There is no upside to the Trump presidency. To be in DC – I’ve come for Saturday’s giant climate march – is to be reminded up close what all Americans have known for months: we’ve put the country in the hands of a man completely unequal to the task. A man so cluelessly over his head that he keeps telling reporters he’s in over his head.

But if you want a few grayish linings to the dark-orange cloud, you can find them. In fact, the last few days have given those of us in the climate fight a few glimmers of light.

At midweek, and quite unexpectedly, the man who invests Harvard’s billions announced at a seminar that the world’s richest and most famous educational institution had more or less divested from fossil fuels. Of course he didn’t say that explicitly since it would require backtracking on the university’s strident declaration that it would never do such a thing. But close enough – Harvard had “paused” investing in fossil fuels, and was unlikely “ever” to resume.

Credit a remarkable campaign. Harvard students – like those at so many other places, including Penn and Cal where campaigners are currently sitting in –waged a relentless fight, even as officials told them no over and over again. Great credit is due them, and the alumni and faculty they enlisted. Leaders like Chloe Maxmin, who I met while she was still in high school, spent their entire college years on the fight, showing what persistence looks like.

East coast readies for fresh climate fight as Trump eyes more offshore drilling Read more

But they were aided, I think, by Trump’s unlikely victory. In the past, plenty of players could look for someone else to pass the buck to: surely dealing with climate change was the government’s responsibility, not Harvard’s? That was always a moral lapse, but in the Trump era it’s completely absurd. We’re ruled by a man who thinks global warming is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese – clearly the rest of us are going to have to step up.

And that rest of us includes Democratic politicians, too many of whom have tried to straddle the climate issue in the past. Barack Obama, remember, spent his years in office championing an “all of the above” energy policy that saw America vault past Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest hydrocarbon producer on the planet. But Trump throws such temporizing into sharper relief.

That’s why Oregon senator Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders felt empowered Thursday to introduce legislation that, for the very first time, draws the line where it should be. Their bill demands that America move to 100% renewable energy. Not some solar panels but also some frack wells, not some windmills but also some new pipelines. 100%.

That bill’s not going to pass anytime soon, obviously, but it is going to become the new bottom line for any serious progressive politician. Whoever leads the fight to replace Trump is going to have to do it on a platform of 100% renewable energy –and in contrast to Trump’s craziness on the issue, it will look statesmanlike instead of aspirational.

If the capitulation of some parts of the establishment, and the invigoration of some progressive leaders, count as two small positives, there’s also a third: the unleashing of the full energy of lots and lots of people who have had to speak more softly in the past. One of the strongest voices at the ceremony launching the Merkley/Sanders bill, for instance, came from Mustafa Ali, who for many years ran the environmental justice program at EPA.

The environmental justice program probably won’t exist much longer – the Trump EPA budget zeroes it out, which tells you all you need to know. Ali resigned – and immediately joined the staff of the HipHop Caucus, one of the most vibrant and dynamic climate justice campaigns on this particular planet.

In his first few weeks, Ali spoke powerfully – but with a bit of the habitual reserve of the bureaucrat. By yesterday he was sounding a lot like the Rev Lennox Yearwood, the charismatic founder of the caucus: he had US senators, fists in the air, chanting “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.”

Which is pretty much what all of us who will march tomorrow are saying. We’re under no illusions: Trump is the worst thing that could have happened to the planet. It’s possible the damage he’ll do will be eternal – we’re clearly on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system. But we will fight on, looking for the holes in the Death Star. And finding some.