WASHINGTON — Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, said on Friday he would donate $500 million to a new campaign to close every coal-fired power plant in the United States and halt the growth of natural gas.

The new campaign, called Beyond Carbon, is designed to help eliminate coal by focusing on state and local governments . The effort will bypass Washington, where Mr. Bloomberg has said national action appears unlikely because of a divided Congress and a president who denies the established science of climate change.

“We’re in a race against time with climate change, and yet there is virtually no hope of bold federal action on this issue for at least another two years,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement before the announcement, which he made in a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Mother Nature is not waiting on our political calendar, and neither can we.”

President Trump has made reviving what he has called “clean, beautiful coal” a cornerstone of his energy agenda.