This conversation took place in February 2025.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò It seems like the California wildfires are a chilling core example of what a human version of the climate movement is up against, which is a story that’s about not just the levels of emissions that intensified the fires but also a political apparatus, a disaster recovery and prevention apparatus, one that’s controlled by the people. Unfortunately, the people who now control it are hostile to climate justice, hostile to climate science, and an increasingly emboldened right wing is hostile to government itself, including disaster recovery and prevention.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright And instead of thinking about that, some parts of the climate movement are talking about how good it is that environmental regulations were relaxed in order to allow rebuilding, and how that is what we need to do for the grid.

Olúfẹ́mi That’s an important point. One thing we should talk about is, on the one hand, there are clear ways that some versions of regulations have been a problem for some versions of green energy rollout. But the particular version of anti-regulation that we’re getting from the people stripping the state to its bones is probably not what the climate movement was originally envisioning. So what should we think are the targets now for a climate movement in an era where IRA 2.0 is not on the table?

Rhiana IRA 1.0 isn’t on the table.

Olúfẹ́mi It doesn’t seem like the prospects for federal legislation or even regulation for climate justice are good. What does the climate movement pivot to?

Rhiana People asking about climate are like, What do we do? Actually, the answer is to be more human. We have to understand that the climate movement’s strength comes from being a moral and a human movement, not exclusively one that is about science and technology. If we’re not strengthening that and proving that all the time, I don’t know where we’ll be, especially at this level of chaos. Nobody’s thinking about climate right now — nobody. One of the new Trump environmental officials is like, Oh, climate change is not even a big problem. It’s not anywhere on the list of big problems. And he’s not the only person who thinks that.

The climate movement, despite growing internationally and in the U.S., is still largely funded and run by white people. And white men in particular. In the Biden administration, you saw a real retraction away from Green New Deal–esque appeals to thinking about climate as a bigger issue. In some ways, the Green New Deal was an emotional appeal. How do you feel about the world? What kind of life do you want? How can we use climate to get there? We sort of moved away from that. And the conversations became technical. The biggest, the most emotional debate in climate over the IRA was over permitting reform, whether the government should relax the National Environmental Policy Act and other rules related to environmental review in order to facilitate clean energy development. How’s an everyday person getting tapped into that? Accordingly, after climate climbed as an issue that people think about, you saw it falling again even though there was more money, more support. It’s falling in terms of what issues voters care about. You have survey data showing that everyday people don’t know about the IRA. And if we continue down that track, we’re going to get wiped out.

Olúfẹ́mi What exactly is missing from the emotionless, metric-driven approach to climate politics — the appeal to having the best facts and best graphs?

Rhiana The answer is not giving people more facts. And we can’t appeal only to fear and anger as emotions. Clearly, climate freaks people out. Even natural disasters don’t freak people out as much. Because, again, people aren’t experiencing it themselves; they’re experiencing it mediated through media. So once the news cycle moves on, people move on, too, unless they were directly affected. That leaves us to figure out how we as a movement slice through that and how we craft the issue to move forward, because we have to be honest about it. All of this is about crafting issues. Policy has never, ever been only about truth and facts. Ever. You are always constructing a narrative in order to essentially wage battle within a particular context, and we have to get comfortable with that. There’s a difference between doing that and misinformation. At the end of the day, this is not a fucking science fair. No one’s coming to pin a ribbon on the person with the best graphs.

If we aren’t appealing to that emotion, if we aren’t helping people understand how and why climate matters to them as humans, and if we’re not connecting to them as humans — especially when climate is tarred with this brush that You’re scolds, you are into ideological purity, which I think some progressives are; I also think it’s overstated — it’s very clear that if we can’t help people feel seen, if we can’t tell people, We see you, we understand your problems, here is how this issue connects to your problems, here is how addressing this could help, and also here’s how we’re going to stand with you in other ways, then I think we’re going to be lost.

Our goal is not to be the people who those in power listen to, to be the people whispering in their ear — that’s influence, which is always easily taken, and mediated by actual power and actual pressure from the outside. So we have to be willing to lose some of that influence in order to build. Because you can’t appease powerful people forever and build power. There’s a reason they have power and you don’t. It’s not because you weren’t nice enough to them. So we have to build power, which means we have to get comfortable working with other movements, learning how to be way more intersectional and just giving a fuck about what else is happening in the world, and being willing to be broad about how climate connects to that, instead of being worried that people will look at us and be like, You’re making that an omni cause. It is an omni cause.

Olúfẹ́mi It’s the fucking planet. Do you have another one?

Rhiana I don’t know what to tell you. Things intersect, right? And that’s just what it is. How can this one thing be connected to so much? Welcome to living in the world.

Olúfẹ́mi It makes sense that we need a more emotion-driven approach to climate politics, but why a justice-centered one specifically?

Rhiana Honestly, even on Palestine and Gaza, you see a loss of momentum. It’s really wild to have a climate movement that’s like, Yes, we’re fighting to keep emissions down, because that’s going to save millions of lives, and then have a genocide going on where environmental injustice was already rampant. Israel was literally pouring concrete in water sources and destroying fields. And the climate movement was largely like, That doesn’t concern us. A lot of those same organizations made statements about Russia and Ukraine. Sierra Club did multiple blog posts about how it was environmental injustice when Russia was blowing up reserves of toxic chemicals in Ukraine, polluting the atmosphere and poisoning the water. Now the same thing’s happening in Gaza, and they said nothing.

Olúfẹ́mi I want to come back to something you said earlier, that the climate movement needs to become a human movement. One problem we’ve just arrived at is that emotions aren’t politically useful only in our direction: Donald Trump and the right have had a lot of success with emotional appeals to people who feel like they’re losing their country, people who resent immigrants and other sorts of people and blame them for things. We’ve also seen ideas for broad emotional appeal on the left beyond the climate movement: appeals to emotions and taking care of them, the discussions around rest and self-care in the context of political struggle. Maybe we’re seeing emotions take center stage after Trump and Elon Musk’s mass layoffs, with the anger about the looting of the Treasury Department and the mass layoffs and the corporate coup that’s happening. We can tell a version of the story of the past few years of American politics in these emotional terms. But it’s harder to do that with climate politics, because the climate movement’s been talking about shit like permitting.

My question is: How do we do this in the context of climate politics? Are there ways of thinking about politics that tap into our emotional life in ways that will link us to material struggles rather than distract us from them? What would be different about a climate movement that would accomplish that aspect of humanity rather than this wonky, graphs-based climate politics?

Rhiana This is when people are going to be like, Rhiana, this was just a ploy for you to say the things you like. True, but I’m also right. It’s climate justice. Climate justice is one of the main ways that you hook into people’s emotions when it comes to climate. Something that has helped me is recognizing that in a lot of ways, people classify problems as foreground and background. Foreground problems: You’ve got to pay your rent. You’ve got to pay your mortgage. You’ve got to go get your kids and have someone care for them, especially if you work outside the home. Those things impact your everyday life. Background problems: For a lot of people, it’s climate change. That’s a bad thing that’s happening. But I can’t think about that right now. I don’t know how it’s impacting me.

One problem the climate movement has is that it’s led by a lot of people who are most motivated by climate, people who have the space in their lives so that climate becomes a foreground problem for them. Or they’re directly affected, but often those people are people of color and more likely international, so we tend not to pay attention to them in the U.S. That means a lot of our appeals are toward people for whom climate can be a foreground problem, who might be able to spend their days thinking about parts per million. But for a lot of people it’s in the background. The way that they understand climate is very material: air, water, soil, food. And climate justice really gives you an opening, because it is — in a way that the climate movement has divorced itself from — about access to clean air, clean water, safe living environments that are free of contamination. Stewardship is something that Americans care about and think about. They want clean air; they want clean water. Climate justice is very interesting in the sense that it inherently comes in a confrontational package. The story is not just about how some communities lack clean air; it’s that they lack clean air because of corporate or right-wing villains. That’s why they’re being denied.

Obviously, the problem with climate justice in a country like America, especially at this moment, is that it mostly affects people of color and is therefore easily discounted as identity politics. But when you talk about climate in terms of climate justice, people listen. They are pulled in because these are stories of actual communities. They’re stories of actual harms that you can point to. This toxic pollution caused this person to get cancer.

One of the things that we need to think about more, given that it creates these openings, is how we tell a broader story of climate justice — one that centers environmental racism, and one that talks more broadly about how this hurts the larger collective beyond these individual communities. Because if you’re in a situation where some people can be poisoned largely without penalty, especially if you’re looking at an administration like Trump’s that barely believes in environmental hazards, how is anybody else safe, ultimately?

Olúfẹ́mi But broader how, specifically? What connection does climate justice need to make with other sorts of politics?

Rhiana We have to become involved with economic justice. Broke people are mean. If you want people to be able to lift their heads up and care about something beyond their immediate lives, it is really important for them not to be in financial and economic precarity. You will always be fighting an uphill battle, because at the end of the day we are people built to survive, and that is always going to be more urgent.

What I think could help is supporting other movements, even things as small as mutual aid — doing things in the background, leveraging our communication support, our money to support different economic justice efforts, and through those relationships, building care about climate. One way is through discussing how the issues intersect and making people aware. The other way that you can attach care about an issue in a place or a time where people aren’t paying attention to that issue is to show up to the thing that people care about and be part of that, grow those relationships as a movement. And then, when we ask people to care about climate, you can more credibly appeal to those people. You can more credibly have a conversation. But if you were nowhere to be found and now you show up talking about emissions, people don’t give a fuck about you.

Olúfẹ́mi Part of the climate movement becoming more human is taking on confrontational politics. But is it possible to build an effective movement in the context of the federal landscape we have now?

Rhiana Obviously, a human climate movement pivots to people. And it pivots to state and municipal governments, smaller levels of government. So, for instance, with the soil testing in the Pacific Palisades, that could be a story that the climate movement is telling far and wide. FEMA has decided not to test the soil on private properties for contamination, which it had been doing for nearly 20 years. People are already applying for rebuilding permits. So what this means is that people who cannot afford private contractors to test and remove soil could very well be rebuilding on contaminated land. I am working on an article that’s talking quite a lot about this, and I have found maybe seven articles about the lack of soil testing. Three of them are from The Los Angeles Times. One is from The New York Times. One is from The Hill. One is a Los Angeles Times environmental reporter being interviewed on NPR. One is sort of a repackaging of that coverage. Other than that, I have seen no national media cover it. I have seen no climate movement talk about it. Those are the sorts of stories we need to be telling. Talking to everyday people — we always say that as if it’s easy. It’s not easy. There are different ways to access people. Talking to people almost always involves some form of media.

And then the other side is state and local. Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, other California state officials and local officials are trying to pressure FEMA to do soil testing. FEMA is not moving. Even at that level, you could be coming behind the state to support that. Because if the federal government doesn’t do that, the only public entities that even vaguely have the capacity are state governments. And how are we supporting them to do that? Even if it’s not going to move federally, there are a lot of things that can move in states and localities. That’s the sort of thing you’re looking at. But when you get to that level, particularly local government, when you’re talking about climate, you’re increasingly going to be talking about climate justice, because that’s just how it intersects with the agencies that are at play and with how people experience climate in their everyday life.

Olúfẹ́mi Are there organizations, political projects, messaging campaigns, or any useful examples of what climate justice as a human movement focused on protecting people in tangible ways looks like?

Rhiana Of course, people always talk about Standing Rock. Because of the ways that Indigenous climate movements think about our relationship to the earth, they’re trying to balance not just protecting people but also protecting the earth and reducing emissions. A lot of people, especially in the mainstream climate movement, think climate justice folks don’t actually care about reducing emissions, which doesn’t make any sense and isn’t true. But I understand why they think that, because when you’re moving with these other things that you’re balancing, it looks a lot different. Often it looks a lot slower, because you’re trying to be careful about how you’re doing this, and you’re trying to navigate a lot of intersections. Honestly, I think a lot of climate justice groups are good examples of how to do this. Taproot Earth in the Gulf is a really good example of folks trying to think through this. In Detroit, an amazing organizer named Emma Lockridge spent nearly a decade organizing against a Marathon petroleum refinery that was poisoning her community. She had multiple neighbors dying from mysterious cancers. And eventually she won, because she had to get attention. She had to sustain attention. She had to explain a complex issue to people. And people take it for granted that she had to do any persuasion, because they’re like, She had to organize people in her community — they already care. Not necessarily. People got bills.

I worked at the Detroit Health Department for a little bit as a policy analyst, and we never talked directly about climate change. But we did talk about environmental injustice. We talked about the incinerator in the middle of the city, lead in homes, etc., all of which could be connected back to climate. That wasn’t our job. If that’s the level of government available to us — and it is — those are the types of issues you’re going to end up working on, and you’re going to have to figure out a way to connect those issues to a broader narrative, as opposed to the other way, which is to have this broad narrative and then winnow it down to the particular issues that illustrate that broader point. At the core of it is that when you make the shift to people and to trying to make a human climate movement, it gets a lot more difficult to make the “lift all boats” argument you’ll hear a lot of climate people make: The biggest thing that we can do is reduce emissions, because that’ll help the most people. That’s true, theoretically. But when it comes down to everyday people, what does that actually mean? You have to move away from that and think a lot more about protection. How do we protect people? If you are trying to make sure people have clean air, clean water, etc., considering the state of play, a lot of what you’re doing is trying to protect them. Part of what happened with the IRA that made me quite sad is that a lot of the discussion about how we have to reduce emissions and how that will help everyone was also used to skirt questions of who will be protected and who will be harmed in order to aim for some big picture where people suddenly became really fuzzy, if that makes sense.

In an article about Hazel Johnson, one of the founders of environmental justice in Chicago, the journalist talked to someone else on the street, and they were like, Oh, yeah, she does something with pollution, right? I gotta take my kids to school. These are still busy people. They don’t necessarily care. But these folks, especially folks who have won these fights, not only know how a lot of the villains operate, they also know how to talk about them. They know how to explain these issues to people, and they know how to sustain attention, often on a very small budget. And so even these fights that we think of as just about pollution can offer a lot of learning about how we build a larger narrative. Grassroots Global Justice is trying to do it in the U.S. The Green New Deal Network, too. There’s lots of organizations trying, but at least in the climate movement, they don’t get a lot of airtime or respect, and they don’t get a lot of resources or attention, especially because the main climate publications, the voices that people take most seriously and have the most reach, are increasingly antagonistic to climate justice. They see it as an obstacle, a slowing force, something run by people who might care about climate but don’t understand the stakes. I get why they feel that way. I don’t think the criticisms have much merit, but it does mean that we’re constantly losing out on knowledge and not centering the people who have the skills to do the thing that we need to do right now.

Olúfẹ́mi One thing you’ve been saying is that a reason for making climate justice a human movement is we’ve got these objective, true facts about climate change.

Rhiana That nobody gives a fuck about.

Olúfẹ́mi Exactly. And we’ve got another set of things that we subjectively care about and have the bandwidth to pay attention to. Any successful climate justice movement is going to have to shift people’s understanding both of what’s true and what’s important. A big obstacle is the thing that came up in the interview you were talking about where someone was like, Oh, I think that person works on environmental something or other. I gotta get my kids to school.

Rhiana For me, it’s helpful to think about it in two ways. One, you have the things that you need to do. There are certain things we need to do to deal with climate change, the actual physical phenomenon. Two, there’s the set of things you need to do to make actual movement addressing those issues possible in our political system, which means that the climate movement cannot and should not ever be about only the physical phenomena. We need to be thinking about how you change the landscape so that we can get what we want. Mostly what we do — and I don’t say this as an indictment; I have done it, it has been part of my work — in progressive policy, particularly the closer you get to federal policy in D.C., is trying to find loopholes for how to make movement in the current landscape without changing it, and we are rapidly reaching the end of those possibilities. I do not think there are many more loopholes to find, and whatever remain might not exist in four years. We need to be in the business of changing the landscape so we can win. I’ve always thought we need to do things like support democracy reform. The more powerful politically people of color are, the more likely you are to get climate action, period. People of color are much more persuadable around climate action, and we don’t take them seriously as actual constituents that our movement should center. And part of that, yes, is white supremacy. But I think a lot of that tendency to overlook people of color comes from the fact that for a long time, the climate movement’s strategy — really, the strategy for a lot of liberals and progressives — has been focused on existing power and navigating and manipulating that instead of building power that does not yet exist.

So part of it is also identifying what parts of our landscape prevent us from gathering the type of power that we need. How do we, even if we’re not on the marquee, support movements to change that behind the scenes and grow trust with the people involved in those movements? Sure, we can talk about the connections between immigration and climate and the refugee crisis, and that’s important. But we can also use our apparatus to push supporters, people who do care about climate, to support actions that protect immigrants’ rights or support immigration reforms that are just and humane. Climate change is such a source of migration; it’s just that right now, those folks aren’t American. But that won’t be forever, because parts of this country will not exist in 50 years, and the way our economy is going, some folks will be repatriating. Even if it’s slow, even if it doesn’t add up to a climate bill tomorrow, all of it is still important work that will move us forward. Because if the terrain is different, we have a much greater chance to win. But if the terrain stays the same, I don’t know if there’s enough narrative support in the world to get us there. And that is also part of being a human movement, showing up for people and supporting their immediate needs, and also trying our best as a movement not to make it transactional. Maybe those folks never show up. But if we are about protecting human life and dignity, then whatever we have done, even if it doesn’t come back exactly how we want, is still probably moving us in the direction that is good for our issue. And I know people say, That’s Pollyanna — what about the details? But at the end of the day, like I said, climate change is going to be in the background for most people for a while. Unless you’re directly hit by a natural disaster, it’s just hard. It’s just brutal out here. We have to use all of the tools at our disposal to help change that.

Olúfẹ́mi It sounds like we’ve got a group of folks who think you can put together a climate movement with agreement and rational self-interest. But what you need to put together a political movement might be solidarity.

Rhiana Yeah, solidarity, and also recognition that self-interest is real. It is what motivates people. But self-interest is not always rational. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. People are self-interested. In the absence of being able to change their material conditions, they will opt for feeling heard or for feeling good even if it goes against their material self-interest. But it’s only against their material self-interest if you don’t think about their emotional selves as part of their material self-interest, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense. It’s solidarity, but — and this is the difficult part for the climate movement — moving toward that type of solidarity is an acknowledgment that the people we have centered in our appeals and our work and our advocacy strategies, who largely are powerful white men, are the least reliable interlocutors. They are our least reliable allies. And that is a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people who might see themselves reflected back in that group. But in many ways that’s just the truth, and we should reorient our movement to acknowledge that everyday people, particularly everyday people of color, might be much more reliable allies, and might be the people who are going to stand by us when it’s hard. That requires a lot of reorientation. But that’s what we’ve seen. A lot of the political calculus around the IRA was — and I believed this for a while; we talked about it in the Green New Deal — that if you bring money into these red districts, then it’ll be hard to peel back the IRA. If you can make this business-savvy, if you can make these investments make sense, you can derisk them; if it makes sense for the bottom line, folks will stand beside it. And that is not what we have seen. The administration changed, and all of that went out the window.

That strategy won’t work. There may not be any amount of money you could sow into red districts from clean energy that would stop them from voting red. I think this election made that clear. So if that’s not a playing ground to create power — and we’ve seen that it’s not — then we have to do something else, and that can be really uncomfortable, because what resonates with that audience is going to be different.