Recently, it seems that every glance at the headlines reveals another obstacle in the pursuit of climate justice. From policy reversals, dismantling of hard-won protections, fossil fuel executives stepping into significant governmental roles, to stalled clean energy initiatives, it often feels like we are regressing when it is crucial to advance.
This perception of overwhelming challenges can lead to what is known as doomerism—the belief that it is too late to prevent disaster. This mindset has become more common as individuals confront the vastness of the climate crisis. However, environmental researcher and data scientist Dr. Hannah Ritchie offers a broader perspective.
In her Big Think video, Ritchie shares her journey from despair to realization, highlighting that humanity has indeed overcome significant environmental challenges before.
Consider the ozone layer, once nearing collapse due to harmful CFCs, saved by global efforts under the Montreal Protocol. Acid rain in the 1970s and 80s was addressed by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions through policies like the Clean Air Act, allowing ecosystems to recover. Moreover, the global phase-out of leaded gasoline improved air quality and reduced health risks, particularly for children. These examples illustrate that when people confront crises, organize, collaborate, and demand action, genuine change is achievable.
Lessons from history: humanity’s energy transitions
These successes are part of a long history where humanity has adapted to and solved critical environmental challenges. A prominent example is the energy transitions over centuries. Faced with environmental, economic, and societal pressures, societies have reimagined energy sources. These shifts were neither quick nor seamless, but they occurred, offering valuable lessons for today.
Initially, wood was the primary energy source, accessible and integral to daily life. As populations expanded and forests dwindled, innovation became necessary. By the 18th century, coal emerged, not out of preference, but necessity.
Coal’s dominance wasn’t immediate. The transition began in the early 1700s, but it took until around 1900 for coal to replace wood as the dominant fuel. This shift powered the Industrial Revolution amid intense debates over labor, pollution, and government’s role in public resource management.
These were not abstract debates. In 1902, more than 140,000 coal miners went on strike, demanding safer conditions and fair wages, pushing the nation’s energy supply to the brink during winter. This strike forced federal intervention, not to crush the workers, but to mediate a resolution, marking a shift in how power, labor, and public needs were negotiated within the energy system.
In the 20th century, oil and natural gas began to surpass coal. This transition unfolded amid global political changes like wars, globalization, the rise of consumerism, and Cold War energy politics. Although oil was produced commercially in the 1800s, it didn’t surpass coal as the primary energy source until the 1960s, a transition spanning nearly a century.
These shifts were not merely technical. Over time, public pressure shaped them, with miners advocating for safety, communities resisting pollution, and reformers demanding government oversight of powerful industries. Energy systems evolved not simply due to new fuels, but because people consistently demanded better alternatives.
Today, we are in the midst of another energy revolution: transitioning globally from fossil fuels to clean energy. The stakes are higher now than ever before.
This transition is unlike past ones; it’s not just about resource depletion, health impacts, or economic benefits—it’s about survival. The science is clear: burning fossil fuels destabilizes our climate, intensifying wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and floods. Frontline communities—particularly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities—bear the brunt of these impacts, facing respiratory illnesses, displacement, and energy insecurity.
This transition is crucial not only because renewable energy sources like wind and solar are affordable and plentiful, but because continuing to use fossil fuels is incompatible with a sustainable future. Momentum is already building. Although we are only a few decades into this transition, wind and solar have become some of the cheapest electricity sources globally. Electric vehicles are rapidly gaining market share in many countries. Investments are shifting, and momentum is growing.
Like previous transitions, this one is complicated. It’s marked by inequities in who bears the burdens of outdated energy systems, corporate resistance, policy reversals, and deep uncertainty. Change naturally brings anxiety—that’s human. However, we often overlook how this anxiety can be shaped, amplified, and manipulated by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The critical question is not whether change feels unsettling, but who defines its meaning and for whom it is meant.
In such times, despair may seem like a natural reaction, but it serves those who want to maintain the status quo. When people believe change is impossible, they are less likely to demand it.
This transition, like those before it, is driven by necessity and by communities determined not to be left behind.
Energy revolutions don’t occur overnight; they are rarely linear, never perfect, and always political. However, they are achievable and span generations. History shows that change occurs not just through innovation, but through persistence—through people fighting for systems that better reflect their values and needs.
The shifts weren’t smooth; they were uneven, chaotic, full of protest and debate, but ultimately progressive. This one will be no different. However, it can be faster, fairer, and more just—if we demand it.
The lesson and the reality
Time and again, it wasn’t just technology that led the way—it was people demanding better.
Take the fight against acid rain. In the 1970s and ’80s, forests, lakes, and wildlife were decimated by sulfur dioxide emissions. Grassroots groups, particularly in the Northeast, raised the alarm, documented the damage, and pressured lawmakers to act. Their advocacy turned a scientific concern into a national priority. The result was the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which established the first-ever cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions. Thanks to these efforts, ecosystems that once seemed lost have recovered.
Consider Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. When officials attempted to dump toxic PCB-contaminated soil in a predominantly Black, rural community, residents resisted. They staged nonviolent protests, sparking a national reckoning. Although the landfill proceeded, their resistance ignited the modern environmental justice movement and highlighted how environmental harm often targets racial and economic minorities.
This fight continued. In the 1990s, farmworkers and advocates successfully pushed to ban pesticides that poisoned agricultural workers. In Flint, Michigan, residents brought national attention to a water crisis that exposed deep governmental negligence and systemic racism.
These moments reinforce a fundamental truth: meaningful change rarely comes from the top down. It begins with people—especially those most affected—organizing, resisting, and refusing to accept harmful systems.
The current energy transition is no different.
What needs to be reiterated
Each of these achievements wasn’t solely about government action—it was about people demanding better. These changes didn’t occur because industries or policymakers suddenly had an epiphany. They happened because communities organized, fought back, and refused to accept toxic air, polluted water, or a deteriorating planet as inevitable.
In my work with the Union of Concerned Scientists, through partnerships with community groups like Souldarity in Michigan and GreenRoots in Massachusetts, we have collaborated with communities actively shaping the transition in real time—advocating for policies that not only change energy sources but also determine who benefits, who holds power, and who decides what a sustainable future looks like. In our Let Communities Choose project, for example, we worked together to analyze what a just transition means economically—navigating complex questions about affordability, ownership, and long-term stability.
Collectively, these elements help us envision not just surviving climate change, but actively creating a future that works for everyone.
Progress doesn’t flow down from the top. It grows from the grassroots.
So, what if we get it right?
What if this moment—driven by crisis but also by care—is our opportunity to build something better? A future where clean energy is not only abundant but accessible and within reach. Where climate policy not only reduces emissions but redistributes power. Where frontline communities—often Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income—are not overlooked but are the architects of change.
As Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, and writer, emphasizes in her work What If We Get It Right?, the transition to a sustainable world must be rooted in justice, equity, and collective progress. It demands more from us than merely reducing emissions; it asks us to rethink how society operates and for whom.
No matter where you’re reading this, there is an opportunity to help shape that future—one based not just on cleaner energy but on fairer systems. A future where communities long burdened by pollution and neglect are not just included but leading—bringing the vision, experience, and knowledge needed to build energy systems that are resilient, accountable, and grounded in care.
However, achieving this vision requires addressing environmental injustices and the economic realities of a just transition for workers in fossil fuel industries. History shows that when transitions leave workers behind, they leave lasting social and economic scars.
This tension is playing out in real time. While political narratives promise a revival of industries like coal, the same communities are often facing health protection cuts and losing critical investments intended to support their transition. What’s being offered is not a genuine path forward but an illusion while the hard, necessary work of building new economic opportunities is abandoned.
Any economic transition is challenging. It requires actual investment, long-term commitment, and trust. That’s why investing in retraining, creating good jobs, and safeguarding workers’ rights must be fundamental—not optional—to these transitions. By doing so, we can ensure this transition uplifts all communities. Lessons from past energy transitions remind us that while change brings opportunities, it requires careful planning and inclusive leadership to ensure no one is left behind.
Progress doesn’t occur in isolation: it’s a collective effort, supported by data, guided by community voices, and focused on equity.
Where we are now
The fires are spreading, but so is the movement. That’s the paradox—we are experiencing destruction, yet also determination. This is not a narrative where hardship was necessary for growth. It didn’t have to be this way. The scale of loss we are witnessing is due to choices—made, delayed, or avoided.
The solutions aren’t distant possibilities. They’re already being constructed, piece by piece, policy by policy, neighborhood by neighborhood. You just need to pay attention. It’s your community that still shows up, giving you a reason to keep showing up, and that will be there when you’re weary.
This is why now, more than ever, we need storytellers and systems thinkers, data scientists and dancers, builders and believers—people who refuse to accept that change is impossible.
Hope is a discipline
And this is what doomerism overlooks. It reduces the struggle to a foregone conclusion when, in reality, the future is still being shaped by those refusing to accept the status quo. History is being made every day. The communities most impacted by environmental harm aren’t waiting for permission to act; they are leading, as they always have, whether or not the world is watching.
Doomerism suggests the arc of history is fixed. However, history tells us otherwise. Every community-led solar project, every climate justice bill, every shared story, and every challenged system says otherwise.
Change doesn’t always announce itself with grand speeches or breaking news alerts. It happens in the quiet power of a courtroom victory against polluters, in neighborhoods where solar panels rise on rooftops, and in workers fighting for—and winning—better wages and a just transition. Policymakers are forced to listen because the voices demanding justice are too loud to ignore.
This revolution is rarely televised. But it’s happening. It has been occurring behind the scenes, moving us all forward.
Doomerism tells us there’s nothing left to fight for. But that kind of resignation is never neutral. It creates the conditions for inaction—for systems to continue unchanged, unchallenged, and unaccountable.
The solutions to climate change are within our reach. The question is, will we let the illusion of inevitable doom prevail—or will we seize those solutions and build something better, together?
