Work On Climate

February 18, 2026

Beyond the EPA Ruling: Building a More Beautiful Movement

This post effectively serves as a Part 2 to our previous post about regenerative economics.

The EPA recently revoked the Endangerment Finding, which formed the basis for much of climate action in the US. It is a devastating event, in more ways than meets the eye.

However, as we consider what exactly it is that we lost, we are invited to build a new and more beautiful foundation for our movement. In this piece we invite you to consider that:

  • The most important thing we lost wasn’t the ability to regulate emissions: it was coordination capacity. The Endangerment Finding provided a foundation for organizing the economy around the health of the climate and climate-adjacent systems.
  • There is a name for the discipline of organizing an economy around the health of its systems. It is called regenerative economics. 
  • The tools of regenerative economics may seem new and unfamiliar, compared to technology and law — but they offer numerous strategic advantages: faster learning, more resilience, and more allies.

We call on the climate movement and our new allies to recognize that this is the right work, and invest in full force into developing the discipline of regenerative economics.

The scopes of climate action

What do we mean when we say that climate action is a good investment? We mean that it has a pay-off. Most people recognize that investments have different time horizons, some require economies of scale, and so on. Understanding these payoff structures matters, because the EPA repeal affects them differently.

However, one more dimension exists, which is less commonly discussed: the scope of coordination required for action to make sense for those participating in it. 

Some things pay off even for an organization acting alone. Reducing waste of food or energy, or more accurate assessment of climate risks to one’s supply chain, simply makes business sense. That still doesn’t mean that it’s easy: even if the numbers add up, most organizations will only act when it becomes the norm recognized by their peers, stakeholders, or the government.

Some things pay off only at the level of a sufficiently large city/region/nation, or coalition. For example, communities that foot the bill for decarbonizing their buildings or transitioning to EVs will prevail over those who don’t — no longer betting their future on volatile fuel prices, suffering from avoidable respiratory disease, and maintaining outdated infrastructure.

Some things pay off only at the global level, because their only payoff is a more stable climate. If nobody acts, the climate becomes too unstable to have a functional society, and everyone suffers. But if only one company or one nation acts, the payoff is modest: a bump in consumer sentiment or employee engagement. Today this bucket seems to include things like decarbonizing aviation, heavy manufacturing, construction, and AI.

Of course, not all humans, organizations, and governments are purely transactional:

  • Most people, and quite a few organizations and governments, find it inherently rewarding to have some moral standards and live up to them.
  • Others may act because it’s silly to invest in approaches incompatible with having an economy. Imagine buying a new mega-trawler when the lake is being overfished. There’s no scenario where you still have fish AND your trawler isn’t a stranded asset.

However, in times of fear and volatility, such motivations become increasingly vulnerable — the more direct are the benefits of action, the more likely it is to continue.

What the EPA repeal actually does

Unfortunately, the EPA repeal does much more than make it harder for the government to regulate emissions. It harms all levels of coordination required for climate action:

  • It creates official permission for delay. When the government sows doubt, “laggard” organizations and communities feel more unsure, and are more likely to drag their feet even on the most “no-brainer” forms of climate action with direct benefits.
  • It weakens the common ground for any group trying to coordinate, because coordination requires shared tools and a shared reality. This is especially damaging to stakeholder groups that didn’t already have a lot of common ground. When the US government is no longer providing such tools (like the Social Cost of Carbon, or climate risk assessment data), or this reality, such groups now have to look elsewhere. 
  • It makes it harder to reach a critical mass. Any coordinated effort needs to start with “first movers” and a leadership group — but the repeal creates fear and volatility that dampen the enthusiasm of such actors.

It is this coordination capacity that we now must rebuild — from a new foundation.

When things get hard, ask a harder question

All of the payoffs we discussed have to do with system health: whether it is the financial health of an organization, the public health of a community, or the health of the climate system, on which humanity relies for having stable places to live and grow food.

If we want to build economic systems that sustain such health — climate health, public health, soil health, any kind of health — we need to ask:

  • What should a health-sustaining economy look like?
  • How do we get there from where we are now?

These are daunting questions. Much bigger than “what is the right carbon price to set?” or “what tax incentive will accelerate EV adoption?” So why should we even ask them, when we are running out of time?

Scientists and engineers know why: when you ask a more general question, you can learn from all of its applications at the same time and avoid methodological dead ends. This tends to make it easier to find a solution, and the solution turns out both simpler and more powerful.

It’s not that it is impossible to reduce emissions without a broader focus on system health. But we are more likely to discover the solution if we ask the bigger question.

There is a name for the discipline that asks this question: regenerative economics. It is the study and practice of organizing economies around the health of their foundational systems.

The highest TRL of them all

NASA pioneered classifying technologies by their TRL (readiness level), ranging from 1 to 9. Eminent investor Tom Baruch observes that nature goes far beyond TRL 9: it is orders of magnitude more proven than any technology we’ve built. For Tom, this informs a focus on synthetic biology; for us, it should inform how we coordinate.

Living systems have been solving coordination for systems health for billions of years. From rainforests to coral reefs to the human body, living systems have been evolving until they learned to excel at organizing their parts to support the health of the whole — and those who failed to do so, died.

It doesn’t mean that we should go back to the woods, or structure our economy exactly like a rainforest. And, make no mistake, there is plenty of death and collapse in nature — in fact, both are a natural part of its cycle. But, if we want to optimize our economy for health, longevity, and resilience, today the healthiest natural systems vastly outperform healthiest human-made systems. It is silly not to ask “is there something we can learn from how they do it?”

We have already done so for many technologies: from the bullet train (modeled after a kingfisher’s beak) to antimicrobial surfaces (shark skin) and self-cooling buildings (termite mounds). But now, we need to look beyond technology: to system structure.

Structural patterns that allow living systems to stay healthy are well-studied: nested networks of symbiotic relationships, distributed local decision-making, diversity as a key source of resilience, robust circulation (rather than accumulation) of nutrients, and more. Regenerative economics invites us to translate some of these patterns to the economy.

A new unit of progress

Because system health comes from system structure, the unit of progress on economic health must also be not a new technology or a new law, but a new structural pattern: Forms of ownership, governance, and incorporation, data sharing standards, markets, financing stacks, and more.

Today’s economy has many such patterns: “the C corporation”, “the tenant association”, “the SAFE note”, “the union”, “the representative democracy”, and more. These patterns form the “DNA code” of the economy. Existing “economic genes” have widespread adoption, but we are seeing their limits in regards to supporting system health.

Some new “genes” have been already invented in the context of climate action: “the shadow carbon pricing scheme”, “the emissions reporting standard”, “the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA)”, “the CDR demand precommitment”, “the Paris agreement”, and more — with varied success.

Many examples exist outside climate:

However, very little work is happening on systematically cultivating such approaches. Some examples include “demand vehicles” proposed by Indy Johar, Pando Funding, Bloom Network, and others mentioned in our recent blog — but, by and large, this work has gotten little to no attention from governments and major foundations, and is completely unknown to the public. This must change.

This is the new framing for our movement’s leadership work: We must cultivate new “economic genes”, structures that support health regeneration at all levels of the economy, and that prevail in competition with those that don’t.

A more beautiful movement

Working on this broader framing offers massive strategic advantages.

First, our work will enjoy economies of scale. Today, public health is separate from climate health, organization health separate from community health, and so on. But in living systems, similar patterns support all types of health. If we fail to learn this lesson, we will be duplicating work. But if we embrace it, we will see that:

  • Coalition-building work for local food systems resilience can be repurposed for regenerative agriculture.
  • Lessons from outcome-based financing for public health can transfer to financing community clean energy development, and bioregional funds can support that work.
  • Capture-proof governance of Internet standards can teach us how to prevent emissions standards from being diluted.

Second, our work will be less vulnerable. Right now, climate-specific initiatives face a direct political attack. Our work was vulnerable because it was so narrowly scoped to climate, and so reliant on the government for a key piece: the EPA repeal pulled the rug from all of it.

However, this administration is less likely to also block progress on public health, agricultural resilience, and regional economic development. Even if they wanted to, it would cause much broader pushback, and they would struggle to do it everywhere at once.

Third, we will gain allies. When we broaden our task from climate alone to system health, we find allies among public health advocates, farmers focused on soil regeneration or aquifer health, open-source enthusiasts, and more. In fact, in many of these areas we are likely to find allies even among conservatives — one of the elusive “holy grails” for the climate movement.

What does this mean for you?

The right destination for our movement is a regenerative economic system. However, everyone’s contribution to getting us there will be different. In order to develop your own compass, we suggest to start by building literacy in regenerative systems leadership — learn:

As you craft your unique path, we offer some suggestions to inspire you. If you are:

An individual or an org with a climate focus or interest: engage in network leadership within the systems in which your work exists:

  • For example, if your org works with clients in the food space, you can start a community of practice among them around food waste reduction. This builds the foundation for future coordination on other systems health challenges.
  • Lead or support development of new industry standards and coalitions.
  • Learn from organizations doing a similar type of coordination work in a completely different space.
  • Work with existing networks already transforming the same systems you’re trying to transform, even if they aren’t focused on climate.
  • If you’re mainly a for-profit funder, allocate some non-profit funding for developing coordination capacity at the scope necessary for the technologies you fund to make sense for those deploying them, in the ways below

A non-profit funder with a narrow climate mandate: All of the above, plus:

  • Explicitly recognize and reward outcomes that improve coordination capacity, such as numbers and connectivity of involved stakeholders; levels of trust / alignment / commitment; emerged collaborations and emerged new leaders
  • Treat these outcomes as “the main course”, rather than a side dish to direct impact. Work with your approving stakeholders to help them embrace this mindset.
  • Similarly recognize learning outcomes. Reward work that tries a new a way to coordinate for systems health, or to engage a new group, and learns something from a failure.
  • Use your networks and learning power to boost the network leadership of your grantees.

A non-profit funder with a more flexible scope: All of the above, plus:

  • Consider going all-in on “innovative regenerative systems change” as your funding scope, moving away from a traditional sector-specific model.
  • Measure your progress by learning outcomes: are you testing new approaches to coordination and system health in different contexts? Are you learning more about what works in what context?
  • See yourself as a funder of a new discipline, which is as fundamental to human progress as fields like mathematics. Funders of fundamental mathematical research do not limit their support only to applications in drug discovery or poverty reduction.

Whatever your path, constantly interrogate your work through the lens of regenerative principles and values — at Work On Climate, we find them a powerful catalyst for our thinking.

Conclusion

Climate action requires coordination at many levels, from individual companies to humanity as a whole. The EPA repeal has compromised this very ability, and this loss calls upon the climate movement to find new, more resilient sources of coordination capacity.

Paradoxically, we will be more likely to succeed if we ask a bigger question: how can economies coordinate to support system health in general? This is the subject of regenerative economics.

This bigger ambition will pay off through shared learning and coordination capacity, greater resilience, and more allies.

Exciting work is already happening, but not in a systematic fashion. We must realize that this is the right work, and tackle it in full force. Everyone doing climate or systems change work today can engage in this work in their unique way.

This will require our imagination to go much farther than imagining a new AI marketing startup, or even a new battery chemistry: we are facing a redefinition of what “innovation” means.

The unit of innovation on our new path is not a new technology, but a new structural pattern in the economy: forms of incorporation, ownership, governance, financing, and more. The people successful at this work likely won’t be the same as the leading founders and investors of today.

But I believe that America, and the world, has innovators who are bold enough, and who will persist in this work. It will be ignored, then misunderstood, then fought — and then we will win.

P.S. What is Work On Climate’s role? We are a non-profit building the movement infrastructure for climate-motivated professionals in each sector to become leaders of regenerative systems change. We are eager to talk to funders and strategic partners interested in the intersection of this vision and their work. Email eugene@workonclimate.org to discuss more!

Authors: Eugene Kirpichov and Inbal Nachman

Work On Climate

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