Want to feel hopeful about climate action? Look to local politics

With a president who has called climate change a “hoax” and packed the federal government with former fossil fuel industry employees, this can feel like a dark moment for climate action in the US. But shifting one’s focus to local and state law makes for a very different outlook.

Analysts have estimated that 75% of the commitments that the US made at the Paris climate agreement – which Trump pulled the nation out of as soon as he took office – can be reached entirely without federal support.

It’s this conviction in the power of local governance that animates Climate Cabinet, an organization focused on supporting pro-climate candidates in under-the-radar races at the state or city level. Climate Cabinet uses data science to comb through the more than 500,000 public offices that US citizens have the opportunity to vote on every cycle, identifies candidates who could make a real impact on the climate, and offers them financial and policy support.

I profiled Climate Cabinet’s work in my latest for the Guardian, and came away sincerely encouraged. Two big things that are going to stick with me from this reporting: first, that conservative billionaires are trying to drown small races — like, city council races in suburbs you may never have heard of — in money. Beyond giving the wealthy disproportionate power over those small-town politics, this strategy is also “killing off future potential progressive policymakers early in their careers,” as one city councilmember in Illinois put it.

But that strategy comes with a flip side, a sort of silver-lining reminder that those small races really do matter, regardless of what’s happening in the White House. And while conservative billionaires might try to sway many of those small races, they can’t win them all if people everywhere, in little out of the way towns as well as big cities that the media tends to focus on, start engaging and voting in local elections. In the case I wrote about for the Guardian, a conservative billionaire-funded group tried to sway a city council election in Naperville, Illinois in part to ensure that Naperville would re-sign an agreement with a coal plant that is one of the top ten greenhouse gas emitters in the country. It didn’t work, though, which means that Naperville residents are going to have a better chance at demanding that clean energy, rather than dirty coal, power their city.

“There has been so much focus on national politics in the last decade that people are missing really monumental decisions that are happening at the local level. The nine members of the Naperville city council have a major impact on one of the 10 largest greenhouse gas generators in the country,” city councilmember Ian Holzhauer told me. “We’ve had two elections the last four years, and both of those elections were decided by under 60 votes.”

Read the full story in the Guardian here.

(And then, if you need even more reason to add “get involved in local government” to your list of resolutions for 2026, revisit this piece I wrote last year about Burhan Azeem, another city councilmember focused on making local climate action happen, this time in Massachusetts. I always come back to this quote: ““[The city council] has a roughly $1.25 billion budget. Divide that by nine [council members], and it’s over $100 million per person. Each of us gets elected on 2,000-ish votes. So it’s almost $60,000 per vote. That’s your impact,” Azeem told me. “That’s crazy to think about: 200 citizens decided where $100 million went.”)

I have some other news coming soon, so keep an eye out for another missive from me in your inbox this week. But for now I’ll leave you with this: I told you I’d share ways to give to the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, which I wrote a story about in 2024 (which received a 2025 Covering Climate Now award). When I reached out, Sansour replied: “We prefer to know our donors and please share that donations can be made by emailing us here, at arts.and.seeds@gmail.com.” She also shared this initiative to raise money to plant fruit trees in Palestine.

I’ll leave you with “No Poems Today” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, because today, I want to treasure the bounty.

Wishing you a future where all your friends come over and you hear nothing but the stars,
Whitney Bauck