In its first few months in office, the Trump administration has rolled out more than 100 actions aimed at halting federal climate initiatives. With new examples being announced almost every day, many people looking for climate policy wins are turning their attention to states and cities.
Although the volatility of the political environment makes it impossible to predict how state and local climate efforts will play out in the coming years, their potential is enormous.
“I think that the states are where most of the action will take place,” said Joshua Basseches, a professor of public policy and environmental studies at Tulane University. “For those that are interested in continued progress on climate and renewable energy, I’d say trying to be more organized and active at the state level would be a good thing to do.”
State and local governments have a great deal of influence over the nation’s largest sources of planet-warming gases. States control many aspects of transportation and electricity, while cities typically have authority over issues related to buildings, transportation, land use, energy, and waste. (Local powers vary by state, however.) States and cities can also take steps like setting emissions targets that catalyze coordination between governments, businesses, and institutions like hospitals and universities.
State and local efforts as climate game-changers
In fact, subnational actors such as state and local governments could reduce emissions so dramatically that the nation could still hit key climate targets even if federal action effectively stopped for the next few years.
This was the conclusion of a February 2025 policy brief from the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, written as part of its partnership with America is All In, a coalition of groups like state and local governments, businesses, and large institutions working on climate change.
After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the coalition wanted to understand how much its members could collectively achieve during his administration. The answer: a great deal. The Center for Global Sustainability found that by 2035, a massive leap in ambition would make it possible to reduce nationwide emissions between 54 and 62% relative to 2005, even without federal leadership. The high end of this range would hit a target established by the Biden administration in its 2024 nationally determined contribution to the Paris Agreement.
According to the paper’s lead author, Alicia Zhao, while all sectors of society would need to work together to achieve this goal, state and local governments are particularly critical, as only they can create a supportive policy environment in the absence of federal leadership.
“For example, if only the business community decided to take action, it’s just too much of an intertwined ecosystem” for it to succeed, she said. “You have to have those state and local governments on board.”
But hitting the Biden-era target would require cities and states to dramatically ramp up their climate efforts, following the lead of trailblazers like California, which is requiring that 100% of new cars sold in the state by 2035 be electric, and Austin, Texas, which has pledged to meet 70% of its energy load with renewables by 2030. The research found that if subnational governments simply maintain current policies rather than implementing new ones, the country would still fall significantly short of its Paris Agreement target, assuming federal rollbacks continue.
“There’s a big difference in emissions outcomes depending on whether subnational actors step up,” Zhao said.
‘Driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion’
An ironic silver lining of the current situation, Basseches said, is that because the federal government has lagged on climate change in the past, states and cities are used to taking the lead.
“Many climate activists have wanted the federal government to take action going back to the 90s, and until the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government simply didn’t,” he said, referring to the sweeping climate law passed by Democrats in 2022.
One major difference today, however, is the aggressive federal hostility toward climate action. (“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in one agency press release.)
“These are truly unprecedented times because of the new federal administration,” Basseches said.
Many attempts to roll back climate efforts have explicitly targeted state and local initiatives. On April 8, the White House published an executive order ordering the attorney general to catalog all state and local climate policies and put a stop to those deemed illegal.
On May 1, the Department of Justice referenced the order when announcing lawsuits against New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan over climate initiatives.
“The Department of Justice is working to ‘Unleash American Energy’ by stopping these illegitimate impediments to the production of affordable, reliable energy that Americans deserve,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi in a press release.
It’s not clear how the executive order will play out over time, said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
“The order promises further attacks on state and local climate laws, but these attacks could come in a variety of ways,” she said. “Much of what the order contemplates, depending on how it’s carried out, would be unlikely to hold up in court. But this is a pending threat to state and local governments and a real power grab by the federal government from the states.”
Another executive order that has already had a profound impact on state and local climate action was signed on the day President Donald Trump took office for the second time. It called for the government to stop paying out funds that were allocated to climate initiatives under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
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According to Politico, these funding freezes are being challenged in a number of court cases. On April 15, a federal judge ordered the EPA and other relevant agencies to resume payments.
But the Trump administration’s willingness to defy court orders makes it difficult to know what will happen next.
“This is an interesting time to be a lawyer, because you can explain how something is supposed to work according to law, but that’s not necessarily how it’s going to play out, just given this administration’s willingness to try things that are pretty clearly unlawful,” Turner said.
Uncertainty and delay
Many state and local governments have felt the effects of these and other actions.
After being promised federal climate funding through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, many of the cities in Climate Mayors, a network of almost 350 U.S. mayors involved in climate efforts, put plans in motion for projects like adding public EV charging and generating renewable energy. But according to the group’s executive director, Kate Wright, the freeze on federal funding has left many cities unsure how to manage relationships with contractors and nonprofit partners that have already been brought in to work on the projects. Some jobs that were expected to be created are also in doubt.
Joe Flarida, the executive director of Power a Clean Future Ohio, which works with 50 local governments around the state, has watched similar scenes play out across the Buckeye State. Many of the cities and towns he works with have been adversely affected by federal grant freezes.
“The sheer uncertainty is causing lots of problems with local governments and how they plan and invest and direct staff capacity,” he said. As a result, some climate initiatives have been paused. “It’s completely snatched any momentum that these cities had in doing the planning work to then invest.”
Some Ohio cities and towns have also tried to police their own language in grant documents, he said, scrubbing terms like “environmental justice” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that have been criticized by the administration.
Reasons to continue pushing on climate
Still, many states and cities have pledged to continue making progress on climate despite federal headwinds.
“Our mayors are unwavering in their commitment, and we are all on the same page in terms of the need to continue with ambitious climate actions,” said Wright. “We work closely with groups like the U.S. Climate Alliance that are supporting governors and leading at the state level. All that work continues under this administration and under any administration.”
Dawone Robinson, who leads state and regional climate and energy advocacy at the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, said that the officials he works with are also forging ahead.
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“States are going to continue to do what they can and they should do, which is to advance strong climate policy, which is wholly within their right as states to pursue,” he said.
Behind this commitment is the conviction that climate action and clean energy are in their best interests, offering benefits like economic growth and cheap energy.
“Georgia is experiencing a boom right now in solar, and they’ve also opened this enormous Hyundai factory that is creating thousands of jobs because of EV growth across the nation,” Robinson said. “Texas, for example, has long been the leader in wind energy in America, and that’s not going to change.”
Cities have seen similar benefits, Wright said. San Antonio, Texas, for example, is working with developer Big Sun Solar to cover 42 city-owned facilities and parking lots with photovoltaics in a project projected to save the city up to $11 million in energy costs over 25 years.
Local governments’ own climate risk also factors heavily in many decisions, Flarida said. Many of the financial costs of climate impacts ultimately fall to local governments. As the impacts of those events worsen over time, municipalities increasingly understand that ignoring climate change isn’t an option.
“I’ve talked to Republican elected officials who get it, and they see the impacts,” Flarida said.
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