Abstract
Climate change and energy are polarising topics in Trump's America: while the grassroots movement clamouring for a rapid low-carbon energy transition continues to grow stronger, Trump's administration, dominated by climate sceptics, has promised an "America First Energy Plan" based on maximising fossil fuel reserves. Responding to this quickly unfolding situation, I will undertake fieldwork with the 'Better Future Project', a grassroots climate action organisation working across Massachusetts. Through my research, I seek to study how activists creatively use moral concepts, promote ethical sensibilities, and communicate visions of a 'good society' to engender action on climate change in the face of wider political hostility to their convictions.

Research Question
There is a growing, globally distributed social movement of grassroots activists, charities, NGOs, and indigenous groups seeking systemic responses to climate change and fossil fuel extraction [13]. In the United States there is a groundswell of grassroots activism on climate change and clean energy transitions across local, national and international scales. This includes youth climate-action groups and the US Climate Action Network, fossil fuel divestment and reinvestment campaigns, political alliances between first-nation indigenous communities, resistance to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, nationwide decentralised low-carbon energy projects, and the Climate Justice Alliance, a nationwide collaborative of around 40 organisations working to implement a 'just transition' to a low-carbon energy system and 're-localised' economy.
Through ethnographic fieldwork, this project will explore the moral underpinnings of the proposed solutions to climate change - e.g. lowering carbon emissions by divesting in fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy capacity, promoting energy efficiency, and reducing consumption. My research will ask: How do activists negate the expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption through protest, civil disobedience, litigation, lobbying etc.? How do they promote and engender what they consider to be viable, necessary and perhaps radical alternatives to the current energy system? What moral concepts (justice, responsibility, freedom, duty), ethical sensibilities (hope, possibility, disapproval), and visions of a 'good society' do they use? To answer these questions, I will examine: a) the specific ways in which climate change and energy 'come to matter' as issues of primary concern for particular actors; b) the specific forms of social, economic and political transformation promoted by activists as proactive responses to fossil fuel extraction and climate change [11]; c) strategies used by activists to promote wider engagement with climate change and convince others to 'take action' in particular ways; d) activists' practical responses to discourses perpetuated by the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry.