The Trump Administration’s “break stuff” governance model has unleashed a deluge of widely reported climate setbacks. In July, congressional Republicans gutted the landmark clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to help pay for the President’s tax breaks for the wealthy. Meanwhile, the Administration continues to test legal boundaries in its attempts to freeze clean energy funding, roll back greenhouse gas regulations, and “stop the enforcement” of states’ climate laws.

A less reported casualty of this onslaught is the resulting dysphoria for the U.S. climate movement. The network of organizers and wonks that recently birthed the largest climate investment in U.S. history now finds itself without a clear offensive strategy.

Many climate advocates are rightly focused on defense—working indefatigably to extinguish the flames that Trump’s Cabinet has ignited in our climate policy edifice. But we also need architects to start sketching what we’ll build in the ashes. It was during the first Trump Administration that we crafted the vision and policy framework that led to the IRA. And it is now that we must start laying the foundation for the next federal governing moment.

The blueprints for what comes next may seem hazy. But one thing is clear: We need to build a climate agenda written not about impacted workers and communities, but by them.

Everything Bagels Make Tasty Policy

A starting point for crafting the next wave of climate policies is to take stock of our successes and missteps in building the last one. What lessons can we glean from our collective work during the first Trump Administration to create the policy, organizing, and narrative architecture that helped pave the way for President Biden’s signature climate law?

From 2018 to 2020, a motley mix of policymakers, unions, climate organizations, and racial, economic, and environmental justice groups forged the strategy that would come to define the IRA: uniting climate, jobs, and justice goals. The underlying theory was clear and compelling. Tackling the climate crisis would require trillions of dollars in clean energy investments, which, properly guided, could flow into good union jobs and communities that have endured decades of disinvestment.

Though Congress whittled down the bold initial proposals from the Build Back Better agenda, many of the surviving policies in the final IRA legislation upheld the climate-jobs-justice trifecta. To convert clean energy growth into good jobs, the law’s climate investments included strong incentives for clean energy companies to partner with unions, pay decent wages, provide equitable training pathways, and sign agreements with community coalitions for locally defined benefits. To ensure that such benefits helped redress longstanding inequities, the IRA incentivized clean energy investments in low-income neighborhoods, communities fighting for environmental justice, coal-producing areas, and other communities sidelined by years of trickle-down economics.

Three premises formed the foundation for this strategy. Only two of them have held up. The third, as-yet-unfulfilled premise points the way forward.

Premise number one was that we can indeed deliver on climate, jobs, and justice objectives at the same time. This “everything bagel” strategy took flack for trying to do too much. Some suggested we might need to sacrifice labor and equity provisions to achieve meaningful clean energy expansion.

But everything bagels taste good for a reason: They combine ingredients that go well together. For policies, as for bagels, the goal is to use congruent ingredients.

Recent data indicate that clean energy growth, union jobs, and equitable investments can pair just as well as garlic, onion, and poppy seeds. Despite congressional Republicans’ recent rollback of many IRA investments, the law’s first few years yielded significant progress on all three fronts: a record 49-gigawatt boom in clean energy installations last year, a historic high in clean energy union density, and a notable 75 percent of clean investments going to communities where the median income is below the national median. This win-win-win is not an accidental outcome. It is the intentional result of a deliberate everything bagel strategy.

Premise number two was that this combination of ingredients was also smart politics—that it would unite unions, climate advocates, clean energy companies, and other constituencies to build the advocacy muscle needed to pass legislation over the opposition of well-heeled interests. This theory held water in the push to pass the IRA. It is unlikely the bill would have survived the congressional gauntlet without strong backing from such a broad spectrum of influential stakeholders. And this cross-sector push would not have materialized if the bill had singularly focused on gigawatts of clean energy while sidelining opportunities for workers and communities to reap the economic, health, and environmental rewards of the clean-energy transition.

No one likes a plain bagel. And legislatures don’t tend to prioritize things people don’t like.

This Doesn’t Feel Like Winning

What has not fared well is premise number three of the IRA strategy—that by linking climate investments with economic benefits, we would spur a broad, popular clamor to defend those investments and expand on them in future legislation. We would create a virtuous cycle, the theory went, in which the economic benefits of each round of climate investments would garner votes for the next.

It’s safe to say that has not happened. Congressional Republicans’ plan to dismantle the IRA did not spark sufficient outcry from voters to protect the bulk of the law’s clean energy investments. And a demand for more climate investments is hardly on the tips of working folks’ tongues from southeast Michigan to suburban Atlanta. Why not? What was the flaw in the logic? As it turns out, there were several.

First, messaging and policy gaps have hobbled us. Many observers have noted that repeatedly citing remarkable jobs statistics to promote the IRA came off as tone-deaf amid low unemployment and the very real economic anxiety caused by high inflation. Our climate messages have been heavy on creating jobs but light on cutting costs. That messaging gap stems from a policy gap. While the initial Build Back Better agenda included climate policies that took aim at families’ biggest costs, such as robust investments in affordable, energy-efficient housing and public transit, Congress cut those investments in the sausage-making that produced the IRA. Much work remains, both in policy and narrative, to develop an affordability-focused climate agenda that offers serious answers to help reduce the cost of living.

A less discussed messaging problem is the missed opportunity to cultivate a much broader base of local, trusted messengers as spokespeople for the federal investments flowing into their communities. When it came time for a ribbon cutting at a new, IRA-funded facility, could we have done more to equip the local reverend or imam, Main Street business owner, or city council member to go in front of the cameras and speak on the importance of long-sought investments in their community? Few national figures can match the authenticity or authority of such local leaders.

Beyond messaging, the lackluster demand for protecting or enacting climate investments also owes to a more vexing challenge: the long lag time between passing a law, deploying investments, building something, and seeing the economic benefits materialize. That lag, for example, is likely to be at least six years for some of the clean manufacturing investments in the IRA. Tragically, a six-year wait is two years longer than a presidential administration. If we can’t deliver results within the span of an electoral cycle, the political economy of our everything bagel strategy has a sizable hole in it (pun definitely intended).

Proponents of the ascendant “abundance” worldview have rightly spotlighted this stumbling block. There is no question that we need to reduce the time it takes to build clean energy projects. The emissions math and political calculus both demand it. But to build faster, we need to name the sources of delay precisely. Imprecision risks remedies that are not only ineffective, but harmful. Elon Musk, for example, attempted to co-opt the “abundance” narrative to justify DOGE’s slash-and-burn deregulation. To expedite clean energy growth without needlessly sacrificing key protections, let’s look at the data on what actually causes delays.

In the name of clean energy “abundance,” some suggest we should jettison incentives for clean energy companies to create good jobs or invest in hard-hit communities, such as those included in the IRA “everything bagel.” But this prescription misdiagnoses the problem. The lag in building clean energy projects doesn’t stem from pro-worker or pro-equity incentives. In a 2023 survey of clean energy developers, such policies did not make the cut for the six biggest sources of project delays. And the inclusion of labor and equity incentives didn’t deter clean energy companies from enthusiastically pursuing IRA funding opportunities, some of which received applications for more than ten times the available funding.

In fact, such policies can actually facilitate clean energy buildout. For example, wage standards and apprenticeship programs for construction workers provide cost-effective ways for clean energy companies to overcome the widely reported difficulty of recruiting a skilled and stable workforce in a tight labor market. Community benefits agreements, meanwhile, offer developers a tool to garner explicit community support for clean energy projects in exchange for economic benefits, instead of risking local opposition—a leading cause of project delays. Incentives for clean energy companies to invest in low-income communities are also on the pro-building side of the ledger, as they help spur clean energy deployment in neighborhoods the market has deemed unprofitable.

Instead of sidelining labor and equity standards, an abundance agenda should target the real sources of delay in building clean energy. Key culprits include: backlogged queues for connecting clean energy to the electrical grid due to a lack of systemic planning, a growing list of local, NIMBY-esque siting restrictions for clean energy projects in both red and blue states, too-little-too-late forms of community engagement that risk community opposition to new projects, and supply chain shortages that mean waiting more than two and a half years to obtain a power transformer.

A clear focus on real snags like these—many of which require more policy, not less—can help to speed up clean energy projects while maintaining the economic benefits for working families that help expand support for further buildout.

Climate Policy: A Project of the Professional Class?

But there’s another fundamental reason for the tepid demand to advance the clean energy agenda: the lack of broad involvement in designing that agenda. People are unlikely to call for more climate investments if they do not see themselves in those investments. And they are unlikely to see themselves in investments they did not help to build. But to date, building climate policy has largely been a project of the professional class.

The path to success is not for D.C. professionals (myself included) to bust out of our offices in a few years and proclaim, “We’ve written an IRA 2.0. And trust us, working America, it’ll be great for your families and communities.” That approach would likely fall flat.

The workers and communities who most stand to benefit from a new wave of climate investments need to be at the forefront of crafting those investments. That is essential both for getting the policies right and for building the power to get them passed.

For too long, building power and building policy have been treated as two separate crafts. (This bifurcation is not unique to the climate movement.) Policy is often entrusted to the wonk class, while the grassroots is asked to provide reliable votes and calls to Congress. That is, the vast majority of the country is typically treated as public policy’s passive recipient, not its agent. This approach has several pitfalls.

First, ignoring the on-the-ground expertise of millions is not particularly democratic. The notion that those impacted by a policy should have a say in its design is a fundamental tenet of democracy. Today’s rift between policy design and policy impact undercuts that principle.

Second, inside-baseball policymaking can also yield misguided policy. Many of us who spend our time in policy schools and the halls of power bring useful technical know-how but lack in-depth experience with how policies play out on the ground. That means we’re missing vital information for aligning policy impact with intent—information that local organizers can readily offer, if they are included in the policymaking process.

Third, a professionals-only approach also misses opportunities to build power, which risks anemic policy pushes. If the next big thing in climate action were to be crafted exclusively in the D.C. bubble, we would be left with the unenviable task of explaining to the rest of the country why they should vocally support a policy they didn’t ask for. Without strong backing in key states and congressional districts, elite policycraft would produce not a new law, but yet another white paper.

To build a successful next wave of climate policies, we need a blueprint by and for regular folks.

Building a Broadly Backed Climate Agenda

Thankfully, over the next couple of years, several blue states have a real shot at passing progressive policies that could feed a new federal policy agenda. These are openings to build policy and power at the same time by merging the technical expertise of wonks with the grounded expertise of workers and communities. Could we equip community groups and unions in those states to be involved in the first steps of crafting state climate legislation, rather than treating their support as a last-step checkbox?

To do so, we have existing bottom-up models to learn from. In Illinois, for example, a broad coalition of community, climate, environmental justice, and other groups came together in school gyms and church sanctuaries during the first Trump term to hash out shared priorities for a new state climate bill. They then worked with legislators and experts to translate those priorities into the technical prose of legislation, jointly crafting one of the nation’s most ambitious and equitable state-level climate policies: the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. The broad-based involvement in designing the policy led to an equally big-tent advocacy push for the bill, which overwhelmed corporate-backed opposition and won passage of the law in 2021.

And yet, such broad participation in policy design tends to be the exception. To build a widely backed climate agenda, it needs to become the rule.

Of course, this agenda can hardly be built in blue states alone. In red and purple states, the coming years may not produce many new climate policies, but they will yield new clean energy, transportation, and manufacturing projects. Despite congressional Republicans’ curtailing of IRA investments and the ensuing cancellation of some projects, other projects are going forward. Thanks to the steady decline in the price of batteries and wind and solar power, many clean energy projects will continue to make good business sense.

Unions and community groups are already taking advantage of this influx of investments to negotiate with clean energy companies for material wins. These efforts build on pre-IRA successes like an agreement that the nonprofits Greater Birmingham Ministries and Jobs to Move America negotiated to secure equitable hiring and training opportunities at an electric bus factory in Alabama. On the heels of that agreement, the industrial division of the Communications Workers of America ran a successful union organizing drive at the factory and secured a contract last year to give workers a sizable increase in wages. Now underrepresented workers can access training pathways to get good union jobs making electric buses in the heart of Alabama, a right-to-work state.

If local groups are resourced to multiply such victories and negotiate tangible gains from the clean investments entering their communities, the base of active support for clean energy may just expand outwards—even in the ruby red South. Even in the purple Midwest. Even in the shadow of the Trump Administration.

What Does Bottom-Up Policy Design Look Like?

But how exactly does participatory design of such policies or agreements work? Certainly, it can’t be as simple as inviting a bunch of unionists, community organizers, faith leaders, and environmentalists into a room and asking them to produce a bill or a legally binding agreement.

Indeed, it is not. But it also need not be a lengthy or cumbersome process. An extensive survey of existing participatory policy design initiatives in the United States and around the world found that the entire design process typically takes six to seven months—on par with the time often required to develop bills the conventional way.

A growing array of proven participatory models show that stakeholders can efficiently craft policy solutions if they have a foundation of trust, a precise agenda, and skillful facilitation. If a room full of union workers, clergy, student activists, and community organizers who have never worked together is simply asked, “What policies do you want?” the answer is likely to be either cacophony or awkward silence. But if organizers start by separately asking each constituency to identify potential solutions for a well-defined problem, a Venn diagram may emerge, revealing options at the center for co-designing mutually beneficial policy.

Take housing, for example. How could a range of groups in a given state find common cause on state-level housing policies that address immediate economic priorities while also cutting climate pollution?

To start, community organizers in one of the state’s largest cities might invite residents of a low-income neighborhood to a spaghetti dinner in a church auditorium to discuss possible solutions to soaring rent, utility bills, and homeowner’s insurance. Several towns away, a few dozen electricians, carpenters, and other members of construction unions are sitting in a union hall and rank-ordering the biggest problems they face in local building projects, from wage theft to safety hazards. An hour’s drive north, a mix of youth and retirees gather in the public library for the monthly meeting of a local environmental group. At a facilitator’s prompt, they write options on Post-it notes for how to reduce the 15 percent slice of U.S. climate pollution that comes from homes.

After hearing the takeaways from these housing-focused convenings, urban planning professors at a state university invite leaders from each of the groups to join a facilitated discussion and compare notes on what they heard. A common thread emerges: The buildout of new affordable housing could help tamp down rising rents, and with proper siting, it could boost proximity to public transit while decreasing proximity to air pollution hazards. With the right labor standards, it could help construction unions negotiate for better wages, benefits, and safety protections. And with the right design specifications, the new houses could come with energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, rooftop solar panels, and increased resilience to storm and flooding damage.

A labor leader in attendance sums up the prevailing view of the room, saying, “There’s potential for a win-win here, but the devil is in the details.” The facilitator suggests they reconvene to discuss those details by examining concrete options for state housing policies.

How the Bagel Gets Made

In the next convening, the stakeholder groups meet with housing experts from the university, who present a menu of potential new policies for the groups to size up. Options include state incentives for inclusionary zoning, retooled housing trust funds, use of public land to build green social housing, and so on. After the discussion reveals several areas of potential alignment, group leaders decide to formalize their partnership as a public-facing coalition.

The new coalition’s leaders then take a trip to the state capitol to meet with their state representatives, seeking out a few who might be interested in partnering to craft housing legislation. The leaders’ pitch to legislators is simple and compelling: We’re offering you an opportunity to lead a bill that is likely to have wide and vocal backing. After a few meetings, three legislators commit to working with the coalition to champion a bill that reflects their priorities.

Commitments in hand, the coalition groups send their organizers back to the church auditoriums, union halls, and public libraries to talk with their members. This time, they come with pointed questions and surveys to suss out their members’ preferences on key policy design questions: What would they see as a meaningful reduction in monthly energy costs? How would they balance new construction and retrofits of existing homes? And so on.

With a sharp understanding of their members’ specific priorities, the coalition leaders meet to hash out their various—at times, competing—policy design objectives. The state legislative champions send their staff to join the meetings alongside the state university’s housing policy experts, who pose questions to the coalition leaders to identify their preferences on design tradeoffs. Issues of contention are met with creative policy options, negotiation, and, in some cases, voting to reach group decisions. After a few spirited Zoom calls and late-night discussions, the deliberative process results in a draft legislative text.

The coalition leaders once again go back to their members and use slide decks and small group discussions to spotlight the contents of the draft bill and invite final feedback. After further massaging the language with the legislative champions to incorporate members’ suggestions, the coalition leaders vote to back the legislation.

With the final text in hand, the legislative champions introduce the bill and shepherd it toward a vote. Meanwhile, the coalition members stage press conferences, call-your-lawmaker events, and public rallies in target legislative districts, inviting their members—the very workers and community members who helped shape the bill—to show up. Seeing this fight as their own, many people do just that, and the ample turnout catches the eye of swing legislators.

Meanwhile, advocates from the coalition’s labor, faith, community, and environmental organizations traipse across the state capitol, lobbying undecided legislators who have sympathies with their particular constituency. Representatives unconvinced by climate arguments are swayed by housing affordability pitches, and vice versa.

A Policy by and for Working People

After a cross-movement advocacy, organizing, and media blitz, a majority of “aye” votes in the state capitol lands the new housing policy—built by and for impacted workers and communities—in the history books. A year later, union workers are starting to build multifamily housing projects that offer low-cost, energy-efficient units, helping families across the state find affordable and healthy homes.

But affordable green housing is not the only thing that has grown. More working families in the state now see themselves in the clean energy transition. Thousands of members of unions and community organizations have just spent months gathering in school gyms, union halls, and church basements to shape legislation that marries climate and economic solutions. Many have hoisted placards at rallies and placed calls to state legislators to urge passage of the resulting bill. And with its passage, many of them—and their co-workers and neighbors—stand to benefit from lower costs or higher wages.

True, that doesn’t mean most participating union and community group members are likely to become card-carrying climate activists. But might they vocally support the next bill that advances pro-affordability, pro-worker climate solutions, or a candidate who does? The odds are good. And so the tentpoles of the nation’s climate constituency expand outwards.

As this hypothetical process indicates, participatory policy design still requires policy wonks. We wonks just need to do things a bit differently. First and foremost, a bottom-up approach calls for us to listen: to believe people as they describe the biggest problems they face, to ask the probing questions required to move from problems to policies, to hear how policy ideas might play out on the ground, and to trust those takes. This will require that we hold lightly our preconceived notions of what works.

Bottom-up policy design will also require meeting people where they are. In the many places where immediate economic and health concerns outrank climate angst, the conversation will not start with “What climate policies do you want?” Instead, the question might be, “What are your biggest household costs?” “What worries you most about the health of your children?” “What kinds of jobs would you like to see more of in your community?” Such entry points can lead to policy solutions that would cut costs, improve health, and boost wages while also expediting the transition to a clean energy economy.

At this point, you might be thinking, “This seems like a lot of work.” Yes, though past practice shows that a participatory process can be just as expedient as traditional policy development, as mentioned. In addition, not all policy decisions need to go through the full participatory process outlined above. Some decisions may call for policymakers to simply engage with a representative set of stakeholders and/or to use digital tools to solicit input from a swath of their constituents.

But for truly game-changing policy plays—where the potential climate, economic, or health impacts are large—a process built on deep and wide participation can help to ensure that: 1) the policy details effectively respond to people’s biggest needs, 2) the policy has sufficient stakeholder support to get enacted, and 3) the policy builds broad buy-in for a larger agenda (e.g., climate action). That helps explain why, despite the labor involved, a growing number of states now have union-community-environmental coalitions dedicated to co-designing climate solutions.

Choosing the Right Ingredients

But such a bottom-up process also raises a question that brings us back to our everything bagel. If we invite a broad array of workers and communities to help design a next wave of clean energy investments, do we think that they are likely to come up with a policy that focuses singularly on gigawatts of clean energy buildout? No, probably not. They may care about how that buildout translates into reduced energy, housing, or transportation costs for their families. Or into wider availability of high-paying jobs. Or a reduction in air pollution. In short, they may add a few ingredients to the bagel.

Additional ingredients, as mentioned, tend to be a pet peeve of some “abundance” proponents, who fear they will get in the way of building things. Some, in fact, caution against broad stakeholder involvement in policy design to avoid this very outcome. But that counsel—essentially an endorsement of closed-door policymaking—presumes that stakeholders, and the policymakers who work with them, will choose contradictory and counterproductive ingredients. Why assume that stakeholders are incapable of choosing congruent ingredients?

To be clear, some ingredients must indeed be discarded as incompatible with policy goals. To address the housing affordability crisis, for example, “abundance” proponents are right that we need to eliminate regressive policies, like exclusionary zoning, that hamper new housing while also undermining equity. But that doesn’t mean we must also eschew housing provisions that support climate, jobs, or equity goals, so long as they’re crafted in a way that does not meaningfully deter construction. We can target the bathwater while protecting the baby.

A well-structured participatory policy design process can do just that. That process starts with intentionally building coalitions around aligned interests. For example, the coalition described above—composed of affordable housing advocates, construction unions, climate groups, and environmental justice organizations—would likely see eye to eye on rejecting exclusionary zoning, which undermines affordability, jobs, climate, and equity goals alike. By contrast, a haphazard approach to coalition building that invites participation from groups with diametrically opposing goals—say, local NIMBY groups and affordable housing campaigners—would likely end in fundamental disagreements instead of policy coherence.

Thanks to its more deliberate formation, our hypothetical coalition may find common ground in not only opposing exclusionary zoning but also welcoming certain other ingredients for housing policy design. For example, they might recommend the creation of a state-level program that offers affordable housing grants to cities, contingent on adoption of inclusionary zoning, high-road labor standards for construction workers, and energy-efficient, climate-resilient building codes that reduce utility bills, home insurance rates, and indoor air pollution for tenants.

The diversity of these policy objectives does not preclude them from meshing well. For example, the preference for climate-smart design would not detract from the goal of rapidly building affordable housing. A recent study found that it costs less to build an all-electric, low-emissions home than a conventional home in nine out of nine U.S. cities analyzed. Other studies agree. The data show that we need not pick between building affordable or low-emissions housing—we can do both.

In fact, the residents of such electrified homes can expect to save money on their upfront costs and utility bills, with savings over 15 years ranging from about $2,000 in Boston to more than $10,000 in New York. Those residents will also breathe cleaner air while their homes emit between 20 and 50 percent less climate pollution. Such win-win potential is the target of participatory design.

Navigating Tradeoffs

But win-win solutions are not always so easy to come by. A participatory design model—like nearly any policy design initiative—will still need to grapple with policy tradeoffs. The question is: Can stakeholders negotiate those tradeoffs to arrive at shared solutions?

Consider the case of labor standards for affordable housing policies. Unions have good reason to push for such standards. Construction workers are paid lower than average wages, resulting in higher than average reliance on welfare. Many face illegal wage theft and denial of basic benefits. In Minnesota, for example, companies use under-the-table payments or worker misclassification to evade basic labor protections for roughly one out of every four construction workers, resulting in a 36 percent average reduction in those workers’ earnings. A number of the state’s affordable housing projects have relied on contractors with a track record of such tactics. To help remedy the situation, last year Minnesota enacted a new, union-backed policy establishing a wage floor for construction workers on publicly funded affordable housing projects.

However, such an outcome is precisely what some “abundance” proponents worry about. Concerned about the potential for labor costs to undercut affordable housing goals, some have suggested that workers should not have a seat at the table in designing affordable housing policies. But this stance ignores one of the key benefits of participatory policy design: the opportunity for on-the-ground experts to bring together contrasting but reconcilable perspectives so as to make informed decisions about policy tradeoffs.

Take, for example, the policy tensions that unions and affordable housing groups grappled with in jointly designing Los Angeles’s mansion tax, which taxes high-value properties to fund affordable housing. The policy design was truly bottom-up, with a broad coalition of local housing and labor advocates meeting on Zoom calls to negotiate the details.

Construction unions and affordable housing developers in California had historically been at odds over labor standards for low-income housing projects. But seeing an opportunity to win a policy that could deliver on both sides’ goals, union and affordable housing leaders worked to arrive at a compromise regarding project labor agreements, yielding a mansion tax framework that melded jobs and affordability objectives. The central role of local unions and affordable housing groups in the policy design process allowed for direct negotiation between impacted constituencies, whose on-the-ground expertise helped surface creative options for navigating policy tradeoffs.

Thanks to the participatory process, the resulting policy enjoyed broad buy-in from unions and affordable housing groups, which then powered a robust citywide campaign to push for passage via a ballot measure. The push overcame corporate opposition to garner majority support from voters in 2022. While not free of tradeoffs, today the mansion tax is Los Angeles’s largest revenue source for affordable housing, and the first tranche of affordable housing projects funded by the tax is expected to create 10,000 union jobs.

Yes, bottom-up processes are likely to initially produce many ingredients for our bagel, some of which may clash. But if we are aiming for the optimal policy—the one that can yield the greatest good and enjoy enough support to pass—the answer is not for a few remote policy professionals to trash ingredients in favor of a single-minded, plain-tasting alternative. The answer is to equip workers and communities to weigh the tradeoffs alongside policymakers so as to write a coherent recipe.

The Architects of Our New Climate Agenda

If we’re open to well-crafted everything bagels, today’s brewing state policy campaigns and clean energy project pipelines present a near-term opportunity for workers and communities to become the architects of the climate movement’s next big thing. Seizing this opportunity will require strong organizing and smart participatory design processes. But the potential prize is large: a suite of new clean energy policies and projects by and for impacted communities, and expanded ownership of climate solutions. These are the building blocks for a national climate agenda that responds to on-the-ground priorities and enjoys broad backing—an agenda we can win.

By building policy and power at the same time, we can lay the groundwork for the next federal governing moment so that we’re ready when the carnage of this Administration ends. A bottom-up offense won’t be easy. It will be messy. It will require overcoming steep odds. But none of that is new for the climate movement.