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After the 2024 Elections, Climate Advocates Need to Change Their Ways

Joel B. Stronberg
5 min readNov 13, 2024

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This article first appeared on Resilience.org. It can also be found on my website Civil Notion.

By Joel B. Stronberg

November 13, 2024

“Gut punched” fairly summarizes what Trump’s return to the White House means for US and global climate action. Sam Ricketts, a former aide to Governor Jay Inslee (WA-D) and co-founder of Evergreen Action, is credited for the blunt assessment.

It’s hard to argue with Ricketts’ conclusion given what the former, now future, president has had to say about climate change in general and his use of the Green New Deal as a meme for what ails America in particular. There’s no denying that Trump made a punching bag out of climate change and the Democrats in his re-election campaign.

The Moneyball question for the climate community is: “How to punch back–effectively?” Coming up with a serviceable answer is not going to be easy. Among other things, it is going to require critical introspection. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, much of the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.

Until the messaging and approach of clean energy and environmental communities change, US climate policy will remain a largely UNACTED UPON voter priority.

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Joel B. Stronberg
Joel B. Stronberg

Written by Joel B. Stronberg

Stronberg is a thought leader in the climate community with over 40 years of experience covering environmental and sustainability issues as a freelancer.

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