Social movement research has long examined why activists persist. Little attention has been paid, however, to how persistent environmental activists use personalized strategies to cope with challenges. This article draws on data from 30 in‐depth interviews with long‐term environmental activists to shed light on this understudied phenomenon. The interviewees point to a number of strategies they use to mitigate the challenges they experience in their activism:(1) they have a self‐care practice, primarily in the form of spending time in nature; (2) they adopt various personalized orientations, such as bracketing or ignoring structural environmental challenges, focusing on what they can control, deciding that they have no choice but to persist, focusing on long‐term outcomes, and being realistic about the possibilities of change; and (3) they integrate work, activism, and life balance by shaping their careers and sense of life purpose around the environment. The article concludes with a discussion of whether these strategies are generalizable beyond the environmental movement.

Objective In this research note, I examine whether the growing influence of political orientation on climate change concern has resulted in the declining influence of the sociodemographic variables that have historically predicted such views. Methods Utilizing evidence from the 1994, 2000, 2010, and 2016 General Social Surveys, I conduct ordered logit regressions, Wald significance tests, and partition the pseudo‐R2 across years to ensure consistency of findings. Results A comparison across three decades reveals that while climate change concern was once grounded in sociodemographic predictors such as age, education, income, sex, race, or size of residential area, the explanatory power of those predictors has declined over time. Climate change concern is now better explained by political orientation variables; once modest in influence, only to rise in prominence over time. Conclusion These findings are connected to political polarization and the “denial countermovement” and their impact on the American public. This article is the first to explicitly and systematically track the decline of sociodemographic predictors of climate change concern over time.

Scholars cite right-wing authoritarian and business-elite influences in their explanations of populist mobilization against climate reforms. The Yellow Vest movement in France, initially sparked by opposition to a carbon tax, defies the generalizations offered by scholars, the media, and politicians alike. This populist movement emerged from below rather than from elite sponsorship and was motivated by social justice concerns. Through in-depth interviews with 31 Yellow Vest activists as well as supplementary primary texts and data, I uncover how the activists frame carbon taxation and climate change within their political struggle. The findings are four-fold: 1) the Yellow Vests are concerned about global climate change and feel their anti-climate depictions in the media are rooted in a government strategy to divide and discredit the movement; 2) they view the government’s taxing them in order to fight climate change as corrupt and unfair; 3) they argue that the carbon tax is additionally unjust due to their precarity, which has increased over several decades; 4) they want to fight climate change on their own terms and argue for more direct forms of democracy to equalize decision making. I conclude with a framework for understanding how and why popular movements oppose climate reforms.

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The most common counterargument to taxing carbon emissions is that the policy has a negative impact on economic growth. The author tests the validity of this argument by visualizing the enactment of carbon prices on gross domestic product per capita from 1979 to 2018 and presenting a formal fixed-effects regression analysis of panel data. No connection is found between carbon price implementation and diminished economic growth. This outcome is primarily due to policy design and the general nature of economic growth. The author concludes that this counterargument to enacting carbon prices exists only because of misunderstandings of economic growth and ideology.