Why POW Is Defending the Vote
There’s a threat to the climate fight you may not be watching closely enough. It isn’t a technology or a price tag. It’s who holds power, and whether the people who care about our winters can still make their voices heard at the ballot box.
Here’s how we see it at POW, and what you can say when the conversation comes up.
The single biggest obstacle to climate progress is who’s in charge
Clean energy isn’t losing on the merits. It’s losing decisions made by the people currently in office. The evidence is piling up by the week.
Last year’s federal tax and budget law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, clawed back clean energy tax credits and set a July 2026 deadline that cut developers’ runway from nine years to one. An estimated $83 billion in solar, wind, and battery storage projects have since been canceled or delayed. Those projects would have supported roughly 470,000 jobs. And on July 13, the administration cut Bears Ears National Monument by 90 percent, from 1.36 million acres to about 121,000, opening the removed land to mining within 60 days and dissolving the tribal commission that co-managed it.
None of that required a shift in public opinion. It only required a change in who holds the pen. Which leads to the first thing worth repeating to anyone who’ll listen: voting is a climate action. Climate policy is set by the people we elect, so the ballot is one of the most powerful climate tools any of us has.
The vote itself is now under attack
If the vote is how we change who holds power, then protecting the vote when it’s threatened is climate work too. And it is being threatened, by the same leadership rolling back clean energy and public lands.
In March, the administration ordered DHS to compile citizen lists and directed the Postal Service to restrict which mail ballots it delivers. A federal court has since struck down key parts as unconstitutional, but the intent is clear. In July, it fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the agency that certifies voting systems without a quorum. At the state level, a dozen states now require documentary proof of citizenship to register, and South Dakota’s and Utah’s new laws are in effect this cycle. Texas is purging voter rolls using flawed federal data, and Ohio faces litigation over its own purges.
These aren’t isolated glitches. They’re a strategy, aimed at the same power we need to change to win on climate. So the second point follows naturally: defending the vote is defending the climate. If you can’t vote, you can’t stoke the vote.
What POW is doing about it
This is the reasoning behind Defend the Vote, our campaign to protect ballot access in the places where it’s most at risk, and the runway to our broader Stoke the Vote push into the midterms. We’ve recently sharpened our focus to the geographies where POW works and where we’re most concerned about election interference, engaging directly with secretaries of state, starting in Montana and New Hampshire. That’s about putting our resources where the problem actually lives instead of spreading them thin.
And the community is answering. Our current sign-on letter has drawn more alliance sign-ons than anything POW has run in recent memory, including some of the most recognizable brands in the outdoor industry. It’s a sign our people already feel the stakes. Participation is always an invitation, never a push. We make the ask, and partners say yes or no. This many are saying yes.
Where you come in
Our whole game this cycle is turnout. Stoke the Vote only works if people can actually cast a ballot, which means we need free and fair elections to get there. That’s why this matters, and why we’re asking you to keep it front of mind.
If you take three things from this: voting is a climate action, the vote is under real attack, and protecting it is now part of taking action on climates.
Protecting the vote is no longer adjacent to our climate work. It is climate work.
Say it, share it, and add your name at defendthevote.org.
Author: Graham Zimmerman
Graham Zimmerman. Thirty-something male. Heavy drinker. Of coffee. Sporter of Moustache. Enamored with alpinism and the experiences, challenges and relationships that come from it. Born in New Zealand raised in the Northwest. After being exposed to alpine terrain in the Cascades he moved back to NZ where he cut his teeth in the Southern Alps […]
