On a Wednesday night in December near Capitol Hill, a dozen activists belonging to the organization Climate Defiance gathered around a long table in a Pain Quotidien. The group has become known in recent years for planning viral confrontations with politicians and policymakers, shaming them for their insufficient actions to address the climate crisis.
Last March, the group crashed an event at Harvard University to call then–West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin a “sick fuck” to his face. During New York City’s Climate Week in 2023, Climate Defiance chased the Interior Department’s deputy secretary across New York City chastising his fecklessness on camera at every possible turn. (He later resigned.)
This time the group was preparing to interrupt the American Gas Association’s holiday party at a tony whiskey bar just up the street. The plan was straightforward: Create maximum discomfort by shaming attendees up close with a camera shoved in their faces.
Often, Climate Defiance’s “disruptive protest” techniques lead to jail stints. Most who showed up to the meeting at Le Pain Quotidien needed multiple hands to count the number of times they’d been detained. But that night, the chief concern was access to the bar, rather than arrest. The group planned to block entrances to a Department of Energy building the next day, so had motivation to leave the holiday party before the police arrived, lest they get locked up too early.
Nick Newberry, a six-foot-tall blond guy from Virginia who previously worked in the oil and gas industry—already vaguely resembling a prototypical D.C. Republican—showed up to the café playing the part of a gas lobbyist: in a dark blue suit with a shining American flag lapel pin. “I think the disruption of our actions gets a boost when the disruption comes from someone who looks like they should be gleefully exploiting the system rather than fighting it,” he told me. Also, he brought a Grinch mask.
Climate Defiance gained prominence fighting the Biden administration. But that administration is now on its way out. So in addition to trying to squeeze last concessions from a Democratic White House—like denying permits for a series of proposed liquefied natural gas terminals that Biden had paused last January—the group is also pondering its future strategies and role under Donald Trump. Influencing someone who considers the climate crisis to be fantasy is no easy task.
Had Kamala Harris won last November, Climate Defiance would have continued what its members call inside-outside: taking meetings with government officials to propose policy changes while pressuring them through flashy public protest. For example, Michael Greenberg, the soft-spoken 31-year-old who founded the activist group in March 2023, also arrived at the holiday-party crash dressed in a suit, having come straight from a meeting with DOE Deputy Secretary David Turk.
The Biden administration was an ostensible ally for the climate movement, although it offered more parleys and delays than systemic change. A Trump government, by contrast, has zero incentive to pantomime solutions to the climate crisis. So why would it humor groups like Climate Defiance with conversation, even if just to placate them?
“Meetings were never our main focus,” Greenberg told me. “Our emphasis is on the outside.” In that sense, spoiling a bourbon bash bankrolled by oil money was a return to the fundamentals for Climate Defiance—and a preview of its efforts under Trump. After gaming out their approach, they marched out of the café and into the rain, two by two. As they entered the party, Newberry, wearing the Grinch mask, was the mirror reflection of a dark-suited crowd clutching whiskey tumblers. Party attendees’ eyes avoided the Climate Defiance cameraman’s lens—as if repelled by magnets. “Hello tiny-hearted people of AGA!” Newberry shouted. “So proud of you for finding something dirtier than coal for kids for Christmas.” There was a “natural gas my ass!” chant. They posted video of the encounter to X and Bluesky on Christmas Day.
“People and philanthropists can sometimes look at these protests and say, ‘This is shocking. People are upset. How can this be good?’” says Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which raises money and grants for groups like Climate Defiance. “The evidence is very clear: In order to succeed, social movements really need to have a radical flank that is disrupting normalcy and willing to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience.”
Recent academic research backs Salamon’s claims. A study published last October in Nature Sustainability found that radical climate protests increase support for more moderate environmental groups, and help to normalize more progressive policies.
The day after invading the AGA holiday party, the group blocked the entrance to a Department of Energy office parking lot, urging the administration to halt LNG infrastructure permits, which would have escalated U.S. exports of fracked gas. The group later reported that 13 of their members were arrested during the demonstration.
The demonstration may not have drawn much attention, but the following week, The New York Times revealed that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had written a letter opposing the permits, to accompany a recently completed Department of Energy study. “Increased energy prices for domestic consumers combined with the negative impacts to local communities and the climate will continue to grow as exports increase,” she wrote. The DOE study had found that “unfettered exports” would increase wholesale gas prices by 30 percent, costing the average American household over $100 a year by 2050.
“What we see here is an industry that is trying to push for as much profit as possible, expand as much infrastructure as possible in the near term, even as the science shows clearly that that is completely out of step with climate goals,” Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. “In fact, it’s going to create real market risks here because that infrastructure is going to have to be abandoned. These are stranded assets.”
Greenberg met Deputy Secretary Turk personally, and more than a dozen Climate Defiance members were arrested just days before the report’s release. To be sure, the report had already been underway for nearly a year—the president ordered it when he paused the permits in January 2024. Still, the timing was fortuitous, leaving a sense for protesters that the Climate Defiance efforts (in addition to the Department of Energy blockade) were connected to the release of the report and Granholm’s letter.
Crucially, the report itself lacks the legal heft to stop the permits. It merely walks readers through myriad reasons the permits should not be approved. It’s also worth noting here that the Energy Department has never denied any company’s requests for the permits in question. Next comes a public comment period that will run past the inauguration and into the first days of the next president’s term. Under Trump, the agency is likely to greenlight those stalled permits. At that point, the real value of the report will become clear.
“This report provides a very important factual basis for legal challenges,” Cleetus says. “I think the underlying report is very carefully, extensively resourced and backed up. It will provide an important basis on which legal challenges will be made.”
By then, the answer to another question will likely be revealed: Will more moderate factions of the climate movement—suitcases and clothes soon to be strewn across the White House lawn—collaborate with groups like Climate Defiance that have embraced outsider status?
Up until now, wealthy climate funders like Bloomberg and Climateworks have handled Climate Defiance and similarly radical groups just as the White House has—from a distance. “They get virtually no institutional support,” says Salamon.
Last month, I met up with Greenberg in lower Manhattan to discuss his group’s future. Afterward, he took the subway uptown for a meeting with a high-profile philanthropic group known to donate to environmental causes. It was his fifth meeting with them, and he expected the same outcome as the first four conversations: leaving without a cent. When I saw him again before the holiday party, he confirmed his prediction to be correct.
“During a Democratic administration, a lot of nonprofits, and especially philanthropies, can get confused about how we should be relating to politicians,” Salamon told me. They put “way too much emphasis on the inside game—relationship building and maintenance—as opposed to just pushing as hard as we can.”
That’s one silver lining of an incoming administration that neither cares nor pretends to care about climate change. Barriers between the factions of people who do care tend to fall. “That’s just something that I think we can solve during the next four years,” Salamon says.
