This arti­cle orig­i­nal­ly appeared at Bill​Moy​ers​.com.

This winter may find climate activists spending as much time trying to block deportations as pipelines.

We’re going to be deal­ing with an onslaught of dai­ly emer­gen­cies dur­ing the Trump years. Already it’s begun — if there’s noth­ing going on (or in some cas­es when there is), our leader often begins the day with a tweet to stir the pot, and sud­den­ly we’re debat­ing whether burn­ing the flag should lose you your citizenship.

These crises will get worse once he has pow­er — from day to day we’ll have to try and pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble immi­grants, or deal with the lat­est out­rage from the white suprema­cist ​“alt-reich,” or con­front the lat­est self-deal­ing scan­dal in the upper reach­es of the Tow­er. It will be a game (though not a fun one), for 48 months, of try­ing to pre­serve as many peo­ple and as much of the Con­sti­tu­tion as possible.

And if we’re very lucky, at the end of those four years, we might be able to go back to some­thing that resem­bles nor­mal life. Much dam­age will have been done in the mean­time, but per­haps not irrepara­ble dam­age. Oba­macare will be gone, but some­thing like it — maybe even some­thing bet­ter — will be res­ur­rectable. The suf­fer­ing in the mean­time will be real, but it won’t make the prob­lem hard­er to solve, assum­ing rea­son some­day returns. That’s, I guess, the good news: that some­day nor­mal life may resume.

But even that slight good news doesn’t apply to the ques­tion of cli­mate change. It’s very like­ly that by the time Trump is done we’ll have missed what­ev­er open­ing still remains for slow­ing down the tra­jec­to­ry of glob­al warm­ing — we’ll have crossed thresh­olds from which there’s no return. In this case, the dam­age he’s promis­ing will be per­ma­nent, for two reasons.

The first is the most obvi­ous: The adver­sary here is ulti­mate­ly physics, which plays by its own rules. As we con­tin­ue to heat the plan­et, we see that plan­et chang­ing in ways that turn into feed­back loops. If you make it hot enough to melt Arc­tic ice (and so far we’ve lost about half of our sup­ply) then one of the side effects is remov­ing a nice white mir­ror from the top of the plan­et. Instead of that mir­ror reflect­ing 80 per­cent of the sun’s rays out to space, you’ve now got blue water that absorbs most of the incom­ing rays of the sun, amp­ing up the heat. Oh, and as that water warms, the methane frozen in its depths even­tu­al­ly begins to melt — and methane is a potent green­house gas. Even if, some­day, we get a pres­i­dent back in pow­er who’s will­ing to try and turn down the coal, gas and oil burn­ing, there will be noth­ing we can do about that melt­ing methane. Some things are for­ev­er, or at least for geo­log­ic time.

There’s anoth­er rea­son too, how­ev­er, and that’s that the inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal mech­a­nisms Trump wants to smash can’t eas­i­ly be assem­bled again, even with lots of future good will. It took immense diplo­mat­ic efforts to reach the Paris cli­mate accords — 25 years of nego­ti­at­ing with end­less set­backs. The agree­ment itself is a jury-rigged kludge, but at least it pro­vides a mech­a­nism for action. It depends on each coun­try vol­un­tar­i­ly doing its part, though, and if the biggest his­toric source of the planet’s car­bon decides not to play, it’s easy to guess that an awful lot of oth­er lead­ers will decide that they’d just as soon give in to their fos­sil fuel inter­ests too.

So Trump is prepar­ing to make a mas­sive bet: a bet that the sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus about cli­mate change is wrong, and that the oth­er 191 nations of the world are wrong as well. It’s a bet based on lit­er­al­ly noth­ing — when The New York Times asked him about glob­al warm­ing, he start­ed mum­bling about a physi­cist uncle of his who died in 1985. The job — and it may not be a pos­si­ble job — is for the rest of us to fig­ure out how to make the inevitable loss of this bet as pain­less as possible.

It demands fierce resis­tance to his silli­ness — clear­ly his peo­ple are going to kill Obama’s Clean Pow­er Plan, but per­haps they can be shamed into sim­ply ignor­ing but not for­mal­ly abro­gat­ing the Paris accords. This is work not just for activists, but for the elites that Trump actu­al­ly lis­tens to. Here’s where we need what’s left of the estab­lish­ment to be weigh­ing in: For­tune 500 exec­u­tives, Wall Streeters — any­one who knows how stu­pid a bet this is.

But we also need to be work­ing hard on oth­er lev­els. The fos­sil fuel indus­try is cel­e­brat­ing Trump’s elec­tion, and right­ly so — but we can con­tin­ue to make their lives at least a lit­tle dif­fi­cult, through cam­paigns like fos­sil fuel divest­ment and through fight­ing every pipeline and every coal port. The fed­er­al bat­tles will obvi­ous­ly be hard­er, and we may lose even vic­to­ries like Key­stone. But there are many levers of pow­er, and the ones clos­er to home are often eas­i­er to pull.

We also have to work at state and local lev­els to sup­port what we want. The last elec­tion, ter­ri­ble as it was, showed that renew­able ener­gy is pop­u­lar even in red states — Flori­da util­i­ties lost their bid to side­line solar ener­gy, for instance. The hope is that we can keep the build­out of sun and wind, which is begin­ning to acquire real momen­tum, on track; if so, costs will keep falling to the point where sim­ple eco­nom­ics may over­rule even Trump­ish ideology.

And of course we have to keep com­mu­ni­cat­ing, all the time, about the cri­sis — using the con­stant stream of sig­nals from the nat­ur­al world to help peo­ple under­stand the fol­ly of our stance. As I write this, the Smoky Moun­tain town of Gatlin­burg is on fire, with big hotels turned to ash at the end of a dev­as­tat­ing drought. Moth­er Nature will pro­vide us an end­less string of teach­able moments, and some of them will break through — it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion fell from favor as much because of Kat­ri­na as Iraq.

None of these efforts will pre­vent mas­sive, and per­haps fatal, dam­age to the effort to con­strain cli­mate change. It’s quite pos­si­ble, as many sci­en­tists said the day after the elec­tion, that we’ve lost our best chance. But we don’t know pre­cise­ly how the physics will play out, and every ton of car­bon we keep out of the atmos­phere will help.

And amidst this long ongo­ing emer­gency, as I said at the begin­ning, we’ve got to help with all the dai­ly crises. This win­ter may find cli­mate activists spend­ing as much time try­ing to block depor­ta­tions as pipelines; we may have to live in a hot world, but we don’t have to live in a jack­boot­ed one, and the more com­mu­ni­ty we can pre­serve, the more resilient our com­mu­ni­ties will be. It’s hard not to despair — but then, it wasn’t all that easy to be real­is­ti­cal­ly hope­ful about our cli­mate even before Trump. This has always been a bat­tle against great odds. They’re just steep­er now.