The Climate Lobby in Five Stages – Watts Up With That?

Charles Rotter

The New York Times recently published a piece titled “Environmental Groups Face ‘Generational’ Setbacks Under Trump”, and the tone could not have been more funereal. For an industry of professional alarmists, one might say grief is their natural habitat. But this time the grief isn’t over melting glaciers or theoretical sea-level rise a century from now. No, this grief is personal. Their taxpayer subsidy empire is crumbling. Their grip on Washington is slipping. Their “apex” moment under Biden—when they believed the Inflation Reduction Act had permanently remade the American economy in their image—has dissolved like morning dew in a Texas August.

It’s almost poetic that the best way to understand the environmental lobby’s current condition is through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous “five stages of grief.” They are textbook cases—grieving not the Earth, but their own waning power.

Stage One: Denial

The Biden years were their champagne banquet. The Times describes how “hundreds of billions of dollars of federal investment in renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles was beginning to flow”. Coal plants were being shuttered, oil and gas drilled under suspicion, and money sluiced from Washington to every group with a clever enough slogan about saving the planet. This was their utopia, written into federal law under the banner of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The denial set in on Election Night 2024. Surely the voters couldn’t have chosen coal over climate, prosperity over precaution, reality over rhetoric. But they did. And as Trump moved to revive coal, “the dirtiest fossil fuel,” while boosting oil and gas, the fantasy of permanent power began to crumble. Denial still lingers in some corners, where activists insist that Net Zero remains inevitable, just “delayed.” In truth, what they thought was an unstoppable train was nothing more than a gravy train, and the conductor just hopped off.

Stage Two: Anger

When denial fails, anger takes the wheel. And what better weapon for anger than a blizzard of lawsuits? Earthjustice, one of the environmental lobby’s most aggressive legal arms, has launched “96 legal actions against the Trump administration this year, including lawsuits as well as technical comments on proposed regulatory changes”. Nearly three times the volume of their first Trump-era flailing.

Greenpeace has taken anger to an art form, but karma has a sense of humor. Sued for defaming the Dakota Access Pipeline’s backers, it now faces “the prospect of nearly $670 million in damages if it loses on appeal”. This is the same group that has spent decades lecturing oil companies about morality, now brought low by the simple fact that slander has consequences.

When movements turn angry, they often turn inward too. The Sierra Club just fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, after a year of “tension between Mr. Jealous and local chapters, employees and the organization’s union”. That’s what happens when an organization bloated with donor cash discovers the faucet has been turned off—it eats itself alive.

Stage Three: Bargaining

Once rage exhausts itself, bargaining begins. Tom Steyer, billionaire climate crusader, has suddenly discovered that Americans aren’t fond of economic suicide. He now insists that climate policies must mean “lower electric bills” and “relief”. Translation: after decades of insisting the planet would burn if we didn’t pay more, activists now plead that green schemes will actually make life cheaper—if you’ll just let them try one more time.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, meanwhile, has decided that if Washington isn’t listening, it will “expand its advocacy at the state level and internationally”. Vermont is being drafted into suing fossil fuel companies for “climate damage.” Georgia and Ohio are suddenly “opportunities” for solar. And if the American voter still refuses to buy the message? Well, there’s always India and Africa. Bargaining often involves desperation. Here it means turning every new jurisdiction into another testing ground for failed schemes.

Stage Four: Depression

The Times couldn’t hide it: “The morale is destroyed,” confessed Ramon Cruz, former president of the Sierra Club. “This is a generational loss”. Greenpeace is slashing staff. Rewiring America fired nearly a third of its workforce. Even Bill Gates is pulling back his money, shutting down his D.C. lobbying shop because, as the article puts it, “his philanthropic dollars would be better spent elsewhere”.

When billionaires stop writing checks, when donors vanish, when directors are fired and activists laid off, depression is inevitable. You can almost picture the scene at Sierra Club headquarters: a circle of dispirited staffers clutching soy lattes, whispering about how unfair it all is. For decades, they were courted as the conscience of the nation. Now, they’re struggling for relevance while fighting Exxon in court.

Stage Five: Acceptance (Not Quite Yet)

The tragedy—at least from their point of view—is that acceptance hasn’t arrived. True acceptance would mean admitting the “climate crisis” is a political construct, not a physical reality. It would mean recognizing that models are unreliable, costs are staggering, and the public simply doesn’t want what they’re selling.

Instead, activists grasp at straws, insisting that if they just “coordinate more deliberately”, or file one more lawsuit, or expand to one more foreign country, victory is still within reach. It’s the addict’s delusion: one more hit of donor cash, one more round of litigation, and the glory days will return.

But deep down, they know. They know that Trump’s reversal of Biden’s subsidies was not some random accident. It was democracy in action. Voters had seen enough of higher costs, unreliable power grids, and endless hectoring from self-anointed prophets of doom. The public made its choice.

And so the grieving continues. Not for the planet, but for lost prestige, lost funding, and lost illusions. The Times calls it “generational setbacks.” A sober observer might call it reality catching up.

The real five stages of the climate lobby’s grief may look like this:

1. Denial that the taxpayer gravy train has derailed.
2. Anger in the form of lawsuits, both filed and lost.
3. Bargaining with voters who prefer affordable electricity to utopian promises.
4. Depression as billionaires close their wallets and staff receive pink slips.
5. And someday, perhaps, Acceptance—that there was never a “climate crisis” to begin with.

Until then, the movement staggers on. Lawsuits in one hand, slogans in the other, forever trying to convince a weary public that the sky is falling. The irony is rich: for once, it isn’t the sky that’s collapsing. It’s their own house of cards.

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