Storming the Hill: Youth Climate Activism in the Modern Era
By Skye Hawthorne ‘22
It was a cold clear day in January of 2016 – the fifth year of California’s record-breaking drought – and I was riding a grimy, poorly ventilated bus through the streets of Fairfax, my hometown, en route to my first ever meeting as a climate activist.
In retrospect, I was in it for all the wrong reasons. As a 15-year-old high school sophomore, I hadn’t really cared about climate change for at least a year, and it would be at least a year before I really cared again. Not that I wouldn’t have gleefully confronted anyone who claimed, say, that Antarctic sea ice was growing[1], or that the earth had stopped warming in 1998[2]. But that came more from a desire to seem smart and important than the actual passion for saving the world I’d once had; after all, what is adolescence if not a testosterone-fueled ego trip? Of course I still wanted to do my part, intellectually, at least: any good California liberal would say as much. But would I have gone to this meeting if it hadn’t been led by two attractive high school juniors? I don’t know. Yes?[3]It’s hard to say.
The meeting took place in the back room of a comic book store/variety shop called Revolution 9, an establishment frequented exclusively by grumpy five year olds looking for toys, stoned fifteen year olds looking for (what were they looking for again?), and…well, climate activists, I guess. In the back room sat a whiteboard, a dusty projector, and a couple of inspiring young climate activists. After introducing myself, I sat down in a beaten swivel chair in the back of the room while the activists created Excel charts, PowerPoint slides, anything to seem like they were actually making progress. We[4]were planning to create a youth climate conference in Oakland, which turned into more of an informational meeting about global warming and our organization[5]as we realized we neither had the funding, manpower, or executive experience to plan an actual conference.
In the end, only one person we didn’t already know showed up to that Oakland meeting. She was a grad student at UC Berkeley, majoring in neuroscience if memory serves me right, but she wanted to know more about climate change. She ate plenty of Pad Thai, took home a pamphlet, and we never saw her again. And after a few more starts, stops, attempts at conferences, and glitchy conference calls over Google Hangouts in the months that followed, I slowly began to fall out of touch with the other activists as well. When the women I’d met at Revolution 9 left for college, I began to wonder whether I might never see them again either. And I didn’t: not for over a year, that is.
Not until one of them became famous.
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A brief history of climate change denial in America:
Climate science has always been a fiercely politicized issue, and one that special interest groups – oil, coal, and other fossil fuel companies in particular – have vehemently sought to obfuscate in whatever way possible. Starting in the 1970’s and 80’s, the oil giant ExxonMobil began to hide its own cutting-edge scientific research, which showed that human CO2emissions were likely to cause catastrophic climate change, choosing instead to take the position that “the facts and the projection of future events are very unclear” and strongly advocate against government legislation to curb emissions. But even in the 80’s and into the early 90’s, there was a general bipartisan consensus in this country on the existenceof climate change, and the need for some sort of action to address it. According to an article in the Huffington Post, even the late President George HW Bush took a stance on climate change now almost completely absent from his party, saying, “Those who think we’re powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.”
Slowly but surely, however, denial of the fundamental principles of climate change – agreed upon by 97% or more of peer-reviewed climate scientists, according to a widely publicized study by climate scientist John Cook – has permeated American politics, becoming the norm in large swaths of the country. In general, special interest groups within the fossil fuel industry have focused their attention on winning over Republican politicians. After all, who better than the party of small government and trickle-down economics to advocate against regulation of the oil industry on account of “unsettled science”? And over the past two decades, due to disinformation campaigns and large amounts of “dark money” pouring in thanks to increasingly lenient campaign finance laws[6], climate change denial has not only become politically mainstream, but those who practice it have dropped any pretense of trying to take a nuanced view of the science. In February of 2015, Oklahoma Senator and former chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Jim Inhofe threw a snowball onto the senate floor as supposed evidence against 2014 being the (then) warmest year on record[7]. And in November of 2016, a successful businessman who had tweeted his disbelief of man-made climate change over 100 times was elected President.
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“So I asked him about his campaign contributions in relation to the things he said about climate change, how like body heat causes climate change…so I was like, ‘it doesn’t have anything to do with the $200,000 you took from fossil fuel executives?’ and he was like, ‘you’re young and naïve, and are we here to elect a governor or a scientist? I’m here to be a governor.’ So, yeah…that blew up really big.”
That’s Rose Strauss – one of the two climate activists I first met in the dingy back room of Revolution 9 – telling me over FaceTime about her confrontation with Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner in a town hall thisin July 2018. By now it’s December 2018, and I’m a freshman at Wesleyan University; Rose has taken a semester off from her sophomore year at UC Santa Barbara to be a full-time climate activist. Rose tells her story with a passive ease, in the manner of someone who’s had to tell a story so many times she’s gotten bored of it. But you don’t need to hear it from Rose to get a sense of the magnitude of Wagner’s gaffe. All you need to do is look at the clip from NowThis Politics, which features exactly what Rose described – the GOP gubernatorial nominee responding to her well-articulated if audibly nervous question about his scientifically dubious views on climate change and their link to fossil fuel industry contributions by calling her “young and naïve,” and pivoting instead to whether people wanted to elect a governoror a scientist, because, you know, having a scientifically grounded understanding of a politically relevant environmental issue is really quite the tall order for a guy preparing to be the most powerful person in the state of Pennsylvania. The video, which was posted on Facebook, was viewed over 14 million times and reported on by the New York Times, the Guardian, the Hill, and ABC News, even prompting the creation of the briefly trending #youngandnaive.
On November 6th, democratic incumbent Tom Wolf was re-elected governor of Pennsylvania, beating Wagner by double digits. Though she wouldn’t admit it when I brought it up, there is a very real chance Rose’s interaction with him[8]had more than a little to do with Wagner’s crushing defeat.
Rose is now living in a “movement house” in Pennsylvania with an organization called Sunrise Movement, doing political organizing on a local and national scale. It was through Sunrise that she had her exchange at Scott Wagner’s town hall, and as such, she’s become a sort of figurehead for Sunrise, leading many of their meetings and appearing at the front lines of all political actions. I ask her how Sunrise has changed in her time working with them, and she tells me that it’s gotten a lot bigger since she joined.
“How big was it?” she asks her movement house roommate Olivia Freiwald, who has walked into the room. Olivia and Rose both look unmistakably like hippies, especially Olivia, who is sporting wild curly brown hair and a distinctive septum piercing.
“Like 100 people?” suggests Olivia. Rose nods in agreement, saying that now it’s a lot bigger. Olivia comments that there have been a few big moments of growth for the movement, and that “one of those moments was ‘young and naïve.’”
Right now, Sunrise is pushing hard for the creation of a green new deal, a phrase that harkens back to FDR’s “new deal” economic plan to pull the US out of the great depression. Essentially, it would be a massive green infrastructure program, accompanied by a federal jobs guarantee and the implementation of universal basic income. It’s the kind of semi-socialist program that would be very difficult to get any sort of bipartisan support for in today’s politically polarized environment, but amazingly, at a recent political action in DC, Sunrise managed to get newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to come out swinging for the creation of a House select committee to discuss this green new deal. Since then, under pressure from Sunrise and Ocasio-Cortez, nearly 20 representatives have voiced their support for such a committee. But the clock is ticking; this session of Congress is almost up, so there really is not much time to build further support and get the green new deal on the agenda for next year. And in a matter of days, hundreds of volunteers for Sunrise, myself included, will be descending on Washington with the goal of doing exactly that.
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The Paris Agreement, and a brief explanation of why you should care about 2 degrees of warming:
The Paris Agreement was formed in 2015 as a result of the 21stconference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), during which it was agreed that in order to mitigate the most disastrous effects of climate change, it was necessary to limit planetary warming to 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Every country to ratify the agreement[9]submitted a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) that laid out its specific plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These plans are different depending on the country’s specific situation; the US, for instance, agreed to a reduction target of 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2030, while China agreed to peak its emissions by the year 2030. The agreement represents the most important milestone in the fight against climate change since the Kyoto Protocol, which in December of 1997 set the first round of internationally binding emission reduction targets for parties to the UNFCCC.
Now you might be wondering (as I did when I first read these numbers) why two degrees[10]of global warming is really that big of a deal. So it’s 55° outside instead of 52°; howis that supposed to destroy Miami again? The answer comes, interestingly enough, from measurements taken directly from ancient ice. Most of Antarctica is a desert; it receives very little snowfall and experiences very little snow melt, so the miles-thick glaciers that cover the heart of the continent take hundreds of millennia to accumulate. As such, a core sampled from an Antarctic ice sheet is often hundreds of thousands of years old, and measuring the amount of CO2trapped in air bubbles, as well as relative concentrations of various isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen, can give an accurate picture of both global temperatures and CO2concentrations over the past 800,000 years. The result is fascinating. When CO2rises, temperature follows in lockstep; the correlation is almost perfect. And the total temperature variance over this time period, between the hottest the planet was[11]and the coldest it ever was[12], is only about 6° Celsius.
So you can think of global change as a planetary fever; a small warming or cooling of the climate system can lead to drastic and often devastating changes to weather patterns, sea levels, local ecosystems, and of course, human populations. So when scientists talk about a 2° warming or more by the end of the century, they’re not talking about the kind of imperceptible weather difference you might attribute to thermometer error. They’re talking about viral outbreaks, mass extinctions, powerful hurricanes where they’ve never before existed, global desertification, destructive floods, and deadly wildfires on a scale never before seen. They’re talking about expanding oceans that will inundate coastal cities and submerge small countries, crop failures that will decimate farming communities and global food supply systems, and a potential collapse of the global thermohaline circulation that drives Earth’s weather patterns as we know them. Mitigating climate change is not just about saving the bees and the trees. It’s about saving ourselves.
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It is the morning of Monday, December 9th, 2018, and I’m riding southbound through Newark on the Northeast Regional Amtrak train when I get the text from Rose on my computer. “Do you want a role in the action?” she asks. “Like a big role,” she clarifies. “Tell me ASAP.”
“What’s the role?” I write back, but I already know I’m going to end up saying yes.
“Want to be a marshal?” she asks. I ask her what that means, and she tells me I’d be directing people during the rally – essentially, I’m going to be one of the figureheads for Sunrise, one of the people that other people look to in order to figure out what’s going on. I’ve never done anything like this before. Am I ready for this sort of high-stakes leadership? “Sure,”[13]I write back, before I have time to stop myself.
Rose tells me that they’ll train me in everything I need to know this evening in a training marathon this evening that goes from 5 until 8 or 9pm. I choose to trust her, to trust that this amorphous theywill indeed know exactly what to do, but I won’t lie and say that I’m not scared. As the train lurches and rumbles southward, I can’t help but imagine all the worst-case scenarios as I look out the window to my left at the matte brown and gray landscape zipping by. What if a reporter runs up to me with a barrage of loaded questions and I end up making a fool of myself? No, that’s self-aggrandizing on my part to assume a reporter will want to talk to me. What if I get arrested? Also self-aggrandizing, I tell myself. But even so, I would be able to wear the arrest as a badge of honor. Then the scariest thought of all occurs to me. What if nobody actually shows up to the rally? What if I’m marshaling a crowd of precisely no one? It’s the kind of thing that would only happen in your nightmares, I tell myself.You might as well worry about realizing you’re wearing just your underwear while halfway through a conversation on campaign finance with soon-to-be-speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Sunrise Movement has rented out a Lutheran church in downtown DC, a medium-sized cathedral called Luther’s Place. The Wi-Fi password, we are informed, is MartinLuther. “No spaces,” says the spokeswoman for the church. “But it’s capitalized because, well, that’s just the right thing to do.” One gets the sense, looking around the venue, that Sunrise Movement shares a lot in common with a satellite in low earth orbit; both seem to be in perpetual free-fall, a state of controlled chaos always on the brink of falling apart yet somehow managing to stay in control. Rose and Olivia find me quickly, and even though we’ve never met, Olivia hugs me like I’m her best friend. “Want to be a lobby leader?” asks Rose. “Sure,” I say, not knowing exactly what I’ve agreed to. “Good, because I signed you up.”
Over pizza[14], I learn that a lobby leader essentially leads a group of students to a meeting with a member of congress, who in our case is the congresswoman representing Connecticut’s third district[15], a longtime liberal firebrand named Rosa DeLauro. She has a strong record on climate change, which means that whomever we talk to in her office will likely be receptive to our message, but the thought of taking charge of that conversation still terrifies me. Do I really have that kind of leadership skills? After all, I’m the person who somehow managed to only bring one pair of socks for the whole 3-day trip, and a pair of Rick and Mortysocks at that.
The night zips by, and the meeting with my lobbying team quickly dissolves into a lecture from a stony-faced DC lawyer named Mark Olson who gives us stern advice about what to do and avoid doing if arrested. “Post and forfeit,” he says, describing the process of putting up bail money. “Not post in forfeit. Not post on forfeit. You can’t end the case if you don’t get the terminology right.” The lawyer is careful not to make any promises about the potential ramifications of an arrest, saying that a DC protest arrest will likelynot become a criminal conviction, and that the odds of having to spend the night in jail are very slimand that there’s not reallya high probability that a DC arrest will affect financial aid eligibility for graduate school so long as we make sure not to touch any policemen. I begin to wonder why I agreed to the high-risk component of the action, but figure it’s too late and too much work to turn away now.
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A Brief History of Chlorofluorocarbons and the Societal Implications of the Montreal Protocol:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 40 years[16], you’ve probably heard of the hole in the ozone. Essentially, some time in the 70’s, scientists noticed that the ozone layer – the stratospheric layer of O3molecules that protect the earth’s surface from harsh ultraviolet radiation – was beginning to thin at an alarming rate, particularly over Antarctica. The dire predictions began to flood in; according to many scientists, 5 minutes in the sun in cities at the latitude of Washington D.C would give most people burns by the middle of the 21stcentury. Consequently, skin cancer rates were expected to skyrocket. And the cause? Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): chemicals containing ozone-depleting halogens such as bromine and chlorine, found in common household products like aerosols and air conditioning systems.
In 1987, facing this pending environmental catastrophe, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layerwas drafted, with the goal of dramatically reducing, and eventually phasing out, CFCs. One of the first countries to sign and ratify the agreement was the United States (under the leadership of President Reagan, amazingly), and eventually, every country in the United Nations signed on.
By the year 2000, scientists began to detect small signs of ozone layer recovery. As of 2018, this recovery is now clearly visible on any map of stratospheric ozone concentrations. By the mid to late 21stcentury, the ozone layer is expected to have fully recovered. Thanks to the Montreal Protocol and collective global action on this behemoth environmental issue, hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives have been saved.
I mention this only to counterbalance that little voice which, if you’re anything like me, is always in the back of your head, telling you that no legislative policy could possibly affect weather or climate. The Montreal Protocol saw a problem, took bold, unified action to address it, and endedit.
Inspiring, no?
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The next morning at 7:56 am, Andrew (the nephew of the woman I’m staying with, who is a former student of my mother) and I step out of the car and into the bitingly cold air. Spirit of Justice park: a sad excuse for a withering patch of grass with an empty water fountain in the center, but a good enough place as any to meet for a protest given its location in the center of Capitol Hill. I am asked to surrender my phone for the next few hours[17], given a paper that says “CT-03” (the state and district of the representative with whom I will be speaking) and am told to line up alphabetically with the other lobby leaders so our groups can most easily find us.
I find the experience of leading my group of 10 Sunrise volunteers to Rayburn – the House building in which Rosa DeLauro has her office – to be not unlike my experience this summer as a camp counselor. In both cases, my biggest struggle is physical disorganization[18], though when it comes to leading adult volunteers, I don’t have to worry (as much) about somebody getting hit by a car while I manage the little cloud of entropy[19]that perpetually surrounds me. Most of the group is my age or a little older, with two exceptions: a 26-year-old guy named Zack who has a Master’s in Science, and a well-dressed, soft-spoken 40-year-old man named Jason, who works with a youth mentoring agency in DC and carries himself with an enormous confidence. Security going into the capitol offices has (understandably) increased in the ten years since I last toured Capitol Hill, but it’s still remarkably easy to get in, and as our muffled footsteps on the linoleum floor softly echo across the halls, I find myself struck by the thought that our democracy, as problematic as it may have become, is still alive and well, given I can simply stroll into an office building and talk to whichever representative I please.
Of course, we end up talking to Rosa DeLauro’s internfirst, a twenty-something guy named Max who looks and talks like a film caricature of a congressional intern. We begin to nervously introduce ourselves, following the script we’ve been given a little too closely until a slightly older, significantly more pale man bursts through the door and Max informs us that thisis the guy we actually want to be talking to: Christian Lovell, a former agricultural analyst for World Bank and DeLauro’s legislative assistant on environmental issues.
“I’d like to talk with you all out in the hall,” Lovell says to us. And after we follow him out, he adds, “Not to blame you in any way, but I’ve been waiting out here for you guys for awhile.”
He’s clearly trying to put us on the defensive, but none of us take the bait; Sunrise emailed DeLauro’s office about setting up a meeting in advance and never received a response, so the fact that he’s been waiting for us is, by most measures, not our problem. Instead, we introduce ourselves, saying where we’re from and why we’re passionate about climate change. And as this happens, something amazing begins to occur. Everybody had been assigned roles in advance, but as the conversation progresses, various members of the group begin to speak up until it starts to seem like as a group we are speaking as one. I bring up how wildfires have devastated my home state of California, and then a young woman named Adriana whose parents are Puerto Rican talks about why a Green New Deal is needed to help rebuild Puerto Rico, and then Zack is talking about renewable energy and the federal support required for us to stay competitive with China on renewable technology, and then I turn around and see that Congresswoman DeLauro is standing right behind us, having been watching the conversation for who knows how long, and we’re all a bit caught off guard by her bright purple hair as she shakes our hands and tells us to call her Rosa. She’s late for a call, but she lends us her ear for a minute, and Jason and I go back and forth trying to explain why we believe a select committee on the Green New Deal is the only path forward to solve climate change, in the wake of an IPCC report that says we have 12 years to radically reduce our current levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
She doesn’t commit to anything, but promises to think about it and get back to us, politician-speak for telling us that she doesn’t reallywant to talk about it right now, but doesn’t want to alienate her constituents. Christian Lovell keeps rattling off centrist talking points on climate, including repeatedly insisting that nobody in America cares about Africa[20], but at this point, we know that we’ve done the best we can do with DeLauro, and that we have other fish to fry before the day is over. For next up on our list are sit-ins in the offices of the three most powerful Democrats in Congress: Nancy Pelosi (our next House Speaker), Steny Hoyer (our next House Majority Whip), and Jim McGovern (our next Rules Committee Chair)[21].
According to its own counts[22], over 1,000 Sunrise Movement volunteers were on the Hill that day. At first, all of those activists were in lobbying groups of various sizes, much like the one I’d led[23], talking to representatives that Sunrise believes can potentially be won over. Then, those forty or fifty lobbying groups coalesce into three mega-groups, one to sit in at each of the offices of those three powerful Democrats. My CT-03 delegation is assigned to the McGovern office in a building called Cannon, which is a short walk through the still-frigid morning from Rayburn.
Once outside the office, Sunrise leaders divide us up into the A team (those who are willing to risk arrest by remaining in the congressional offices even when asked to leave) and the B team (those who are not willing to risk arrest). The A team, which is about one quarter the size of the B team yet still impressive, is told to line up against one side of the wall, while the B team is told to line up on the other side. Then the wait begins, as various aides and interns walking down the hall stop to inform us that McGovern is on his way, that he got held up somewhere but that he’s almosthere. Cameras begin to pop up in various places up and down the hall, with a Capitol Policeman at one point yelling at a volunteer for standing on top of a congressman’s sofa, which is getting moved from one office to another, in order to set up a tripod. The cops are clearly on edge, aware that many of the protesters are not only comfortable with the possibility of getting arrested but are actually hopingfor it.
And then: murmuring. Excited jostling of elbows as a single set of muffled footsteps grows louder. And that’s when I catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye – a middle-aged man, somewhat flustered in appearance, balding, with dark-rimmed glasses: McGovern. “I support you!” he shouts over the din of the excited crowd.
“Do you support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ resolution for a select committee on the green new deal?” says Shawn, a senior volunteer who looks not unlike a college-aged, redheaded Gandalf.
Looking around, McGovern says, “I…I want to make sure that it happens.”
“Can we have you say the words ‘I’m committed to the house select committee on the green new deal?’”
“Yeah, I’m committed to the house select committee on…on the green new deal,” he responds. He quickly begins to follow himself up with various qualifiers, but his words are drowned out by the rapturous cheering of the hundreds gathered inside and outside his office, who know what he’s just agreed to even if he himself isn’t quite sure yet.
The crowd begins to disperse in a state of shock and disbelief, both at the fact that such a high profile congressman agreed to support such a far-left policy andthat they likely won’t be getting arrested[24], since there’s really no reason to continue obstructing the office of someone who has already agreed to wholeheartedly support our goals. About twenty of us stay behind, standing in McGovern’s office while he drafts his tweet in support of the GND.
If my visit to Congresswoman DeLauro’s office gave me an inkling of the idea that democracy might not be dead, watching as the Democrat who would set the agenda for the incoming House types out a supportive tweet right in front of me feels like actively participating in a working democracy for the first time[25]. As the twenty of us finally leave his office and head back to the park, we pass by Nancy Pelosi’s office, where Capitol Police have formed a blockade around the protesters who, one by one, are being escorted out of the room with their hands tied behind their back, continuing to sing folk songs as they follow the police down the cold halls of the basement. By the time we get back to the park, two more representatives have voiced their support. The scene in the park is joyous, even as the voices of those getting arrested ring out from several blocks away. A social justice themed marching band called Bread and Puppets plays upbeat jazz, folk, and pop music as a circle of bodies coalesces in the center of the park and a spontaneous kick line forms. Then the crowd quiets down to listen to an inspiring reverend talk about pollution, environmental justice, and the lives that a green new deal could help save.
Does it feel like victory? No, not really. But it does feel like change, and more than that, it feels like a little slice of unity. And in today’s political climate, grassroots unity and change are victory enough.
Epilogue:
I wrote this piece at almost the exact same time these events were happening; in fact, I wrote the first half of the article before even going down to DC with Sunrise. As such, I had no idea what the future of the green new deal would be as I was putting the finishing touches on it. As I waved goodbye to Rose and Olivia the afternoon of the sit-ins, I had no idea that Sunrise Movement would become a household name, its members regularly profiled on MSNBC and in the New York Times. As I was riding the train back up to Wesleyan from DC, I had no idea that the Green New Deal would ever be given airtime as a serious policy proposal on Fox News. And as I was turning in the final draft of this piece to my journalism professor, I had no idea that the policy I’d described as “semi-socialist” would end up being endorsed in some form by nearly every major democratic presidential nominee, including more moderate progressives such as Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke.
I am more than thrilled and a tiny bit overwhelmed at the response this movement has received, and honored to have played a part in it, however small. I hope that whoever this article finds will be at least a tiny bit inspired to make change, to confront authority, and to speak truth to power. Because with issues like climate change, holding authority figures accountable is the only way we can make sure they are addressed on the scale that is necessary for our continued survival.
Works Cited:
UC Berkeley. “Land and Ocean Data” Berkeley Earth.
http://berkeleyearth.org/land-and-ocean-data/
Cimos, Marlene. “George H.W. Bush: The Last Green Republican.” The Huffington Post, 4 Dec. 2018
Commonwealth Parliament, and Parliament House. “Paris Climate Agreement: a Quick Guide.” Home – Parliament of Australia, 18 May 2018.
Cook, John, et al. “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature.” Environmental Research Letters, IOP Publishing, 18 Dec. 2017
C-SPAN. “Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) Snowball in the Senate (C-SPAN).” Youtube, 26 Feb. 2015.
Duignan, Brian. “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 14 Feb. 2018.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments.” United Nations, 8 Oct. 2018.
Jirving, Sara et al. “What Exxon knew about the Earth’s melting Arctic.” Los Angeles Times, 9 Oct. 2015.
Leber, Rebecca, et al. “Stop Repeating the US Is the ‘Only Country Not in the Paris Agreement.’” Mother Jones, 7 Nov. 2017.
Matthews, Dylan. “Donald Trump Has Tweeted Climate Change Skepticism 115 Times. Here's All of It.” Vox Media, 1 June 2017.
Mythili Sampathkumar. “Syria Signs Paris Climate Agreement Leaving the US as the Only Country in the World Not in It.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 7 Nov. 2017.
“Mass Balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 13 June 2018
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Kyoto Protocol – Targets for the first commitment period.” United Nations,2018.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Stratospheric Ozone Protection: 30 Years of Progress and Achievements.” EPA, Nov. 2017.
Notes
[1]Technically true, but terribly misleading – According to a study in the journal Nature, land ice in Antarctica, of which there is significantly more than sea ice, is melting at an alarmingly fast rate, causing the surrounding waters to cool, and sea ice to (in some places) grow.
[2]Patently false. According to the instrumental temperature record (provided by UC Berkeley), the five hottest years on record
are 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014, and 2010, respectively. 1998 comes in at #9 on that list.
[3]No.
[4]They were doing most of the planning really, but I like to pretend I had at least a little something to do with it.
[5]BAYCA (Bay Area Youth for Climate Action). Technically, we were a youth subsidiary of the bay area chapter of 350.org, an international organization whose goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million, but they were careful to distance themselves from our work – the funding they provided barely paid for the Pad Thai we served at our “conference,” and clicking on the BAYCA link buried under several tabs of 350 Bay Area’s website led to a defunct webpage.
[6]Including but not limited to the controversial Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which ruled (5-4) that unlimited campaign contributions on the part of corporations and unions were protected as free speech.
[7]It has since been surpassed by 2015 and 2016. Oh, and 2017 too. But hey, snowballs are cold so the earth can’t be warming…right?
[8]Which not only highlighted his lack of understanding of climate science but also what his detractors saw as patronizing sexism and failure to understand that 18-year-olds vote. As Rose said in our call, “the message is not only being…dismissed about climate change but being dismissed as a young woman in politics.”
[9]169 countries in total have ratified the agreement, including, amazingly, the United States (thanks, Obama. No, seriously.) The United States has since declared its intention to pull out, but, despite what many people assume, the US is still legally a part of the agreement until the year 2020, a year in which new leadership ~may~ be elected. If the United States leaves, it will be the only country to have completely rejected the agreement; Syria, the last holdout, signed the agreement in November of 2017.
[10]That’s around 3.6 degrees of warming in Fahrenheit, if you’re not feeling like doing the math right now.
[11]Much warmer than it is today.
[12]As recently as ten to fifteen thousand years ago, mile-thick glaciers extended as far south as Connecticut, and the sea level was many meters lower than it is today. In fact, it was during this ice age that Long Island was formed, as a result of deposited glacial sediment.
[13]Whoa.
[14]Vegan pizza because…well…the environment.
[15]Of which Middletown, and thus Wesleyan, is a part.
[16]Or, I don’t know, 40,000 feet above the earth’s surface, in the ozone layer.
[17]Everybody in the high-risk group is asked to put their phones in a Ziploc bag and hand them over because, apparently, getting your phone back from the police after being arrested can be a major hassle.
[18]The ever-present dropped pen, for instance, or the folder full of papers that just seem to flutter away at the slightest gust of wind.
[19]Nor do I have to walk backwards to keep an eye on everybody. That’s a plus.
[20]A problematic assertion in so many ways, not only in the quasi-racist blanket statement about Africa but in the core idea that the destructive effects of climate change have hit Africa but not the US; case in point, Puerto Rico and California.
[21]The rules committee, to somewhat simplify its role, decides what gets resolutions get voted on in the House, and when. As such, it is considered more powerful than nearly any other such House committee.
[22]And as someone who sat in the church the night before during the training, I can attest that its estimate seems accurate.
[23]Including a surprisingly large contingent of people who’d traveled from Kentucky. Goes to show that movements like Sunrise can pick up steam in the most random of places. Or maybe it says something about the changing demographics of Kentucky…
[24]A Sunrise co-founder actually had to console several members of the A team who seemed visibly disappointed at not having the opportunity to get arrested.
[25]Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I did vote in the 2018 midterm elections. This is different.