Lena Goings, member of Fridays for Future NYC, in Brooklyn. Some young climate activists, who galvanised under Donald Trump’s first presidency, are taking a different approach to his second. — ©2024 New York Times Company
THE youth climate movement that formed under the first presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021) is gearing up for his second.
Activists in groups like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, and Fridays for Future have pushed for outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration to step up climate action before its exit at the end of this month: They want land protected as national monuments, permits denied for liquid natural gas projects, funds allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down for good.
After the inauguration, they’ll retrench. They might ease off the mass marches and school strikes that built their platform, while refining new strategies like focusing on state politics, reducing the use of fossil fuels at a local level, and re-energising the country to elect climate-conscious leaders.
The youth climate movement, which widely defines itself as people under 35, celebrated the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in United States history. Among other things, it created a conservation-focused job corps for young people. But the movement also ran into real-world obstacles: a pandemic, disagreements over how to address climate change and simply the passage of time.
“What always makes this movement so difficult to maintain is that they don’t remain children,” said Viktoria Spaiser, an associate professor in sustainability research at the University of Leeds who has studied the youth climate movement.
“They become adults and necessarily move on in different activities, so they can’t maintain the claim that they’re the youth” indefinitely.
The 2018 child activists who were in middle and high school are now in their 20s, moving through college and into their careers. They’re facing the conflict so many generations before them have grappled with: how to balance the scales between hope and despair.
“Covid was a really dark time and made us all slow down and face things,” said Jamie Margolin, the former executive director of Zero Hour.
“I’m trying to fight my own cynicism and find a place to actually do the work because who everyone got to know, me at 17, is not the same person I am now.”
Margolin was thrust into the global spotlight at 16, in the wake of a brutal fire season that spewed smog over her hometown of Seattle in 2017, around the time that Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord and Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico.
Jamie Margolin, co-founder and former executive director of Zero Hour, in Bogotá, Colombia. — ©2024 New York Times Company
Margolin and three friends channelled their pent-up frustration over climate change into a continent-spanning youth march in 2018. Soon after, Greta Thunberg, now 21, began school striking in Sweden.
That autumn, the Sunrise Movement went viral after occupying Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office and demanding climate legislation. They started attending global climate conferences and it seemed like the adults might be listening.
Aru Shiney-Ajay, now 26 and the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, withdrew from Swarthmore College in 2019 to organise full time. She moved into a Philadelphia house with seven other people and slept on a mattress on the floor.
But then, the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the US and the dizzying ramp-up of the youth climate movement seemed to stall. Much of the movement went from mass marches to the internet, where even younger members of Gen Z were ready and waiting.
From her home in Oakland, California, Elise Joshi, now 22, began using her social media prowess to amplify some of her peers’ climate causes. She eventually took over a new nonprofit organisation – Gen-Z for Change – that uses online campaigns to fight liquefied natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast and support union strikes at auto manufacturers in Detroit.
Elise Joshi, 22. — ©2024 New York Times Company
But as the activists grew up, the tactics that once gave their movement star power – mass protests and school strikes – began to feel stale. Groups started to get more disruptive: members of Just Stop Oil began throwing cans of soup on famous paintings; Climate Defiance began crashing political events.
They were disenchanted by the United Nations Climate Change Conference, this year held in Baku, Azerbaijan, where hopes were dashed for more than US$1 trillion in climate financing to materialise for developing nations.
And in the US, things were not going quite as well under a Democratic administration as they’d hoped: President Joe Biden has permitted major fossil fuel projects and the US is now the world’s top oil producer; global carbon emissions are on track to hit historic levels in 2024.
On the day Biden dropped his re-election bid, Gen-Z for Change quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him, as did Climate Defiance. Sunrise Movement has only endorsed one presidential candidate – Senator Bernie Sanders in 2020 – but helped call four million voters on behalf of Harris. Zero Hour did not endorse a candidate because of the group’s opposition to the war in the Gaza Strip.
Some of the nine youth climate activists who spoke to the Times said they voted for Jill Stein, the third-party candidate, in protest.
But now they again have a clearer adversary in Trump. The stakes are high: 2024 will again be the hottest year on record, and scientists warn that the world is well on its way to locking in 1.5°Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, promised to again withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and he’s working to appoint key federal leaders that support an expansion in oil and gas drilling and overturning environmental rules.
Project 2025, which Trump has not endorsed but could serve as a blueprint for his administration, has proposed eliminating environmental justice offices.
Leah Thomas, 29, made a social media post in 2020 that popularised the term “intersectional environmentalist.”
Her platform was based on links between racial and environmental justice, looking at “the ways in which injustices happening to marginalised communities and the Earth are interconnected.”
She worried that disagreements over politics, especially over the war in Gaza and how to address fossil fuels that are warming the planet, had splintered the movement.
Trump could again be a unifying force as activists refocus their movement at the local and state level.
Recently, members of climate groups, including Fridays for Future, held a rally and then occupied a room in the New York state Capitol building to push Governor Kathy Hochul to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act. The proposal, like one passed this summer in Vermont, would require polluters like oil and gas companies to pay billions per year that would be used to cope with damage from extreme weather events.
Whatever the next round of youth climate activism looks like, youth activists overwhelmingly agree that it will be about more than just climate.
Keanu Arpels-Josiah, an organiser for Fridays for Future USA, in Swarthmore. Some young climate activists, who galvanised under Donald Trump’s first presidency, are taking a different approach to his second. — ©2024 New York Times Company
“We’re not just the youth climate movement, but the youth climate justice movement,” said Keanu Arpels-Josiah, a 19-year-old core organiser for Fridays for Future USA.
“That reframing is really key.” – ©2024 New York Times Company
