Jenna Ruddock
Sunrise Movement activists wend their way to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Capitol Hill office to pressure him to take action on the Green New Deal.
Climate change presents a threat of unprecedented scale, complexity, and uncertainty. The sheer magnitude of the problem makes it difficult to wrap our minds around. In fact, research has suggested that human brains are literally not wired to process climate change in the same way they react to threats in our immediate environment—that is, with swift, decisive action.
But it’s a different story once climate change hits home.
On a Sunday night in late February, at a church in northwest Washington, D.C., young Kentuckians with the Sunrise Movement—the explosive youth movement responsible for putting a Green New Deal on the national agenda—were joined by other young climate activists from all over the East Coast. Most came with only backpacks and sleeping bags in tow.
The Kentucky cohort made the long trek after spending the Senate’s week-long February recess camping outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s district offices, where he failed to show. The church basement where everyone gathered for food and introductions rapidly filled to capacity. Organizers directed the crowd upstairs to the main chapel. The energy was palpable. So, too, was the sense of urgency.
‘I was scared for my family and our future, and I was scared for other people around the world who did not have access to water.’
Today’s teenage climate activists have grown up in an era marked by overwhelming scientific consensus regarding the threat that climate change poses to their generation. In states like Kentucky, they have also grown up in communities—and with politicians—with longstanding and complex ties to polluting industries.
In Kentucky, that means coal. These industries often provide decent-paying jobs in places with few other opportunities. Yet the communities that depend on them are also forced to pay a heavy price. In the Bluegrass State, that has included a black lung epidemic, widespread groundwater contamination, and toxic air pollution.
McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the Senate for thirty-five years, has accepted roughly $2 million in contributions from the fossil fuel industry over the course of his career. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he has taken more money from the coal industry than any other sitting Congressperson, even while that dying industry has increasingly left miners and their communities plagued by severe health issues and increasing economic insecurity.
That night at the church, and again the next morning in front of McConnell’s office on Capitol Hill—where dozens of demonstrators were arrested for refusing to leave without speaking to their Senator—young Kentuckians spoke emotionally not only about climate change and the threat it poses to their futures, but also about its connection to their lives now. A brother whose asthma has been exacerbated by local air pollution. A county struggling to deal with water contamination from mining operations and coal-fired power plants. A local student who lost his life in flash flooding caused by record-breaking rainfall.
For this new generation of climate activists, the causes and consequences of climate change are inextricably linked. The polluting and extractive industries contributing most significantly to climate change have already created on-the-ground consequences for the communities they’ve grown up in.
Behind headlines about the massive undertaking of a federal Green New Deal, young organizers have been working hard to build support where it is needed most—at the local level, in communities across the country.
“I think the local and state organizing that’s happened has really been the beating heart of Sunrise,” remarks Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement’s co-founder and executive director, as we stand outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., on a fiercely windy morning. We watch as the group’s Kentucky organizers address a large crowd of young activists preparing to flood McConnell’s office.
“The way I see it,” Prakash adds, “the climate crisis is a massive problem that is going to require solutions at the federal level, the local level, the state level, and everything in between.”
Less than four months earlier, just one week after the 2018 midterms, Prakash and other young organizers with the Sunrise Movement took the post-election news cycle—and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office—by storm, calling on the new Congress to act. Their proposal: a “Green New Deal,” funded by the federal government, implemented by states and municipalities, targeted at radically transforming the U.S. economy on a scale comparable to its Great Depression-era namesake.
When newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the demonstrations outside Pelosi’s office, she ensured that their demands made headlines. Ocasio-Cortez, at twenty-nine, is not much older than many of the Sunrise organizers, and has already proven to be a valuable and fierce ally, co-sponsoring a Green New Deal resolution with Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and challenging her colleagues to follow suit. High-profile endorsements of the Green New Deal have been rolling in ever since, including from most of the current 2020 Democratic presidential field.
Climate change isn’t the only issue on the agenda. A federal jobs guarantee, universal health care, and environmental justice are just a handful of the systemic challenges that Green New Deal proponents plan to tackle. For some, this breadth of issues has been difficult to grasp. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Pelosi said it “goes beyond what our charge is. Our charge is about saving the planet. They have in there things like single-payer and . . . what is it? Guaranteed income?”
But the young organizers behind the Sunrise Movement seem to understand intuitively what many of their political elders have failed to see: that “saving the planet” will require more than simply switching our power source. The Green New Deal is about radically remaking an entire system built and propelled by unchecked, fossil-fueled capitalism—that has led the world to where it is today.
The prominent role of state and local campaigning and planning similarly reflects a generation of young organizers for whom climate change isn’t some distant, far-flung threat. And increasingly, cities and states have been at the forefront of U.S. climate policy. When the Trump Administration announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a coalition of states and major U.S. cities publicly announced their continued support for the landmark climate deal.
“We’re already seeing the state-level Green New Deals begin to manifest,” Prakash says.
Some states, like California and New York, have indicated a willingness to move forward with state-level Green New Deals whether or not the federal government steps up. “That means that our actions can’t be based just in D.C. or in some of these political strongholds,” Prakash says. “They need to be all across the country.”
Stephen O’Hanlon, co-founder and national field director of Sunrise, agrees. Part of the necessary work, he says, involves consensus building at every level.
“Everywhere across the country we have Sunrise chapters active in almost every state, and they’re working to build local support,” Hanlon says. “Part of what we need to do is talk to ordinary people about it and talk to organizations about it to get public support and get thousands of organizations large and small signed on to the Green New Deal.”
For Sophia Zaia, Sunrise’s Pennsylvania’s state director, young activists are uniquely suited to envision, demand, and implement a bold climate-oriented policy agenda.
“Young people can tell a story about climate change and about our generation that’s different than any past generation,” she says, “because we have inherited this problem that we didn’t create, and we’re growing up with this awareness from such an early age.”
Like others of her generation, Zaia was first exposed to climate activism at a local level. She grew up outside of Austin, Texas, where summer droughts are common. But one summer, she says, the drought became particularly severe. Her home lost access to running water. Her family had to get drinking water from the store and shower at the local YMCA. Ultimately, her family had no choice but to dig a deeper well. Even at a young age, Zaia realized that simply digging deeper “isn’t the kind of solution that we could continue to afford, or that would continue to even be a solution.”
For Zaia, the connection between climate change and the increasingly severe droughts in her home state was obvious. “I was scared for my family and our future, and I was scared for other people around the world who did not have access to water,” she says. Just last year, prolonged drought conditions in South Africa pushed the entire city of Cape Town to the brink of losing access to running water completely.
Pennsylvania, like Kentucky and Zaia’s home state of Texas, has a fraught history with fossil fuels. In recent years, the state’s natural gas boom has spurred a massive statewide expansion of fracking and pipeline construction, despite significant opposition from local communities. “There’s definitely an appetite for this in Pennsylvania because it’s one of the places where folks have dealt with the impact of the fossil fuel industry, of fracking, of that control over their politics for so long and they know how important this transition is,” Zaia says.
Pennsylvania, where fossil fuel money and infrastructure are so deeply entrenched, also illustrates why a Green New Deal must be so ambitious in scope. Without also addressing such challenges as health care access, job displacement, and funding for education, it will be impossible to provide communities with the security and flexibility they need to make the dramatic economic transition required to act on climate change.
“Building the Green New Deal is going to need to be not just one piece of legislation, and it can’t just happen at one level of government,” O’Hanlon says. “This is going to be the largest mobilization of our society and economy since World War II, and that’s going to require action at all levels of government. We can’t be focused on just the federal government.”
Zaia agrees. “It gives me hope that we are developing these plans at all levels of government, so that if at one level our politicians still aren’t ready to stand up for our health and safety, hopefully at another level politicians are ready to do that,” she says. “We are also watching, and we’re ready to vote out the politicians who aren’t going to stand up for our future.”
Outside McConnell’s Capitol Hill office, the young Kentucky Sunrise organizers filling the halls wear black shirts with bold yellow print that reads: “We have a right to good jobs and a livable future” and “12 years.”
“12 years” refers to the time-frame put forth by scientists in the sobering United Nations report released last October, within which we must dramatically cut emissions before our ability to keep climate change within a manageable range becomes increasingly unlikely. For this group, most still in their teens, that window will close before many of them turn thirty.
But while they came to Washington, D.C., with a message for McConnell and the country, the pictures they carried and stories they told were from home.
Their signs? “Kentucky needs a Green New Deal.”