Courtesy of Aaron Regunberg

Aaron Regunberg (he/him), while only in his mid-30s, has a long list of accomplishments to his name. A former two-term Rhode Island state representative, this kakapo fan is taking on the might of fossil fuel companies as legal counsel at Public Citizen, and is fighting the Trump administration in Rhode Island as co-founder of Resist Hate RI. Read on to learn more about Aaron and his legacy of activism!

Where are you based?
I live in Providence, Rhode Island

Why is your favorite animal the kakapo?
They’re so silly – these big, bedraggled, hapless, beautiful birds. They represent a very sad story – they’re almost extinct. But they also represent a hopeful story – cause they’re not extinct yet. New Zealand has rallied around this animal to keep it from disappearing, and I find brightness in that. The first tattoo I ever got was a kakapo.

What inspired you to get involved in activism and politics?
I first got involved in organizing by working with public high school students in Providence who wanted a say in their schools. Seeing that it was possible for young people to come together and win some real policy changes was a big inspiration.

You served in the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 2015-2019. What do you consider to be your major accomplishments during your tenure?
I’m proud to have led fights that won passage of worker protections like paid sick days and an increase in the tipped minimum wage, and climate initiatives like the creation of new renewable energy programs in our state. I’m also proud to have helped a bunch of other progressives run for office and win.

You are senior policy counsel at Public Citizen. Can you tell us a bit about this work?
I lead Public Citizen’s Climate Accountability Project. We’re working to hold Big Oil companies legally accountable for their climate crimes. I think it’s a really important fight.

How do you see litigation as an effective means to bringing about long-lasting change?
Corporate bad actors break the law all the time in ways that hurt regular people. But the law isn’t self-enforcing. Litigation is a key tool for forcing that enforcement on the rich and powerful who otherwise would continue getting away with murder.

Fighting against Big Oil is one of your hot topics. Why is this issue particularly important to you?
Climate change didn’t just happen out of the blue. The climate crisis we are experiencing is the direct and foreseeable—and, in fact, foreseen—consequence of the actions of a small number of fossil fuel companies that knowingly generated a huge portion of all the greenhouse gas emissions that caused this crisis, and fraudulently deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products specifically in order to block and delay solutions that could have avoided these catastrophes. What’s more, they did all of this with full knowledge of how lethal their conduct really was, having long predicted that the continued burning of their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “catastrophic” climate harms that would do “great irreversible harm to our planet,” “have serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,” create “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” We have a concept in the law for when someone consciously disregards a substantial risk of causing harm to another person. That is called recklessness. And that’s what I mean when I say that while climate disasters are unspeakably tragic, they aren’t just tragedies. They’re crimes. And I for one refuse to let these evil bastards get away with it.

How do you want to see the regulation of oil and gas companies change within the decade?
We need to phase out fossil fuels, which are putting us on a rapid path to civilizational breakdown, and transition to clean energy – which is cheaper, healthier, and cleaner anyways!

During the Biden administrations we saw some strides to move towards greener energy sources. What are your thoughts on the current options available? Do you have a favorite? They all seem to have positives and negatives.
The cheapest way of producing electricity right now is to point a piece of glass at the sun. That’s miraculous. We have everything we need right now on a technical level to transition to 100% clean energy (or very close to it). The problems are political. The obstacle is the power of Big Oil, which has been actively blocking this transition for almost 40 years.

Europe seems to favor nuclear power. What are your thoughts on the use of nuclear power?
Nuclear power is a hell of a lot better than fossil fuels. We shouldn’t be shutting down any existing nuclear plants. But new nuclear power plants take a lot of time and capital to develop – so from a prioritization perspective, wind and solar are always going to be cheaper, faster, and make more sense to focus on.

While Europe and much of the world is trying to go green, we fear the USA will be making some major steps in the opposite direction with Trump coming into office. Please let us know your thoughts on this and how can the lay population help?
Yeah, it’s devastating. Trump is doing everything he can to lock us into an unlivable future, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil backers. It’s so disgusting and repulsive and horrific I can’t even find the words for it – it makes me shake with rage. But we can still take action at the state and local level. All across the country people are coming together to pass climate policy, to support local renewable energy development, to hold Big Oil accountable, and everyone who cares about climate should get involved in that organizing in their communities.

You founded Resist Hate RI in 2016 as a response to the election of Donald Trump as president. What concrete steps did Resist Hate RI take to resist Trump’s first term policies, and how successful were they?
In Rhode Island, we had three primary focuses – first, we needed to make sure our Democratic federal delegation was shifting from a business-as-usual approach to an all-hands-on-deck-we’re-fighting-fascism approach. Second, we needed to make sure that state leaders were stepping up to pass policies to protect our vulnerable communities. And third, we needed to give newly activated people constructive ways to channel their outrage. I think we had some solid successes in each category, and helped develop a lot of leaders who are still doing great organizing today.

What do you have planned for Resist Hate RI in Trump’s second term?
We’ve already held two big actions pushing our federal delegation to step up in the last couple weeks.

A lot of activists are saying that the left needs to take as much time as it needs to rest after the win of Trump in November. Do you agree? How should progressives be handling the next four years?
We’ve all been through a lot since November. We’ve taken our time off of social media, we’ve tried to ignore the news. We’ve done our grieving and our spiraling. Now we’ve got to shake the numbness off. The literal worst people in the world are threatening everything that we hold dear. And like every would-be tyrant in history, they want us to think that we’re powerless to stop them. But we’re not powerless. And our Democratic leaders are not powerless. And we need them to start acting like it. This is do-or-die time.

It has been a crazy past few years, how do you stay positive?
I’m gonna be honest, particularly when it comes to climate change, despair has a lot going for it. Climate change is accelerating faster than all our predictions. Feedback loops—both physical and political—are looming, and the catastrophic effects we’re starting to see are going to be increasing not linearly, but rather exponentially. Shit is going to get really bad—like, really bad—and I think sooner than most of us think.

So when I think about staying positive, I’m not talking about some pure, unalloyed positivity that says everything’s gonna be okay, because it isn’t. It just isn’t.

But the fact is, we exist. We’re here, we’re alive, and as long as that’s the case, the future can still be worse or better depending on our actions. Every minute we continue to breathe, to get up, to raise our kids, we are choosing hope—hope that it’s better to keep existing than to not, to keep breathing than to not, to keep getting up than to not. As long as we can save even the smallest slice of this mind-blowingly beautiful planet, and of our flawed but still miraculous civilization, that means going on will be worth more than giving up. A billion lives lost will always be better than two billion, or even a billion and one; two-thirds of all the species on Earth going extinct will always be better than four-fifths, or three-quarters. There’s no point at which that extra bit of fight won’t matter.

Vaclav Havel described hope as “a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” In this moment of political debasement and climate breakdown, that’s probably the best we’ve got. If we can cultivate that kind of hope—and regularly water it with righteous anger—I think we can make it through these next four years, and whatever is on the other side of that, and whatever is on the other side of that. It’s not the brightest vision, but it’s a long-haul approach, and this is a long-haul struggle—one that will continue to be worth fighting no matter how dark it gets.

What is your motto in life?
I have a tattoo on my arm that’s a line from the moral climax of Huckleberry Finn. He’s been struggling the whole book with whether he should help his friend Jim, because he’s fully saturated in the culture that says it’s wrong to help an enslaved person escape. He thinks that helping Jim will damn him to hell. But at some point he says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” and just decides to do what he feels is right.

Where can we find out more about you?
My website is www.aaronregunberg.com. Twitter is @aaronregunberg. Bluesky is @aaronregunberg.bsky.social.

Aaron Regunberg - Fighting Pollution and Hate