We can battle climate change without Washington DC. Here's how

Global warming is an immediate battle with enormous consequences. We dare not wait for Washington to return to sanity – nor do we have to

The most telling item in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address may have been what wasn’t there: any mention of climate change, the greatest problem the world faces. And just as telling was the fact that official Washington seemed barely to notice.

Understandably preoccupied with his vile attacks on immigrants (or cheering his ability to actually stay with one task for one hour), press, pundits, and other politicians treated the omission as not even worthy of note. The Democratic response from Representative Joe Kennedy didn’t touch on global warming, either, though it did avoid Trump’s oddly intimate ode to “beautiful clean coal”. This means many things, but for climate campaigners one of them should be patently clear: if we’re going to make progress on climate change it’s not going to come through Washington DC – not any time soon.

Related: After a year of Donald Trump, there is still hope amid the horror | Jill Abramson

This fight is going aggressively local, and fast

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