In November 2024, one week after the presidential election, I attended the United Nations climate change conference in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a major oil producer. The globe was still reeling from Trump’s victory, which many negotiators believed would spell the withdrawal of the United States from the climate fight. Trump had pledged to exit the Paris climate accord and “terminate the Green New Deal” — a reference to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Members of the outgoing Biden administration tried to put a brave face on things. They touted the historic accomplishments of the IRA, their unprecedented regulatory action to curb emissions of methane from oil fields, and the resulting surge of private investment in clean energy and electric vehicles. One afternoon at the conference, Ali Zaidi, then the White House’s National Climate Advisor, told reporters that subsidies for green energy had provided a crucial boost to a free market that was already shifting away from fossil fuels, and that it would be difficult for the next presidential administration to undo. Zaidi pointed out (for about the thousandth time that week) that most new E.V. factories and solar battery plants would be located in conservative-leaning communities, and argued that those investments would prove so popular that Republicans in Congress would not support efforts to repeal them. This was more than just political posturing. It was the thesis of the Biden administration’s approach to climate policy. Once voters felt the benefits of the clean energy manufacturing boom, the theory went, they would refuse to let their representatives reverse course, and the freight train of the market would keep on rolling irrespective of electoral outcomes.

To say that this theory has been tested in the first few months of the Trump administration would be a brutal understatement. Zaidi might have anticipated that Trump would abandon the Paris Agreement and scrap the EPA’s emissions standards, but he did not seem to anticipate that the new administration would illegally freeze billions of dollars of Biden-era climate funding, claw back billions more, and seek to fire many employees at the EPA and other climate responsive agencies like FEMA. This swift regulatory action, combined with the threat of steep tariffs on China and other countries, has already led to the loss of almost eight billion dollars in manufacturing investment as developers have abandoned plans for new E.V. plants and other clean energy projects. Each shuttered solar manufactory or marooned battery startup will slow down the process of electrification in the U.S. and abroad, ensuring that the world burns more fossil fuels for longer.

The most significant remaining battlefront is the suite of tax credits that make up the meat of the IRA. These incentives have boosted the development of solar and wind farms, the capture of carbon dioxide, and the purchase of electric vehicles. The initiative’s potential one trillion dollar price tag makes up only a tiny sliver of federal spending over the next decade, but it has nevertheless come on the chopping block as Republicans prepare to pass what Trump has called a “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. Most Republicans loathe Biden-era climate programs, but GOP leadership also needs to offset trillions in tax breaks proposed by the bill while minimizing cuts to political sacred cows such as Medicaid and Social Security. As Zaidi predicted, more than a dozen House Republicans urged leadership not to end credits that finance wind turbine factories and battery recycling plants in their districts. But all of them folded when the bill came up for a vote. Clean energy trade groups and even many oil companies are mounting a frenzied campaign to save the credits, but we aren’t seeing mass demonstrations to defend them, or to protest the Trump administration’s illegal cancellation of clean energy funds.

There are any number of reasons why this might be so. Perhaps the IRA just hasn’t had time to take root yet in American communities. Perhaps even the biggest clean energy subsidies in world history, representing the most generous programs that the inflation-wary Joe Manchin would support, were insufficient to create a political constituency on their own. Perhaps members of the American public don’t perceive a new factory or a discount on a new E.V. as part of their political birthright. Perhaps the Biden administration didn’t put up enough billboards or air enough TV ads taking credit for the fact that manufacturing spending nearly doubled after the passage of the IRA and its companion bills.

Regardless, the fact that Biden’s climate policy is on life support poses a dilemma for those who want a livable planet. Activists warbled for years about the forgotten “climate voter” and urged Democrats to make climate change a turnout issue. The Biden administration did prioritize it, even to the exclusion of other issues, and succeeded in passing a climate bill through a tied Senate. The IRA was just about the most broadly palatable climate bill imaginable, one that allowed the administration to tout all-important manufacturing jobs instead of emissions avoided or polar bears saved. If even this vanilla legislation gets tarred as a “Green New Deal” and eliminated after a few months in order to pay for billionaires’ yacht maintenance, what other options remain? Do we have no choice but to let the market run its slow course away from new oil and gas, or to wait for a disaster big enough to raise world consciousness?

Despite the assurances from Bidenworld in Baku, Trump’s reelection likely means it will be impossible to avoid a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which is thought to represent the threshold for runaway climate impacts. Even staying below two degrees might be a challenge. Trump’s second term has likely already altered expectations for what life on earth will look like at the end of this century. But the demise of the IRA also creates a more proximate political challenge. How might a future Democratic administration, one that will inherit a decimated federal government, design a climate policy that will have more sticking power than Biden’s did — and one ambitious enough to make up for lost time? If “free money to save the world” wasn’t a viable strategy, what else could take its place? Is it better to retreat further into emissions technocracy, or swing for the fences on a movement-building effort that could usher in something big enough to actually earn the “Green New Deal” pejorative?

These are fascinating questions. I wish I did not have to ask them.