In 2006, at the end of an unusually hot summer, activist and author Bill McKibben organized a five-day march in his home state of Vermont to demand congressional action on climate change. The march began at Robert Frost’s summer writing cabin near Ripton, Vermont, and from there traced a path up the western edge of the state. In the evenings, the marchers took part in village green-style rallies hosted by communities along the route. By the time McKibben reached Burlington, 1,000 people had joined him. One Vermont newspaper proclaimed it the largest march ever for climate change action.

“When I read that I thought, no wonder we’re losing,” McKibben recently told Sierra. “We’ve got the superstructure of a movement—the scientists and policy people and Al Gore. The only part we’ve left out is the movement itself.” 

What a difference a decade-and-a-half makes. Today, there is unmistakably a vibrant, vigorous, and diverse American climate movement—a people’s movement strong enough to influence US politics and to shape US policy at the highest levels. The best evidence of that is this year’s Inflation Reduction Act. One can trace a direct line from those village green rallies in 2006 to the passage, last August, of the landmark legislation. Recognized as the biggest investment the federal government has ever made to combat climate change, the IRA directs $369 billion to climate change solutions and clean energy incentives.

After the Inflation Reduction Act squeaked through the Senate, lawmakers were quick to celebrate sausage well made, especially at a time when the political atmosphere in DC is dangerously unhealthy and compromise is a dirty word. In truth, the IRA wouldn’t have happened without the climate movement. That we finally have meaningful climate policy is a testament to the persistence, smart strategizing, and rowdiness of millions of activists. It’s also a sign that the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on Congress is not as total as it once was. As Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California and a longtime leader on climate issues, recently told The New York Times, “I don’t think we would have had that achievement [IRA passage] but for the climate movement.”

“Each of these fights has been important in its own right, but also has had the effect of shifting the zeitgeist, bit by bit,” McKibben said.  

So, how did that achievement happen? It has taken countless small battles to help erode the strength of the fossil fuel industry. Fights over this pipeline or that fracking well; fossil fuel divestment from this college or that pension fund; and a thousand cuts against the fossil fuel industry eventually shifted the balance of power in Washington and made a political moment possible. “Each of these fights has been important in its own right, but also has had the effect of shifting the zeitgeist, bit by bit,” McKibben said.  

Demonstrators march with a replica of a pipeline during a protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline outside the White House on November 6, 2011. | Photo by Evan Vucci/AP

Early days

In June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that the greenhouse effect was happening: human activities were spewing carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere and contributing to global temperature rise. The very next year, McKibben published the first popular book about climate change, The End of Nature, which warned readers that we need to overhaul our relationship with the natural world (and fossil fuels) to avoid catastrophic global warming. Then, in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report, calling for the nations of the world to come together to address climate change.

“I was naïve enough to think if we kept writing books and articles and the IPCC did its thing, that, having settled the argument, our leaders would then get to work,” McKibben told Sierra. “It took me too long and too many books to realize that we’d won the argument conclusively, but we were still losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and evidence. It was about money and power.”

In the 1990s, environmental groups slowly began making climate change one of their issues, though it wasn’t yet the issue. Meanwhile, fossil fuel industry–funded front groups rushed to fill the vacuum and began organizing an effective disinformation effort to sow skepticism about the threat of global warming. In 1998, the United States signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the Senate never ratified the treaty; just three years after the protocol was conceived, President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the agreement. 

By the early 2000s, the warning signs were flashing more brightly. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina (and the bungled federal response) shocked the country and gave us a taste of the extreme weather events to come. That same year, the Sierra Club membership voted to make climate change a top priority for the organization. An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, documented Al Gore’s efforts to wake the world up to the threat. The film won an Academy Award—and suddenly global warming was hot. Leonardo DiCaprio appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with a sad-looking baby polar bear at his feet. 

After the Vermont march, McKibben started planning other events with the help of a handful of students and recent grads from Middlebury College, where he teaches. Jamie Henn, who became involved with carbon neutrality efforts on the Middlebury campus after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, was one of them. In those early days, Henn and other activists spent much of their time simply trying to wake people up to the issue.

Social media was still new, so activists cold called environmental groups across the globe and invited them to participate in the global day of action

“We literally had days of action where we just rang church bells,” Henn said. In 2007, the loose-knit group of climate campaigners organized a national day of action for “global warming legislation” called Step It Up. Soon after, Hansen published a paper warning that we needed to keep carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic climate change. McKibben, Henn, and company formed a new entity called 350.org and began planning a global day of action for October 24, 2009, ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen that December.

Social media was still new, so activists cold called environmental groups across the globe and invited them to participate. McKibben likened it to a potluck supper: they announced the date and theme, but groups and individuals decided what to bring to the moment. There were 5,200 events in 183 countries. “It was this moment where everybody got to see themselves in this new climate movement that was young and diverse and global and creative,” Henn said. 

Water protectors brave frigid temperatures as they try to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. | Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Sipa via AP Images

The failed attempt of Waxman-Markey

To fully appreciate the historic accomplishment that is the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s useful to first understand what happened to the doomed Waxman-Markey bill. 

The first months of the Obama administration were a heady time for progressives. Buoyed by the landslide election of Barack Obama, who had campaigned on a promise to tackle climate change, environmentalists were optimistic about passing climate legislation. Democrats enjoyed large margins in both houses of Congress; a national law to ratchet down greenhouse gas pollution seemed within reach. In June 2009, the House narrowly passed (219 to 212) the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Sponsored by Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the legislation sought to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2030.

The euphoria faded fast. The recession dominated Obama’s first year in office, and he spent much of his political capital passing the Affordable Care Act. The White House seemed to have little appetite to push the climate legislation. After clearing the House, Waxman-Markey languished in the Senate. That left Obama with limited credibility on the climate issue when he arrived at the December 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen—talks that ended in a total failure.

Waxman-Markey was, essentially, a cap-and-trade plan: It set limits on greenhouse gas emissions and then established a market so companies could buy and sell permits in order to meet those limits. While the proposed legislation may have had a certain technocratic elegance, it suffered from political weaknesses. For one thing, it splintered the environmental community.

Waxman-Markey created a rift between centrist environmental groups that embraced the bill and environmental justice groups concerned that the bill did little to protect people in poor and minority communities living near big polluters—polluters that would be able to keep polluting, and simply buy their carbon credits from elsewhere. “The idea that we can carbon trade away [our emissions] really generated a huge outcry, particularly for climate justice and grassroots groups,” said Jean Su, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

While many of the “Big Green” groups—including Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, and League of Conservation Voters—lobbied Senators to pass the bill, they neglected to rally support at the grassroots. There were no major marches or demonstrations in support of the proposed law; there were scant efforts to generate calls to representatives on Capitol Hill, even as the BP oil spill unspooled an ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Big Green groups trusted their inside game would be enough. 

In the wake of the defeat of Waxman-Markey, environmentalists engaged in plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking.

The problem was that there were plenty of lobbyists on the other side too. Soon, Waxman-Markey was warped by what The New York Times termed a “cornucopia of concessions and exemptions” to the fossil fuel industry and Big Ag. Senate Democrats eventually recognized they wouldn’t have enough votes to overcome a 60-vote filibuster, and by the summer of 2010 it was declared dead. 

In the wake of the defeat, environmentalists engaged in plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking. The demise of Waxman-Markey was due to the recession, or the intransigence of Republicans, or the corporate lobbying, or the sclerotic Senate, or all of the above. Eventually, many in the environmental movement would come to see that the lack of a broad-based movement as a major factor in the defeat. Writing about the collapse of the cap-and-trade bill, the League of Conservation Voters would eventually admit, “We learn[ed] an important lesson: we must organize at the grassroots level and make climate action a priority issue for the public and elected leaders alike.”

Sierra Club staff and board members celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act at the White House. | Photo courtesy of the Sierra Club

Keystone XL and Keep It in the Ground

In some post-mortems of the Waxman-Markey debacle, none other than President Obama played a prominent role. The president never made climate a priority. And after the Democrats got hammered in the 2010 mid-terms, the White House seemed to shrink further from climate change. Obama embraced an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that promoted offshore drilling and methane gas extraction alongside nuclear and renewables.

Aware that legislation was off the table in a GOP-controlled Congress and increasingly perturbed by Obama’s pivot to “all of the above,” environmental organizations big and small turned their focus to “supply-side” battles. The basic strategic idea was to tackle the climate crisis by cutting off the flow of planet-warming coal, oil, and gas. Increasingly, the cutting edge of the climate movement would be fights against pipelines, wellheads, and coal terminals.

Target number one became the Keystone XL Pipeline: a proposed 1,400-mile-long pipeline that would have moved petroleum from the tar sands mines of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Environmentalists opposed the project for sound strategic and scientific reasons; tar sands oil is especially dirty and carbon-intensive, and opponents dubbed it a “ticking time bomb” for the climate. The pipeline also had tactical value: It provided the climate movement with something to rally against. 

“Movements require villains,” Henn said. “The incredible local organizing, led by environmental justice and Indigenous communities, animated the movement in a way that a price on carbon or even clean energy targets could never do.”

In August 2011, climate activists organized a two-week-long string of civil disobedience actions at the White House to call on Obama to deny a crucial cross-border permit needed for pipeline construction. McKibben and James Hansen were both arrested, as were celebrities like Darryl Hannah. Black leaders, including Ben Jealous of the NAACP and the Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, addressed the demonstrators. Then-Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune and Sierra Club president Allison Chin were arrested—marking the first time ever that the nation’s oldest environmental organization had engaged in civil disobedience. By the end of the month, more than 1,200 people had been detained at the White House—marking the biggest show of environmentally focused civil disobediences since the height of the anti-nuclear movement 30 years before. 

The Obama White House was unmoved. But the campaign against Keystone XL had the intended effect of broadening and deepening the climate movement. In Nebraska, Jane Kleeb’s Bold Nebraska succeeded in enlisting politically conservative farmers and ranchers. In South Dakota, Indigenous activists blockaded Keystone XL construction equipment from moving across the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Eventually, those two threads of resistance would combine into the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance” of white ranchers and Native Americans that would march on Washington.

Such alliances weren’t always easy. “There was a whole lot of latent racism, although I give props to those who had to put up with all of our anger—500 years of being pissed off,” said Joye Braun, an Indigenous life-long activist who served as a community organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network until her untimely death this fall. A citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Nation, Braun first heard about the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2010 after she returned to her reservation in South Dakota, and almost immediately began organizing against it. 

The culture clashes and tensions within the climate movement were real. They were also a healthy sign of growing pains, as what had been a largely white, largely coastal movement began to spread and diversify. The grassroots demand to “keep it in the ground”—to put an end to any new development of oil, gas, and coal—offered a movement entry point for people across the country. In Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, communities that weren’t used to fossil fuel extraction in their backyards were galvanized by the noise and pollution from the gas fracking boom. In the West, proposed coal-export export plants provoked grassroots opposition. On the Gulf Coast, the long tail of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster sparked new community resistance to oil and gas projects. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign led to hundreds of local battles nationwide to shutter existing coal plants.  

The potency of the local and regional campaigns against pipelines, power plants, and coal ports was on display in February 2013, when environmental groups organized a “Forward on Climate” march a month after Obama’s second inauguration. Most of the speakers on stage focused their remarks on calling on Obama to deny Keystone XL. Most of the signs and banners held by the estimated 35,000 people who turned out for the frigid march focused on gas fracking. Local fights against fossil fuels had begun to coalesce into something greater than the sum of its parts. 

A man throws an Earth balloon into the air as people fill 58th Street between 8th and 9th Avenue before a global warming march in New York on September 21, 2014. | Photo by Mel Evans/AP

Divestment and disasters

Even as climate activists kept their focus on individual pipeline projects and power plants, some organizers began to experiment with another tactic: cutting off the flow of money going toward fossil fuel projects. The fossil fuel divestment movement was a conscious copy of the 1980s campaigns to get US institutions to divest from the apartheid government of South Africa. It was also deliberate effort to expand the movement’s scope and to create additional entry points for people concerned about the climate crisis.

“Most people don’t have a coal mine or oil well in their backyard,” McKibben said. But most people are “adjacent to a pot of money”: a pension fund, church fund, or college endowment. “It was a way to have a battle about climate change play out in a thousand places rather than ten.”

Tiny Unity College in rural Maine was the first to divest, in 2012. As of this writing, more than 1,500 institutions have extracted fossil fuels from their investment portfolios. These including churches, municipalities, major philanthropists (including the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune), and most Ivy League universities.

Earth itself was starting to change the politics of climate change. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy brought climate chaos to the doorstep of the country’s media and financial capital, as the storm flooded large sections of lower Manhattan. That year was also a record year for wildfires in the West—a bitter taste of the smoke-filled years to come. Starting in 2013, a drought gripped California, while a years-long drought went unabated throughout the greater Southwest. Nearly every year was record-breaking scorcher. For many people, climate change no longer felt like an abstract threat; it was a clear and present danger to their lives. 

The newfound depth, breadth, and militancy of the climate movement erupted into public view in September 2014 at the People’s Climate March in New York City. Organizers had expected some 100,000 people to show up for the march, scheduled for the eve of a United Nations summit on climate. Instead, more than 300,000 people jammed the streets of Manhattan. The mood was boisterous, even joyful, the crowd colorful and diverse: church groups and unions, elders, veterans, and Indigenous leaders, and lots and lots of young people. In a clear signal of the movement’s shifting priorities, environmental justice organizations were at the front of the column, marching with a banner that read, “Frontlines of Crisis, Forefront of Change.”

Belatedly, President Obama started to make moves on climate change. Through executive order he put in place the Clean Power Plan, which set national limits on carbon pollution from power plants. In a clear departure from how the doomed Waxman-Markey legislation had been conceived, environmental justice groups worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure equity and justice were baked into the plan’s framework. “We didn’t get all of the things we asked for—like mandatory emissions reductions in our communities, or the elimination of cap-and-trade as a mitigation option for states—but we did get some of them,” wrote Jalonne L. White-Newsome, director of federal policy for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, in an opinion piece for Grist.

In November 2015, Obama finally bent to the years-long grassroots pressure and denied the Keystone XL Pipeline. The next month, he helped to negotiate the successful Paris Agreement, an international treaty in which countries agree to reduce emissions enough to hold global warming below 1.5°C.

During the final year of Obama’s term, a grassroots uprising against another new pipeline project revealed just how large and cohesive the keep-it-in-the-ground movement had become. It started in the spring of 2016, when a small group of Indigenous activists calling themselves “water protectors” began protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile pipeline owned by Energy Transfer Partners that would carry oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale fields to Illinois. 

The pipeline route ran under Lake Oahe, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s primary source of drinking water. Water protectors took to social media to share what was happening, creating viral hashtags #NoDAPL and #StandWithStandingRock. “We didn’t have time to organize. What had taken us years to build was mashed together in weeks,” the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Joye Braun recalled. “But because of the alliances we had built [during the Keystone XL campaign], we were able to draw people into the DAPL fight.”

Standing Rock was a milestone. The demonstrations made clear that no community threatened with a new fossil fuel project would have to fight alone. 

Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people joined encampments on the Standing Rock Sioux’s tribal lands. Braun was one of the first to arrive and one of the last to leave. During the wintry demonstrations, security forces used brutal violence against water protectors, who suffered through tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and attack dogs.

Although the Dakota Access Pipeline was completed—at great cost to its owner, Energy Transfer Partners—Standing Rock was a milestone. The demonstrations made clear that no community threatened with a new fossil fuel project would have to fight alone. At Standing Rock, the world bore witness to the ways in which Indigenous groups had rediscovered their power. Standing Rock would also become a crucible for future progressive movement-building: both Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland would later say that their participation in the DAPL protests influenced their decisions to run for office. 

A new sunrise in the Trump years 

As soon as he took power in 2017, President Donald Trump began dismantling Obama’s climate-action accomplishments. Trump reversed the official State Department decision on Keystone, gutted the Clean Power Plan, and withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement.

Frustrated young people refused to let climate change recede from the political agenda, and climate activism became one of the bright threads in the broader Trump-era “Resistance.” One of those frustrated young people who refused to stop organizing was Aru Shiney-Ajay, who now serves as training director for the Sunrise Movement. She was drawn to climate activism after connecting the dots between worsening droughts, climate change, and the refugee crises. In 2016 she got involved in the fossil fuel divestment movement on her college campus.

In some ways, the emergence of the Sunrise Movement followed the script of predecessors like 350.org in the aughts or Greenpeace in the seventies—youth-driven, idealistic, ambitious. But the Sunrise Movement founders self-consciously modeled themselves on another tradition of American social change: that of the Civil Rights Movement. From the outset, Sunrise was committed to diversity within its ranks and an intersectional view of progressive politics. The organization and its growing number of hubs was comfortable using nonviolent action, and just as comfortable working with politicians and helping to craft policy. Sunrise understood that outside pressure could create progress from within. In the 2018 midtem elections, Sunrise’s endorsed candidates included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Deb Haaland. 

“We were always clear that goal was not only to get people elected, but to use the people power we built through the elections to hold those people accountable,” Shiney-Ajay said. After the Democrats swept the mid-term elections, Sunrise focused on promoting the Green New Deal, a plan to simultaneously reign in carbon emissions, address racial injustice, and revitalize the American economy. Though certainly not as bold, the Inflation Reduction Act can trace its lineage to the Green New Deal, which was championed by progressive lawmakers, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Octavio-Cortez, who joined Sunrise activists in a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office shortly after the 2018 midterms

“One of the things the Green New Deal did was shift the conversation about climate policy away from cap and trade and carbon pricing to massive government investments in clean energy as a way to reduce emissions,” says Shiney-Ajay. Many of the signs at the Pelosi office sit-in read “Green Jobs for All.”

Meanwhile, climate activism in the streets continued to grow. In August 2018, a Swedish student named Greta Thunberg skipped school and planted herself in front of the Swedish Parliament, demanding action on the climate crisis. Other students joined her, and soon students all over the world were striking every Friday. In September 2019, a Greta-inspired global strike for climate swept the planet. It was very likely the largest coordinated popular protest in world history.

Election 2020 and the IRA saga 

In the eight presidential races between 1988—when James Hansen first warned Congress about the greenhouse effect—and 2016, climate change received less than 10 minutes of air time during presidential debates. To the surprise and delight of American climate activists, climate change claimed more of the discussion during the first Biden-Trump debate than those previous eight presidential contests combined. Climate change appeared again in the vice-presidential debate and the final Biden-Trump debate, during which the moderator asked the two candidates what they would do about “environmental justice.” Finally, the injustice of the climate crisis had arrived at the apex of American politics. 

It would be overstating things to argue that climate change was a key issue that determined the outcome of the 2020 elections. But in some places—like drought-ravaged Arizona and wildfire-torn Colorado—climate-minded voters likely played a key role in the final tallies. After Joe Biden was declared the winner, climate activists were quick to start mobilizing to ensure that the climate crisis would be a top priority for the new administration. “Make no mistake, this election is just the beginning,” Gina McCarthy, then head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, soon-to-be the most influential climate advisor in the Biden White House, said after the election. “Climate change isn’t going away any time soon, and our fight to keep this a vital political issue isn’t going away, either.”

Climate activists knew that the first two years of the Biden administration represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the crisis, and they were determined Biden’s agenda would not suffer the same fate as Waxman-Markey. The centerpiece of Biden’s climate agenda came to be known as the Build Back Better Plan, which promised to be the federal government’s largest ever investment in clean energy.

This time, climate-action advocates resolved to maintain a united front; they also vowed to pour on the grassroots pressure congressional district by congressional district. During the August 2021 Congressional recess, for example, Sierra Club undertook an unprecedented grassroots lobbying campaign just as the first iteration of Build Back Better was being drafted, said Miranda Ehrlich, federal field director at Sierra Club. “We made sure legislators were hearing nonstop about how important this legislation was.” And those legislators were not just hearing from lobbyists, but from thousands of their constituents. Sierra Club members alone made over 54,000 calls to their representatives and sent 98,000 emails to Capitol Hill offices. 

Big Green organizations and grassroots EJ groups were also much more aligned than they had been 11 years earlier. In the fall of 2021, Braun co-organized People Versus Fossil Fuels, a diverse coalition of over 1,200 groups from across the country, to push President Biden to use his executive powers to halt new fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency.

The House narrowly passed Build Back Better, but Senator Joe Manchin declared the legislation dead in December 2021. No one in the climate movement thought of giving in. To mark Earth Day, there were Build Back Better rallies nationwide, including a rally outside the White House that drew at least 1,000 people. “That moment was definitely an inflection point that put pressure back on decision-makers,” Ehrlich said.

In July, Senator Manchin once again publicly said he was pulling his support from a climate bill. A combination of outrage, panic, and despair swept through the climate movement. Then, on July 27, after at least one false start, Manchin and Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a revamped reconciliation bill dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included approximately $370 billion on climate-change-related spending.

Of course, there was a catch. Manchin would vote for the IRA if Democrats supported legislation that eased permitting for energy projects. He hoped to use this vehicle to propel the Mountain Valley Pipeline, plagued by delays and permit violations, to completion. Immediately dubbed Manchin’s Dirty Deal, the bill was tied to a government spending package that had to be passed to avoid a government shutdown.

Once again, the climate movement stayed united. On August 24, over 650 groups signed a letter urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Schumer to oppose what they called the fossil-fuel handout. Citizens barraged Congress with texts and calls; hundreds flooded Capitol Hill offices. “It feels like we were really well prepared for this moment,” said Denali Nalamalapu, communications director for Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights, a coalition fighting Mountain Valley Pipeline. “All the time our organizations spent forming strong and reciprocal relationships paid off.”

The efforts culminated with a Capitol Hill rally on September 8. It was a “beautiful moment,” Nalamalapu said. “The folks you saw on that stage were from the front lines of the fights against climate injustice.” This was a marked shift, she noted, with the Big Green groups looking to Black and Indigenous leaders for guidance, not the other way around.

Within a couple of weeks, Manchin’s permitting scheme went from slam dunk to DOA. On September 27, to avoid a government shutdown, Manchin requested that his bill be removed from the funding package. In mid-December, Manchin’s side deal was defeated once more when the proposal couldn’t muster enough votes to be included as an amendment in the annual defense spending authorization. The climate movement had picked up another win.

All together now 

Nalamalapu sees the defeat of the Dirty Deal as a turning point for the broader climate movement. “You saw grassroots groups and Big Green groups working really closely together and really trying to work on their relationships after years of mistrust,” she explained. “I think we’re going to see more of that going forward because of the alliance against the Dirty Deal.”

Such alliances will be critical for making sure the IRA is implemented justly and equitably and that funding gets to the communities that can use it most. Many groups are also committed to checking the bill’s egregious aspects—in particular, the mandate to lease millions of acres of public land for onshore and offshore drilling over the next decade.

“It’s unacceptable that oil and gas leasing provisions would be tied to clean energy development on federal lands,” Ehrlich said. “For our movement, it’s important that we double down and stop the build-out of oil and gas, especially in places like Appalachia, the Gulf [of Mexico], and Alaska—places that have been treated like sacrifice zones again and again.”

Jamie Henn, who now runs an outfit called Fossil Free Media, agreed that, going forward, the climate movement will have to craft clean energy policies even as it stays focused on a keep it in the ground strategy “We can build all the solar panels in the world, but if we build a bunch of new LNG export facilities and pipelines and other infrastructure over the next five years, we're not going to hit our targets.”

Before she passed away, Joye Braun, who spent her last year lobbying in DC to stop various fossil fuel projects, noted a shift in how environmental justice is now received within the halls of power. “When we first started People Versus Fossil Fuels, it was really hard for tribes to get meetings with representatives and senators,” she told Sierra. “Now, tribal sovereignty is part of the conversation.”

McKibben, tireless as ever, is also looking forward. His latest project, Third Act, harnesses the power of people who, like him, are over 60. At the same time, he thinks it’s important to pause and appreciate how far the climate movement has come.

"In some ways, the American climate movement is still just getting started.”

Making the case for the urgency of climate is easier for today’s climate activists than it was more than 15 years ago, when he organized that trek across Vermont. “When we began it was very clear we didn’t have enough power to influence anything,” he recalls. “Watching this movement spread has been fantastic. It’s a movement that very much looks like America and the world.”

It’s true, as McKibben said, that the climate movement has come a long way. Looked at it another way, though, and you can see how the historic passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is only the beginning. In some ways, the American climate movement is still just getting started.