Environment
By the time a repeal bill is filed, the narrative is already set, the coalition is already assembled, and the outcome is already largely shaped. Undercurrent tracks the signals that precede legislation – across all 50 states – so you can see what's forming before it arrives.
What you get
Each week, Undercurrent runs across all active state legislative sessions, assessing bills targeting environmental protections, clean energy standards, and regulatory authority. It surfaces cross-state patterns, flags coordination signals, and tracks how campaigns develop over time.
The brief covers three layers: what just became law and what it means, what is actively moving through legislatures now, and what is building at the narrative and funding level – the signals with 6–18 months of lead time that most organizations never see until it's too late to act on them.
Subscribers working in clean energy, advocacy, policy, or law use it to track states they operate in, monitor states they're evaluating, and stay ahead of coordinated campaigns before they produce legislation.
Current watch list
From the brief
This is the forward-looking signals section – the part of the brief focused on what is forming, not just what is active.
A coordinated campaign to strip state environmental agencies of regulatory authority is running simultaneously across a dozen states. The most urgent signal is not the legislation itself – it is the convergence of federal litigation and state repeal bills in the same states at the same time.
265 bills assessed · 27 high-confidence threats · 6 states with coordinated rollback · April 7, 2026
This week's forward-looking signals
Three signals that matter before the current session ends.
DOJ is suing states to block their climate laws. Those same states are now moving to repeal them.
The Trump DOJ has filed federal lawsuits against Vermont, Michigan, New York, and Hawaii challenging their authority to pursue state climate commitments. State legislatures in those same states are now moving to repeal the exact laws under federal challenge. Vermont H0159, Michigan SB0322/HB5711, and the New York "Affordable Energy, Not Albany Mandates" package are all active in states currently defending their climate authority in federal court.
If those laws are repealed before the federal cases are resolved, the cases become moot – without a court ruling establishing whether states have that authority at all. That outcome leaves the legal question unanswered and the authority unestablished for any future legislation. The intervention window on these state bills is not just about preserving specific policies. It is about preserving the legal precedents those policies would generate.
Rhode Island just gained the right to sue the state over climate targets. Two bills would take that right away before anyone can use it.
Rhode Island's 2021 Act on Climate grants citizens the right to sue the state for failing to meet its climate targets. That right opens in 2026 – this year. S2080 and H7531 seek full repeal of the Act on Climate, which would eliminate that enforcement mechanism at the precise moment it becomes usable. The window to defeat these bills is the same as the window to use the enforcement right.
Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey are using identical language to attack clean energy laws. That's not a coincidence.
The same frame – "reliability and affordability" – is driving coordinated campaigns simultaneously across these three states, all citing PJM capacity auction prices as technical justification, all using identical language in caucus press releases. Illinois has "Energize Illinois." Michigan has "Project Lighthouse." The deeper pattern is structural: in state after state, the target is not just specific standards but the regulatory capacity itself – stripping agency authority rather than just repealing laws, making restoration harder.
Brief continues with active session bills, recent developments, and full threat list across 12 states ↓
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