The Sierra Club, which made up part of the 2.3 percent sliver of climate lobbying dollars that came from environmental groups, blamed “the unlimited money fossil fuel polluters have poured into our political system” for making “the debate on the climate crisis in the United States … radically different than in every other country on earth.” To try to counter that disparity in lobbying dollars, legislative director Melinda Pierce said the nonprofit mobilizes “more than three million members and supporters.”

Brulle suggested that climate advocates could exploit differences between industry sectors that have historically opposed climate legislation as a way to disrupt their lobbying power. Utilities that generate a larger portion of energy from natural gas or renewable power were more likely to lobby in favor of climate legislation, he said, than their coal-powered competitors.

A 2017 paper from Australian National University researcher Christian Downie laid out a strategy that included building coalitions among renewable energy players, exploiting inter-industry divisions by targeting “politically weak industries that are less able to mount a resistance campaign,” and exploiting intra-industry divisions by “seeking to bring on board outliers that support policies that the rest of an industry opposes.”

The Trump administration has little use for efforts to fight climate change. The EPA under then-Administrator Scott Pruitt started the process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a federal rule that would have incentivized utilities to use more renewable energy and scale back emissions from coal. It also moved to gut a regulation that would have raised the fuel efficiency of vehicles, now the country’s biggest source of greenhouse gas pollution, at the behest of auto manufacturers who publicly claim to support climate action. There’s little reason to believe Andrew Wheeler, the new EPA chief and a former coal and mining lobbyist, will shift gears.

Meanwhile, corporations that profess concern about the environment are not always reliable allies. A study published last year in the peer-reviewed Academy of Management Journal found that several big companies that had announced ambitious sustainability goals later retreated when profits decreased or top executives changed.

Legislation ambitious enough to make a difference at a time when fossil fuel emissions are hitting an all-time high and climate change appears to be happening faster and more intensely than previously thought faces yet another hurdle. The false belief that scientists are not yet certain about humanity’s role in global warming all but dominates the Republican Party and undergirds the Trump administration’s environmental, national security and energy policies. Meanwhile, Democrats have failed to rally around a bold climate plan, instead intermittently producing legislation to set renewable energy goals with no clear roadmap on how to achieve them. Even the most purportedly hawkish Democrats on climate change have proposed conservative policies to deal with it, including a carbon tax that would have lowered the corporate tax rate by 6 percent and a cap-and-dividend bill that would have returned carbon revenues to Americans in the form of a rebate.

An insurgent group of progressive candidates running in the 2018 midterm elections could shift the debate within Democratic policy circles. Some House candidates― including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Randy Bryce of Wisconsin and Kaniela Ing of Hawaii ― are calling for a Green New Deal, a massive government spending plan to build up renewable energy production and create potentially millions of federally backed middle-class jobs. Some left-leaning think tanks are also drafting proposals to nationalize and dismantle publicly traded fossil fuel giants.

But at a time when rising floods, droughts, heat waves, storms and wildfires afflict the country ― causing a record $306 billion in damages last year ― radical action seems far past due.