green New Deal were hamstrung by the platform’s formal emptiness, which allowed others to fill in the gaps. For the most part, its prospective details were hashed out by those far from the grassroots, unions, or potential benefactors of such a program (though politicians and pundits were sure to refer to the movement as “inspiring”). Furthermore, with demands for more formal organization (particularly fundraising), Sunrise opted for the nonprofit mold. But this pathway demanded a more rigid structure and effectively neutered the organizational suppleness which was its early strength. Ultimately, the GND coalition was funneled into support for Biden as the lesser-of-two-evils, and once elected, the platform’s void ultimately was filled by market reformists who created Biden’s Build Back Better – which was gutted further into the Inflation Reduction Act. As Thea Riofrancos recently argued, the GND became “largely co-opted” into “an elite geopolitical and industrial strategy, hinging on competition with China.” The latter passed Congress only due to Biden’s quid pro quo with Manchin to fast track the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Various versions of the “dirty deal” amendment were halted by organizing pressures before ultimately being passed as a rider to the 2023 debt ceiling package. What had initially seemed like the Biden administration’s open willingness to partner with the ascendant climate movement ended deflatingly with the approval of a pipeline.

While the radical wing of the climate movement was equipped with more cynicism towards the state apparatus, what had seemed to have worked at Standing Rock faced new challenges. Both the Stop Cop City (Georgia) and Line 3 resistance (Minnesota) had built the capacious kinds of alliances and place-based occupations modeled by the anti-pipeline movement of the 2010s. But unlike Obama, neither Biden nor underling democrats like Tim Walz had the same egoist concern with legacy or appearance. Radical movements could be safely positioned as marginal rather than popular and repressed accordingly: Money flowed freely from Enbridge to local police departments in Minnesota; innovative RICO suits and terrorism charges were filed against seemingly random Cop City opponents; Energy Transfer Partners filed a massive SLAPP suit against Greenpeace for the NoDAPL blockade, to which they were only tendentially connected. Though it has now reached a new level with the Prairieland indictments, this highly punitive (and specious) posture towards activists started well before Trump took office for a second time.

Accompanying these trends of co-optation, neutralization, and repression, was the total collapse of the media environment. A series of studies have documented precipitous drops in climate coverage since 2021, despite (here’s that litany): Canadian fires and smoke crises (2023, 2026), Hurricane Helene (2024), the Los Angeles / Palisades fires (2025). While legacy media studiously avoided the causes of all these crises, the tech-bro right-wing turn accelerated the suppression of movement language on (and enshittification of) social media platforms, causing many writers and reports to jump ship for good reason. While “stunning images of Indigenous-led protest movements” (as the cliched phrase goes) were fresh in 2016, they were now suppressed. The Line 3 struggle never achieved similar national and international coverage despite moral conviction and tactical innovation through mobile blockades. More recently, a May 2026 Indigenous-led direct action successfully halted and cancelled exploratory graphite drilling near Pe’ Sla, a sacred area in the Black Hills, South Dakota. Despite well-crafted narrative imagery and an almost totally successful action – the contractor abandoned the plan after just a few days – it has received no coverage from niche-environmental outlets, let alone the mainstream. Even when we win, no one hears about it. This amplifies the general feeling of listlessness among those who were part of this movement’s moment.

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What was missing? 

A closure of a cycle of struggles is not necessarily a bad thing. A great benefit of the concept of “cycle of struggles,” in my mind, is a certain agnosticism. The class tarries, is captured, adapts, and new terrains emerge. Though elements of the climate movement achieved much, they also hit hard limits. These limits create space for considering new orientations in the future. I pose five such prospects before turning to a brief evaluation of the data center rebellion. 

First, while the movement’s turn away from COP summit-hopping resulted in a return to place-based struggle, it also entailed a loss of practical climate internationalism. Often this is framed as a charge against climate activism’s practical nationalism, and thus inattention to anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South. My sense is that much of the prior decade’s climate activism had an incipient internationalism even when not expressed in a clear anti-imperialist language (e.g., many of the Sunrise youth were kids of immigrants). However, the inchoate form of its internationalism was no defense against the move that fitted the GND into practical climate nationalism against China. Less frequently noted is that the loss of COP/Cochabamba internationalism, however, also absented political-tactical internationalism (and not only between North and South). There is little writing (and seemingly communication) that, for instance, draws connections among Les Soulèvements de la Terre in France, Ende Gelände in Germany, and North American movements. Nor have I seen much attempt by US climate populists to learn from the experience of La France Insoumise. Though U.S. climate activists are liable to highlight the frontlines of struggle in which water protectors and land defenders worldwide face reactionary violence, have we any tactical understanding of how these movements confront or evade these forces? 

Second, the channeling of the GND into the IRA suggests a failure to interpret and politicize inflation, which is a logical capitalist response to climate and fossil risk. All the volatility of weather and oil-related conflict are being baked into price increases which are being passed on to working class pocketbooks. Food, fuel, and rent prices are absolutely wrecking livelihoods in the US, and inflation is usually even deeper in the Global South. Environmentalism has long had a consumption and demand-based politics, but it is deeply individualized into consumer choice for luxury green products. As Nicholas Beuret argues in Or Something Worse, inflation demonstrates the way non-choice hides in market “freedom.” Without connecting this to climate changes we’re already experiencing – and the firms who are performing the magic trick – climate-consumption politics remains wedded to debates about lifestyle choices of the bourgeoisie. 

Third, the nonprofit model is a particularly weak organizational form in this historical moment. While nonprofits have been subjected to critique by the left for decades, they have a particularly strong hold on environmental politics. In the 2020s, this form is extremely hamstrung. Nonprofits are dependent on funding sources that can dry up or be politicized at any second (see Greenpeace, above). Nonprofit boards are likely to be more conservative than members or militants. And issue-based nonprofits crowd out possibilities of more capacious collaboration. Even more radical or agnostic movement tools like bail funds or GoFundMes provide webs of interconnection that can be conspiricized by the state. 

Fourth, movements need to offer a critical analysis of technological forms as expressions of capitalist political economy. The 2010s cycle of struggle remained agnostic on tech, gesturing towards renewable energy but abstract or ambivalent about the material and spatial constraints which are likely to produce injustice in its capitalist form. It is not just tech oligarchs or their insertion into capital that makes our contemporary environment so alienating; technological form itself is shaped by capital to attenuate our capacities for thinking, democratically organizing, or flourishing. The rise of AI makes this particularly apparent, but largely because it is new – this is technology under capitalism. 

Fifth, there needs to be a practical break with the Democratic party disciplinary apparatus and its haughty helicopter punditry. While the 2010s revived (somewhat utopian) thinking about left seizure of state power, less preparation has been made to develop the party or media infrastructure to do so. This means that even when small-level elections are won by purported socialists, they are almost immediately disciplined into left-liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, even when not affiliated to Democrats, climate and environmental movements are associated by proxy (much to the chagrin of those Dems). To the extent that the two-party system remains in place, a practical independence in language and goals needs to be fostered, lest popular energy be co-opted into regressive policy visions such as the IRA.

To these, other elements could be added – a more robust climate movement might need a more organized response to stochastic catastrophes which some have called ‘disaster communism.’ So too are relationships with unions in need of repair. Nonetheless, this sketch provides a basis for assessing the incipient data center struggles that might presage a new phase of U.S. climate politics.

Against the centers of artificial stupidity 

In the era of climate chaos, virtually all instances of class struggle are likely to contain elements which connect to global energy crisis: profit margins and our wallets are getting thinner, volatility is everywhere, the workplace is getting hotter, everyone is a little bit more exhausted and meaner. Nonetheless, there are certain struggles which deserve special scrutiny even when climate is not their top-line concern, due to their potential as inflection points. The insurgent rebellion against data centers is one of them, not least because the scale of projected electricity demand – ranging to several hundred gigawatts in the rosiest portraits – is ushering in a renaissance of new fossil fueled power plants. To conclude, I will suss out why data center resistance has emerged, what differences it has from the prior cycle of struggles, and what pitfalls it might face as it grows and matures. While these comments are somewhat anecdotal, they are formed from making a real effort to follow the data center rebellion here in central Virginia.^[i]

The data center rebellion is not primarily a left or even left-populist formation. It is certainly not internationalist in orientation (a synthesis remaining to be built). Finally, while potential fossil fuel demand destruction which data centers opposition might usher in is implicitly a climate politics, those elements have thus far usually remained just that – implicit. Of course, data centers have a variety of local environmental impacts – land use, noise, air pollution, water use, temperature changes, and surely more. (Some data center owners – such as Meta – purport to be offsetting their electricity consumption with renewable energy purchase agreements. These displace no fossil fuels, while using scarce spatial constraints on renewables). However, the data center rebellion is instructive in four of the orientations outlined above. 

First, the data center rebellion represents a politicization of inflation. Household electricity and water are relatively inflexible goods, and both electricity and water operate as so-called natural monopolies. Consumers–especially renters–have zero choice over from whom they purchase their electricity, and far less individual control over the amount they use than environmentalists usually surmise. Bill inflation is highly visible, making utility companies deeply despised across the political spectrum. In Virginia, we have a particularly egregious villain in Dominion Energy (a former CEO financed a “lost cause” pro-Confederacy movie in 2014; in 2026, Dominion and NextEra Energy announced a merger which would create “the world’s biggest regulated electric utility business by market capitalization”). While social democrats have read concern about “tech oligarchs” into the movement, it is less these figureheads than their firms who are posed as villains. Data center opponents speak an experiential language of class: something like “They want to keep us divided between left and right to make us pay for their millions. But we’re out here having to choose between which bills to pay. And then, even worse, they ask us to conserve energy and water whenever it is hot out.” It helps that project developers tend to be out-of-touch hucksters, too. 

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The data center rebellion seems to take inchoate steps towards politicizing tech. It joins other recent tech-critical movements, like the charming but largely apolitical new Luddites, organized opposition to Flock cameras, and the defeat of carbon capture projects and pipelines in the US Midwest and South. Each of these punctures what Adam Hanieh properly calls the “techno-fetishist illusions” promulgated by the oil industry (among others) that fossil capital will usher in a green transition. A “tech critical” outlook is different than “anti-tech.” The data center rebellion navigates contradictions, organized frequently on Facebook and Instagram while often butting against Meta. And like other grassroots populist movements I’ve followed (including those against wind farms), there can be a bit of crankery and outright misinformation involved. Though their critique is not so highly developed that it reaches capitalist totality, the data center rebellion evidences the possible upshot of a social formation which questions about which technologies are incompatible with the economy we want. In its concern for spatial distribution, data center resistance has forerunners in environmental justice movements, but the simultaneous rollout almost everywhere means data centers aren’t just a matter of uneven development. In this and other elements of the rebellion’s tech discourse, there’s also an unconscious or implicit critique the unplanned nature of the capitalist economy. If climate movements have sometimes been too timid in learning how to assess tech, using only emissions and land use as barometers, this is a sign that we need not be. 

It is difficult to generalize about the organizational form of data center opposition. Certainly some legacy nonprofits are involved, such as the Sierra Club and NAACP. However, much of the data center rebellion is organizationally unaffiliated and non-professional, forming and growing through moderately spontaneous actions especially at local city council, planning, and permitting meetings. In addition to meetings and rallies, an organizational form also evidenced is something I’ve been calling “militant investigation.” Because so many data centers are shrouded by the outright secrecy of non-disclosure agreements, practices of weeding through council minutes, correspondence, FOIA requests, and site visits have become part of the organizational repertoire of the data center resistance. In certain situations, militant investigation can lead people towards broader critiques of the capital relation. Even when it doesn’t, it demonstrates regular working people are more than capable of learning on the fly.

Finally, the data center rebellion is not organically sutured to the Democratic party and punditry. It is not just that many rural Republican voters find themselves opposing data centers, or that both Democratic and Republican politicians have Eddington-esque bipartisan support for such development. Nor is the rollout simply due to Trump-era deregulation, though that doesn’t help. Rather, because of its grassroots emergence and independence from these structures, the data center rebellion is in a vanguard position to which other political elements must adapt. They can pose costs on elites, whether through public shame or election defeats. The punditry class has been tripping over itself having just patted itself on the back for solidifying NIMBY “grassroots opposition” as the climate villain. Left punditry has also been caught off guard, and its debates have spanned a tepid range from “under socialism, data centers should be publicly owned” to “under socialism, data centers should be democratically controlled.” Politicians running on data center opposition seem to be faring better. Regardless, the political openness and constitutive independence give the movement a real sway, even among deep red parts of the country.

As the movement against data centers matures, organizational and political independence will be harder to maintain. Populist formations tend to have a short shelf life, anyway. It is unlikely that the backlash will face the same repression more radical movements are facing, though there will be attempts such as recent smears of “anti-tech extremism” and various demonizations of the movement as purportedly funded by the Chinese Communist Party. On the other hand, inflation and tech politicization are likely to grow and morph – especially if the AI bubble bursts. If not, hundreds of gigawatts of new power will be needed to feed the data centers currently planned – yet another catastrophe to pile on those we already experience. From these developments, climate organizers might consider how a more explicit working-class character could be nurtured out of populist generics, bringing out more of the “good sense” which inheres in these chaotic political forms. To what degree this opens a new cycle of climate or anti-capitalist struggles remains to be seen.

Kai Bosworth is a human geographer and political ecologist, and an Associate Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (2022, University of Minnesota Press). His current book project is provisionally entitled Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-Oil Activism.