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Tom Bateman of Rockport is professor emeritus of organizational behavior and leadership with the University of Virginia, McIntire School of Commerce. For more than a decade, he has been studying and writing about climate psychology.
On Feb. 12, the Trump administration repealed the scientific finding that, for 17 years, authorized the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
For most Americans, that news barely registered; a legal filing doesn’t rattle us the way deadly heat domes and floods do. But quiet actions like this one strip away tools we’ll need for the next crisis.
That repeal joined dozens of similar moves: agencies gutted, international commitments abandoned, clean-energy tax credits rolled back. Together, they explain why so many of us feel like we’ve lost — or maybe have never had any — control of the climate fight. That feeling is justified, but it doesn’t have to be permanent.
Psychologists use the word “agency” to refer to one of the field’s most powerful ideas: the belief that we can accomplish our goals and protect what we care about. Agency predicts the goals we set, the effort we sustain, and how well we perform. It doesn’t guarantee results, but we hate to lose it, and we’re losing it now.
In my view, climate agency is the necessary solution to the biggest problem we’ll face for the rest of our lives. We already have plenty of it — scientific knowledge, technical solutions, and a clear understanding of what to do differently. What we’re not doing is closing the gap between knowing and doing. That gap is our key obstacle and opportunity.
Leaving so much agency unused is self sabotage. Climate change is a threat multiplier, the term military planners use for a danger that amplifies nearly every other danger, from water and food shortages to human displacement, large-scale migrations, and conflict.
Our federally imposed climate losses are piling up. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can no longer act on greenhouse gases the way it could a year ago. The Federal Emergency Management Agency cut staff even as billion-dollar disasters grew far more common. Federal scientists were ordered to stop updating the public disaster tracker. The U.S. forfeited its climate leadership to China, which is now producing roughly 80% of the world’s solar panels. Different losses, same result: less capacity to respond as crises grow.
We are not as helpless, and things are not as hopeless, as many feel. Federal control isn’t the only form of control, and coalitions are already pushing back. Environmental and public health organizations quickly sued, as did 18 young plaintiffs in a separate suit against the EPA, arguing that the rollback violates their constitutional rights.
In June, a unanimous U.S. Senate vote forced the National Science Foundation to reverse a plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean-monitoring network. Funding has been restored, and the buoys will return this fall.
Those coalitions pushed back. It isn’t only people in positions of positions winning ground. Citizens’ Climate Lobby, with volunteers in over 500 chapters turns tens of thousands of conversations into big legislative results, helping pass the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and a nuclear-permitting bill that cleared the Senate 88-2 in 2024.
Simply talking openly about climate change matters more than it might seem, but we do it far less than we should. Roughly six in 10 Americans underestimate fellow citizens’ worries about climate change, deepening the silence. Katharine Hayhoe’s 2018 TED talk, “The most important thing you can do about climate change: talk about it,” makes the case clearly.
Think of history’s pendulum as swinging between control taken away and control reclaimed. The raw capacity to act — civic engagement, legal and political tools, consumer and investor influence, citizen and business leadership — is available but underused. We haven’t turned enough of that capacity into assertive power. Which way the pendulum swings depends on how many of us engage, and how well.