We Can't Hit Pause for the Next Four Years
Passively relying on the market and political self interest won't be enough to overcome Trump administration attacks on climate progress. Active education, advocacy, and activism will be needed.
As I write this, the Los Angeles wildfires have taken the lives of 24 individuals (though the death toll will unfortunately rise), displaced tens of thousands of people, and consumed thousands of buildings - single family homes, apartment buildings, libraries, churches, synagogues, schools, businesses, and various local landmarks among them. Entire neighborhoods are now ashes. Local ecosystems, including wildlife habitats, are being incinerated as the choking, toxin-filled smoke invades everyone's lungs, creating immediate respiratory distress while taking years off of lives in the process. Preliminary damage and economic losses at the time of this writing have been estimated to be between $250 and $275 billion (not accounting for the long term health and ecological impacts). Stories of escape and devastation have been harrowing and heartrending.
When I first heard about the Los Angeles wildfires, Stephen Markley's The Deluge immediately came to mind - a climate dystopian novel spanning the recent-past-to-near-future as it explores through fiction our ongoing failures to effectively address climate change and the potential results of those failures (reviewed here). About a third of the way into the book we see a burning Los Angeles hellscape act as the setting for a main character's dramatic rescue of one of his daughters (reminiscent of the scene above).
Tony followed on the firewoman’s heels. Through a smoke-choked hallway, sucking cool air from the oxygen mask, and out into the savage night. Fire everywhere. Burning so bright, the night was forgotten. Every home he could see was in some state of nature’s arson, whether it was cinders spotting on the roof or the whole structure wrapped in flame. It felt like it was a thousand degrees outside, and the wind blew hot and spiteful into his face, peppered with a cool mist evaporating from the barrel of the truck’s water cannon. The hellscape ran on in every direction, as far as his vision allowed. - Markley, Stephen. The Deluge (p. 374). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Markley also conjures up a Come to Jesus polar storm that kills dozens and plunges millions across seven midwestern states into cold and darkness. His fictional tale has some not so surprising parallels with the series of winter storms the U.S. great plains, Midwest, south, and east coast have been experiencing recently, impacting travel, commerce, power, and schools throughout. In Kansas where I live, every highway in NE Kansas was closed during and in the immediate aftermath of Winter Storm Blair. Luckily these storms haven't caused the same dozens of deaths Markley depicted, but deaths did occur and there will be significant monetary costs. Winter storms of the recent past have cost the U.S. billions of dollars; this winter will likely be no different.
Mother Nature keeps sending us signals that it's past time to get serious about collectively addressing climate change. And she keeps getting less subtle about it. Same for climate scientists, whose warnings regarding the urgency of action couldn't be any clearer, many themselves fleeing areas at immediate risk (at least those with the privilege to do so). Johan Rockström, professor in environmental science and co-founder of the Stockholm Resilience Centre last July pointed out this urgency with respect to several key tipping points:
Our youth, suffering from climate anxiety, take to the streets and protest, begging us to take meaningful action. Many have stopped waiting for the adults in the room and have started taking action themselves. Yet in the U.S., the adults in the room decided to add to our youth's climate anxiety by giving the party that embraces climate denial and fossil fuels complete control of the federal government and many state governments. Perhaps even worse in some ways are the adults in the room working to decarbonize who have chosen to hide behind the market and our inadequate progress to date in the face of the incoming Trump administration.
This perspective came through during a 12/20/2024 interview of Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Loan Program Office (LPO) by guest host Robinson Meyer, contributing writer for New York Times Opinion and the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, on the Ezra Klein Show. Mr. Shah's argument that the IRA and Biden's Green New Deal will continue under Trump boiled down to a) the market (and associated corporate / business interests), b) decarbonization progress to date (combined with projects in the works and associated inertia), and c) political self interest (relative to red states already benefiting from the IRA and other decarbonization efforts).
Some of these arguments have been repeated by others, including US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. They also alluded to the likelihood that the ineptness of some of the MAGA coalition combined with infighting could further blunt efforts to roll back the IRA and other decarbonization efforts. While I agree there is some merit to all of these arguments, in my opinion it's naive to think that efforts to roll back decarbonization over the next four years at the federal and state level won't have a damaging amount of success.
In a thread on Bluesky (do we call them threads on Bluesky?), I laid out some of the reasons (summarized below this link) I believe passively relying on Shah's arguments are insufficient:
Some of these reasons included:
Trump is driven solely by self interest, which often doesn't align with GOP interests (at least historical GOP interests), corporate / business interests related to the market, good government practices, or the U.S. in general). While decarbonization advocates could theoretically use Trump's transactional nature to their advantage, the fact is...
Trump has surrounded himself with more ideologues and yes-people this time around who are less concerned and responsive to market trends and perceptions of political malpractice or good governing norms. More of these same type of legislators populate our state governments as well.
As I've laid out elsewhere (and others have covered), Project 2025 and Agenda 47 specifically target the IRA and other decarbonization efforts. While it's doubtful they’ll be able to repeal the entire IRA, they’ll likely try eliminating critical tax incentives necessary to more rapidly decarbonize our built environments. Other Project 2025 goals include (but aren't limited to) stopping grid-planning and expansion to accommodate renewables and defunding grid deployment programs. These may not stop progress already being made, but they can slow it down (when we need it to be rapidly speeding up).
Achieving the goals of Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will be greatly assisted by the Trump administration's anticipated efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, including eliminating positions and departments and replacing career federal employees having decades of experience and expertise with Trump loyalists. We're seeing the beginnings of that now during the administration transition with the questioning of career civil servants as to who they voted for in the November 2024 election.
Vivek Ramaswamy (at this point slated to co-head DOGE with Elon Musk) has alluded to such actions for the Loan Program Office itself, indicating the amount of money the office releases should be reduced, people should be installed whose goals aren’t really aligned with the office's mission (reducing the number of staff and associated expertise in the process), and a greater percentage of the remaining dollars should be directed to natural gas projects or other fossil fuel adjacent projects. And Project 2025 even goes so far as to call for the office's elimination (pp. 383-384). Mr. Meyer brought this up during the interview, but Mr. Shah skirted the question.
The market is a social construct that we manipulate by our actions (intentionally and unintentionally). Just as regulations, tax incentives, etc., modify the market to help promote healthy environments, renewable energy, and other prosocial goals, eliminating regulations and IRA tax incentives, decimating federal agencies and expertise, limiting the dollars the Loan Program Office releases and constraining the type of projects targeted, etc. will reduce the market's ability to achieve such prosocial goals. Though the growing insurance crisis may drive some change here, limiting what the Trump administration and its allies are able to do.
The market itself, as it's been constructed and evolved over the last 100 years or so, is itself part of the problem. It's unable to effectively account for much of our vast social and non-human ecological realm, much of which isn’t monetized. This is frankly why fossil fuels are still around. If the market actually accounted for the air quality impacts on global health / loss of life resulting from burning fossil fuels, that alone may have resulted in the extinction of fossil fuels much sooner.
The market as it's constructed, combined with authoritarian threats from the Trump administration, has already contributed to billionaires, corporations, and CEOs bending the knee before Trump has even taken office. Though weird combinations of billionaire / white male ego, lust for power, greed, fear, patriarchy, bigotry, and maybe even a little concern for their employees in some cases probably also contributed to this. We've already seen the six largest U.S. banks withdraw from the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group in anticipation of Trump taking office. We will likely see similar corporate actions pulling back from decarbonization efforts in the coming months (though maybe some insurance companies and their CEOs will buck this trend and speak out).
Mechanisms whose goals may not be directly related to decarbonization can also indirectly impact our ability to decarbonize. The GOP / MAGA war on the trans community and DEI (spelled out in detail in Project 2025) will also have a negative impact on implementing building certification systems at the individual building or portfolio level that address health / wellness, equity, and the sustainability / resiliency necessary to respond to climate change.
At the state level Mr. Shah seemed to make a blanket statement about renewable / electrification economic development being universally welcome, but that doesn't apply to every state, particularly ones dominated by GOP legislatures and/or state regulatory commissions controlled or influenced by the GOP. In Kansas where I live, we should be much farther along than we are with regards to renewables, efficiency, and electrification. GOP control is a big reason we aren’t (Legislature passes bill barring natural gas bans, ‘This is punitive’: Kansas Senate committee considers poison pill wind energy bills, Keep the pressure on KCC - Move Kansas Faster to Clean Energy).
Kansas GOP’s targeting of public education (with similarities in other GOP controlled states) has also negatively impacted the electrification / greening of our schools. And now with the GOP adding to it’s supermajority in both the Kansas Senate and House, along with Trump’s victory, they feel even more emboldened to continue their anti-prosocial agendas.
I was appreciative of Mr. Shah responding to my thread, taking seriously the need for government officials to engage with the public (you can see the back and forth in the thread). However, his responses to my specific concerns above were superficial and always tied back to his initial arguments laid out in the podcast (seemingly trapped in a neoliberal mindset and/or administration talking points). But I do think he made some really good points in the podcast about the need to engage local communities and include them throughout the process of any project development.
In my assessment, we can't passively rely on the market, decarbonization inertia, and/or political self interest to continue increasing needed decarbonization efforts over the next four years (let alone protect the rights of women, minorities, immigrants, and democracy itself). We will need to be proactive, visible, and vocal in our education, advocacy, and activism. I know others agree with this assessment as well.
Focusing on the AEC Industry, the U.S. Green Building Council's Advocacy Working Group is still looking for support in it's efforts to defend the IRA. While the deadline has passed for companies or organizations to join the building industry sign-on letter to Congressional leadership opposing repeals of the buildings-related provisions in the IRA (proud that BranchPattern did sign on), there are still opportunities to engage your elected officials. See the link above (looking for support) for how to do this along with recommended talking points to use when engaging your elected officials. Arathi Gowda, principal at ZGF Architects, as part of a Citizen Architect New Years resolution recently posted a call to action for architects to sign a petition from the The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Committee on the Environment supporting the IRA. She also listed some potentially swayable officials to contact.
Such advocacy, engaging your local, state, and federal elected officials (developing relationships when possible), and finding the language and talking points that speak to your elected officials (like how it benefits their constituents with specific examples) is going to be really important over the next four years. And if making the business case is what speaks to them, then throw in some quantified estimates on productivity, health, rental rates, etc. to help make the case (see Gaming the System).
As Arathi pointed out, in addition to being designers, builders, building scientists, owners, operators, and occupants, we are also all citizens. We have a responsibility to stay informed and engaged in the running of our communities, states, and nation. We are also citizens of the world, weighing us with the responsibility of equitably maintaining a healthy planet, now and into the future, for all humans and other species. We don't have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines (or hiding during the next four years), and those of us with various forms of privilege should exercise it in the service of climate action, decarbonization, and social / environmental justice.
Admittedly, that responsibility can get tricky because education and advocacy must at times transition into more aggressive forms of activism and resistance, whether that involves engaging building owners or elected officials. We can work with the GOP, the Trump administration, or building owners whose values may be at odds with our own when interests align. But we still must hold elected officials and others in power accountable where the climate, human rights, and democracy are concerned. And sometimes compromise isn't an option. There will be no trading trans rights for IRA tax incentives or continuous building monitoring.
I don't have all the answers by any means (and I have, and likely will still, struggle finding the right balance at times), but I think we do need to find ways to plug ourselves into coordinated, multi-level strategies spanning multiple sectors and academia, involving many disciplines (including the behavioral sciences) to help counter negative Trump administration / GOP actions in the short term and promote prosocial actions over the long term. This should involve various professional organizations like the U.S. Green Building Council, The American Institute of Architects (AIA), the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), Living Future, ASHRAE, the Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE), the Illuminating Engineering Society, the CIE - International Commission on Illumination, the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA), the Environmental Design Research Association, GRESB, NAIOP, IFMA, the ICMA - International City/County Management Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association, the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA), and the Applied Behavioral Science Association, to name just a very few.
Professional organizations should consider bolstering and/or expanding what they do relative to education, advocacy, and activism, as well as explore opportunities to work collaboratively with one another. Advocacy and activism through professional organizations may also help reduce some of the risk to individuals and individual firms. And we should be clear-eyed that there will be varying degrees of risk for speaking truth to power. Several other organizations of various affiliations to keep in mind for multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary ideas, inspiration, and information include ProSocial World, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), the Cultural Evolution Society's Sustainable Working Group, the ACE Lab: Applied Cultural Evolution Laboratory, the Muthukrishna Lab, The Alliance for Collective Action, the World Economic Forum, UK Architects Declare, Architecture 2030, the New Buildings Institute, Project Drawdown, UN Biodiversity, The Centre for Conscious Design (CCD), and the Center for the Built Environment (CBE). Though again, these just scratch the surface.
I've touched on some strategies and actions in previous posts and articles (a few examples are listed below and I'll have some more ideas in the next edition), but I'm sure readers could share ideas, actions, and other relevant organizations to get involved with in the comments.
Blurring the Line Between “Others” – A Practical Application of Cultural Multilevel Selection Theory
What the Kansas Legislature could learn from our hunter-gatherer ancestors
Markley envisioned that it would take another fifteen years of increasing devastation, societal instability, conflict, and extensive suffering before we would really and truly begin to address climate change. If we don't step up, individually and collectively, to speak truth to power and hold it accountable, aggressively when needed, Markley's fictional near-term future may be our own. We can't passively rely on the market, progress to date, or political self interest.
We can't hit pause for the next four years.