A Breakthrough Moment?
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Climate change is no longer a far-off scenario. It’s happening now. It’s getting more intensive every year. And young people are seeing a scary future play out right in front of them.
In recent years, the youth climate movement has gained unprecedented strength. Borrowing from the civil rights movement and early environmental activists, young leaders are forcing politicians to grapple with climate change in new ways. Are we truly at a breakthrough moment? Or a breaking moment?
In this episode, we’ll hear stories from Erin Bridges, Isha Clarke, Varshini Prakash, and Mary Anne Hitt.
TRANSCRIPT
Katharine Wilkinson: Do you think we're at a breakthrough moment?
Erin Bridges: We are either at a breakthrough moment or a breaking point moment. That feels sure. Depending on the day, I feel either very apprehensively helpful or absolutely terrified.
Katharine Wilkinson: At the beginning of 2018, climate activist, Erin Bridges was leaning toward terrified.
Leah Stokes: That's because 2018 was a terrifying year for the climate.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's right. A lot of destructive forces came together that year. It was yet again one of the hottest years on record.
Reporter 1: The report found the Earth has been warming for decades, and the hottest 20 years have all happened since the mid-1990s.
Katharine Wilkinson: Two slow-moving hurricanes crushed the southeast, breaking all-time rainfall records.
Reporter 2: And it is pummeling the Carolina Coast, and its impact will extend for hundreds of miles. The center of the storm just made landfall in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
Katharine Wilkinson: And in November, California saw the most destructive wildfires in State history.
Reporter 3: Camp fire scorching more than 100,000 acres, destroying more than 67,000 homes and buildings. This week at paradise looks like a war zone.
Katharine Wilkinson: It was also the year the United Nations released a really dire climate assessment. It said we had just over a decade to prevent a very, very bad scenario for the planet.
Speaker 7: According to a new report, experts say that we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe. It also says if unprecedented changes are not made and made soon, there will be irreversible damage to the planet.
Katharine Wilkinson: Erin read that report and so did a lot of other people.
Erin Bridges: And it was one of the first times that the UN really kind of went in on the scale of devastation that we were anticipating from the climate crisis. It was kind of the first time they really did not hold back.
Katharine Wilkinson: It was a volatile political moment too. The middle of a campaign season for the 2018 midterm election.
Leah Stokes: Right. Congressional seats were up for grabs. Democrats were hoping to claim enough seats to flip the House in their favor.
Katharine Wilkinson: And then in the middle of all of this, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests Democrats won't move on comprehensive climate legislation the next year, or even the one after that.
Erin Bridges: And we were like, “What?” Like, we're literally organizing young people to come out and vote for Democratic members of Congress to flip back the House so that we have a chance at passing any sort of real legislation around climate. It was just so upsetting.
Katharine Wilkinson: Activists like Erin knew they had to do something bigger, something bolder. They had to make party leaders wake up and take notice.
Erin Bridges: Yeah, you don't know what you can't lose. I mean you're just like, “Well, we got to try.”
Katharine Wilkinson: So she and a bunch of other young activists hatched a plan of action. It was a pretty simple one, but it turned into something that would change the course of the climate movement and inspire an entire generation of young leaders. The night before, Erin went to bed unsure of how it would play out. But she had a feeling a shift was coming.
Erin Bridges: I remember sending a video to my best friends and being like, “Guys, I don't know how to explain this to you, but something really big is going to happen tomorrow and I think it might change the world.”
Katharine Wilkinson: This is A Matter of Degrees. I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: And I'm Dr. Leah Stokes. And together, we're telling stories for the climate curious. So Katharine, you've got me intrigued. What have you been digging into?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, lately I have been really into this idea of movement moments. So, the idea that there are these catalytic moments and movements for social change. Moments that create ripples and add up to something that's actually a lot bigger.
Leah Stokes: I like this idea. Can you give me an example from history, so I can understand it a bit better?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, I think that Rosa Parks is a great example that a lot of folks are familiar with. There was incredible organizing that had gone on for years in Montgomery. Most of it led by black women. But the moment that Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus, that's the moment that breaks through. You could also think about the first Earth Day as a movement moment. 20 million Americans take to the streets, 10% of the U.S. population at the time. And that helps to catalyze a whole slew of federal environmental legislation.
Leah Stokes: We've definitely seen the same pattern with the Black Lives Matter movement this summer. I think about the response to George Floyd's murder and how many people took to the street, maybe for the first time, to protest racial injustice in America.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, totally. I mean, we've really been living through movement moments as a country right now. And sometimes these moments are genuinely unplanned, but savvy activist also know that we don't have to just wait around for them to occur. They can actually be made, created, and the things that we want to change often can't wait.
Leah Stokes: I feel like we've definitely started to see that with the climate movement. When I think back to the fall of 2018, it felt like there were young climate activists like Erin who you were talking to who were ready to make those moments happen.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. That's actually the moment that I want to focus on today. It was a really big national climate story two years ago. But what's the backstage version of that moment that was so catalytic?
Leah Stokes: So, where do we start with this story?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, we've got to set it in the context of 2018. As we heard, it's a heavy, extreme weather year. The UN makes its most dire scientific assessment ever, and it was an election year. So, a lot of young people were showing up at election events, campaign stops, looking to hold political leaders accountable on video.
Erin Bridges: And so we were like trying to kind of see these moments that would go viral and we also were like, well, we really have to take serious this idea of having to build political power, right? With like the enthusiastic elected officials. Like, getting those folks into office.
Katharine Wilkinson: So that's Erin Bridges who you heard at the top of the show. She's an organizer for a youth powered climate activist group called The Sunrise Movement. They're a really big deal on the climate space now. But back then, they really weren't very well known.
Erin Bridges: I was looking around and seeing all these other young people our age wanting a home to organize and not having a space for it really.
Katharine Wilkinson: A lot of the folks organizing with Sunrise were in their early 20s or even younger. And a lot of them got their start in other climate efforts like pushing their colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuels. And so for most of them, organizing wasn't a career, it was kind of a side hustle. And even for Erin that was true. They got really interested in learning from moments of change in American history.
Erin Bridges: Yeah, and really trying to take seriously what it means to win and what it means to build power at the scale we're talking about. What did it take to get the right to vote for women? What did it take to get the right to vote for black folks in the South? What did it take to pass the Clean Air and Clean Water Act? And what we saw was that it took millions of regular people stepping out of their homes and demanding change, and it also took politicians and seats of power going out on a ledge and responding to folks in the streets and passing legislation.
Leah Stokes: And we started to see that kind of change happen in the climate movement in 2018.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. For one, a bunch of progressive women of color had just been elected to congress. So, folks like New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. And the 116th Congress actually became the most racially and ethnically diverse congressional class in U.S. history. Climate change was a really important part of all of their platforms, and they expressed a real appreciation for the way young people were talking about this issue.
Erin Bridges: Gosh. I mean, it was wild. 19 of the 30 candidates that we endorsed that year ended up getting into office.
Katharine Wilkinson: It was like all the pieces for their big moment started to come together. So, they knew it was time. And they decided to hold a sit-in in the office of a very prominent D.C. politician.
Erin Bridges: I think we really started to feel the electricity around what was about to happen really only about maybe five or six days ahead of the sit-in. Because some really big things happened that were pretty magical and you just couldn't have planned for. It was the other key ingredient to social movements, which is luck.
Leah Stokes: I'm liking this. What is this magic piece? Tell me more.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, one of these new congresswoman got involved in a pretty surprising way. Evan Weber, who is Sun Rises' political director says that he's going to make a call to AOC's team, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and they weren't expecting much to come of that call.
Erin Bridges: And I remember being in D.C. and he was in the office and came over to a group of us and he was like, “Okay you guys, I need us to get in the circle and say a prayer to the phone gods because I'm calling AOC's Chief of Staff and just really hoping he picks up.” And I don't know, maybe 30 minutes later or something, he comes back in the room and he's like, “Okay guys, you know I was going into that call, all I really wanted was to ask if she could tweet about the sit-in that we're going to have. But it sounds like she actually wants to join the sit-in and we think that it would be a good idea to launch the Green New Deal.” It was like, “Okay, cool. That sounds like a great idea.”
Katharine Wilkinson: In other words, AOC is like, this is the time to reveal a draft resolution for the Green New Deal that Sunrise and a few other groups were working on together. And she wanted to use that sit-in to capitalize on the announcement.
Leah Stokes: You know, now, we're all familiar with the Green New Deal. But when you think back to that time, it was a really new idea. And before then, climate policy was dominated by this idea of a carbon price, which was putting cost on carbon pollution. And the Green New Deal really flip that logic around. It said, “Hey, let's talk about the benefits and let's make sure that all these people who are struggling under income inequality and racial inequality, that we bring them along too with our climate policy.” So, it was an idea to link climate policy with our other social problems.
Katharine Wilkinson: So, in November of that year 2018, the day before the sit-in, these activists assemble at a church in D.C. for kind of a pre sit-in training, like a planning meeting. And about 150 people had signed up.
Erin Bridges: Suddenly the doors at the back open and AOC and Rashida come in and all these young people turned around and it's just this huge commotion, and people swarm out to the back. We get this folding table and Varshini gets up on the folding table and gives the speech about like, I never thought that a politician who looked like me would be in office. AOC and Rashida get the mic and AOC was up in her heels on this folding table and it's just like, “Wow, Rashida and I were talking and we were like, ‘Wow! We're about to do this really crazy thing tomorrow. I mean, we're freshmen congresswomen and guess like on our first day of orientation we're going to join a sit-in with a group of kids in Congress. And we were like kind of pretty scared to do this and we really wanted to come by the church just to like remember why we're doing this and like see your faces.’”
Leah Stokes: I love this. I just love to hear about this sort of nervous excitement that the congresswoman had at the idea of staging a protest right at the beginning of their careers.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, you can just imagine the nerves and the electricity in this moment, right?
Leah Stokes: Yeah.
Katharine Wilkinson: This amazing moment of solidarity between a youth-led social movement and really young elected officials who are so totally in lockstep with one another about what they're trying to achieve. And even though AOC's there, she's standing up on the table, she's also saying to the Sunrise folks, “I'm standing with you. I'm standing side-by-side with this movement.”
Leah Stokes: So that was the night before. What was it like on the morning of this sit-in?
Katharine Wilkinson: That is exactly what I wanted to know and what I asked Erin about.
Erin Bridges: Yeah. I woke up next day I think at 4:00 A.M. or something and we all had our Green New Deal t-shirts on and we had these shirts that said 12 years on them, which was kind of a pertaining to the UN report around having 12 years to transform our society to solve the crisis. We all put on our t-shirts and made our way down to the Capitol in the middle of winter.
Katharine Wilkinson: So they had these awesome t-shirts and they also had all these posters with slogans like, “Dear Democrats, what's your plan?” And, “Green jobs for all.” And, “Step up or step aside.”
Erin Bridges: And then we all marched inside the building and we marched into Nancy Pelosi's office. The door was somehow open.
Leah Stokes: Right. The sit-in was in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office. They just kind of walked in.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. Erin and all of her comrades just squeezed into the House Speaker's office.
Erin Bridges: We unfurled our banners and I remember being like, “Oh, this is the part where I'm supposed to start the action.” Like, I forget that I'm the one in charge of getting things started.
Katharine Wilkinson: Sunrise has this remarkable way with music. So Erin stands up and leads a song. She's got dozens of young people on either side of her and she's walking back and forth and pumping both of her fists in the air over her head.
Crowd: (singing)
Katharine Wilkinson: It gives me goosebumps to hear Erin and all of these young activists sing, because song has been used by social movements for generations to give voice to the change they want to see, to express solidarity, to express feelings. And it's a way to build joy during the hardest of fights and in daunting moments, like the one that they're in.
Crowd: (singing)
Leah Stokes: Yeah, it's really powerful to hear the singing. I think it somehow communicates the stakes in a different way.
Katharine Wilkinson: One activist then, 24-year-old Claire Morrison gives a speech about a wildfire that had just consumed her aunt and uncle's home. WOW Cable News footage of the camp fire is flashing across the screen behind her.
Claire Morrison: Nancy Pelosi is from California. She should know. She should be thinking about these people, and I know that she does. Because you can't be from California and not hear this news and think about your families back home.
Katharine Wilkinson: And another young man, then eighteen-year-old Jeremy Ornstein, speaks about his grandparents passed and his own future.
Jeremy Ornstein: You know, please, Speaker Pelosi come of age with us, care for us, and we'll care for each other and we'll join in that great American tradition of rising to meet a challenge.
Katharine Wilkinson: And then just like the night before, AOC walks into the threshold of Pelosi's office.
Erin Bridges: She was just so incredible. I mean, you have to go back and watch the speech that she gave.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I just want to let you all know how proud I am at each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future. It is so incredibly [crosstalk 00:17:51].
Katharine Wilkinson: So, AOC is not just showing up at the church, away from the cameras, she's showing up with Sunrise in this super public and reputationally risky way, She's a new kid on Capitol Hill and yet she's standing up to the most powerful Democrat in the House.
Erin Bridges: She was saying I'm here with you guys and then she left and we started building up more energy around the action and started dancing in the office and singing together and we eventually got arrested, but it was ...
Katharine Wilkinson: The way all good dance parties end.
Erin Bridges: That's right.
Leah Stokes: I love this. So, they're having a great time and then they get arrested. They get booked out by the police and they go out back into the world. So, what was the impact of this whole thing?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. I mean, I don't think Erin really knew in that moment, but she could feel that something was different. There were thousands of articles that got written about the moment, and it really did force Democratic leadership to talk about the issue in a more urgent way. And just as AOC hoped, it thrust the Green New Deal out into the mainstream.
Erin Bridges: Well, I mean, gosh, the whole thing was just quite a shock. I mean, you talk about trying to change the world and then somehow randomly something happens and thousands of people are talking about what you just did. It's wild. It's just wild to live through a moment like that. It's just shocking still to look back and think about someone in Congress showing up alongside you. You grow up as a young person feeling so disillusioned with literally everyone in power, and it's just like shocking. I just remember my mouth dropping and tears pouring from my eyes when she walked in the room because I was just like, “Wow! This is what it looks like when someone fights with you.”
Katharine Wilkinson: It honestly makes me tear up hearing Erin tell that story again, because I think young people have felt so lonely in their concern about our future with the climate crisis. And so totally abandoned by most of the supposed leaders.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, it's ... You know, you and I have been in this fight for a while and what these young people did for my life, for your life in terms of getting climate on the agenda, it's hard to describe. We went from sort of toiling away on this obscure subject to being asked all the time by media, by groups, by students, “Well, what about the Green New Deal and what about climate change, isn't it happening now?” I mean, it really changed the whole conversation.
Katharine Wilkinson: God, it makes me think back on my early 20s and wish that our generation had figured out how to show up with the kind of ferocious love and commitment that the Sunrise Movement is bringing. And maybe the coolest thing about the Pelosi sit-in is that smaller versions of that event were happening all over the country, right around the same time and then in the months that followed. I actually wanted to talk to one of these young activists who were using a similar approach, challenging the adults in the room. And I think that I found someone who's really leaned into that strategy.
Leah Stokes: Who's that?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, her name is Isha Clarke. She's from Oakland. She just graduated high school. What she told me is that she wasn't always a climate activist. Frankly, she didn't really know that she could be. As a young black girl, she just didn't see a lot of environmentalists who looked like her, who looked like her community.
Isha Clarke: Before I even got involved in this work, I was always really passionate about social justice, but I never felt connected to climate or environmental activism or issues because it was always portrayed to me as something that was very white and of privilege. And I didn't relate to that all.
Leah Stokes: Right. I totally get that. I feel like if you don't see people who look like you doing something, it's hard to sort of think that that's something that you should be caring about.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, and then something happens right there in her hometown of Oakland that changes everything for her.
Isha Clarke: I was invited to an action targeting Phil Tagami, who is a very prominent developer in Oakland and who was and still is trying to build a coal terminal through West Oakland. At the time of this action, I was a freshman in high school. It was a group of predominantly black and brown middle and high school students who went to this developer's office and looked at him face-to-face and said, “Please don't poison our community.”
Katharine Wilkinson: And these kids actually cornered the developer at his office, trying to catch his ear. This was real for Isha, because black and brown kids in West Oakland are still twice as likely to get asthma than white kids. Because they're often living in parts of the city abutting these polluting and industrial developments. But Tagami told them that they didn't understand his side of the story.
Isha Clarke: This power was sickening because he was using his power to poison people and he didn't seem to care at all. And so I had this moment where I looked at him and I was like, “Okay, well then tell us the other side of the story.” And I feel like that line is really what started Isha Clarke the activist because it was this moment where I spoke up and in this is very standing my ground way in front of this person who was trying to disempower me and my community.
Katharine Wilkinson: So, Isha walked away from that encounter with a new sense of purpose. Climate and environmental justice became her thing, and she was determined to get adults to take the urgency seriously. Fast forward to 2019, and Isha set her sights on a new powerful adult. She and a bunch of other young folks wrote a letter to California Senator Dianne Feinstein, asking her to sign on to the Green New Deal.
Leah Stokes: Right. I remember this. This was when the Green New Deal really started to break through for the public at large.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. And Feinstein has been a strong supporter of climate policy historically, but she, like so many others, were worried about tying their names, tying their reputations to the Green New Deal. So, Isha and a bunch of her peers marched up to the doors of Feinstein's office, hoping that they could deliver a letter. And they stood outside holding their signs, giving their speeches, but not sure if they'd be able to get in. And then a staff of her comes down and tells them to come on upstairs.
Isha Clarke: And we were like, “Oh my gosh, okay.” It was crazy because we were walking up to the building and they had barricaded the doors because we were having this rally outside. It was like this super chill rally with young people ...
Katharine Wilkinson: With lots of 10-year-olds.
Isha Clarke: Right. And they barricaded the doors. It was so stupid.
Katharine Wilkinson: A small group was led in a door and when they got into the office, they found that Senator Feinstein was actually there to meet them and she was willing to talk, kind of.
Isha Clarke: She came back at us and was just like, “Basically, that plan is not feasible. It's not going to happen. And you guys are coming in here ... ” And she says, “You tell me it has to be my way or the highway and I don't respond to that.”
Dianne Feinstein: I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what I'm doing. You come in here and you say, “It has to be my way or the highway.” I don't respond to that. I've gotten elected. I just ran. I was elected by almost a million vote plurality and I know what I'm doing. So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit.
Isha Clarke: I remember this same moment with Tagami, where I was standing here and I was like, this person in power is just spewing BS and I can't have it. And so I stood my ground. I don't remember what I said first, but I said something like, “We're the ones who voted you into office.”
Isha Clarke: I hear what you're saying, but we're the people who voted you. You're supposed to listen to us. That's your job.
Dianne Feinstein: How old are you?
Isha Clarke: I'm 16. I can't vote.
Dianne Feinstein: Well, you didn't vote for me.
Young activist: It doesn't matter. We're the ones who were going to be impacted.
Katharine Wilkinson: Do you remember kind of the feeling in the room as this is all unfolding?
Isha Clarke: Yeah, it was definitely very tensed. It was also like, what do you do in this moment to actually make something happen, to make change happen instead of it just being this useless back and forth? Which was a lot of what that conversation was and which also to your point is why I think that I had that moment in the end. Because I felt like, what did we do? Like, what was the point of this conversation? We just went back and forth like little kids. And we didn't come to that place as little kids, we came as young activist who are concerned about our future and wanted to talk to our representative, to our senator about doing something that she had the power to do.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. So, Leah, you probably saw this on Twitter practically in real-time. That moment in the office totally goes viral and it ends up putting Isha into the limelight as an activist, and giving her a much bigger platform to be a voice for climate justice and to organize her community and youth in even more powerful ways. And Isha's actually one of the leaders of the group, Youth vs. Apocalypse, which is just a name that I absolutely love.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I know right. It's like, let's be against the apocalypse. Seems like that makes sense.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, we can probably all find some common ground in being against the apocalypse. Yeah, so the group is mostly black and brown youth who live in the Bay Area and they're working together to do direct action and lobbying around the climate crisis.
Katharine Wilkinson: So, this action in Feinstein's office ends up feeding into the momentum that Sunrise had started from their sit-in in 2018. And together these moments start to force a bigger discussion about how incumbent politicians are so deeply out of touch with the issue of climate change and how it's going to impact the future for folks like Isha.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I kind of can't imagine being a teenager right now and just thinking about my own future and trying to think about what my life will be like and looking at these 70-year-old politicians who are just completely out to lunch on the climate crisis.
Katharine Wilkinson: Remember last episode when I was telling you about The Outdoor Academy, where I was in high school?
Leah Stokes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Katharine Wilkinson: Last year, I got to spend time with the current cohort of students who are at OA and the questions that they are asking about their lives and the world that they're living in are so different. They're teenagers who are asking questions about, could we ever possibly have kids?
Leah Stokes: Yeah and I just think that a lot of politicians, especially older politicians just don't understand what it looks like to be a teenager in 2020.
Katharine Wilkinson: And the thing to me that's so frustrating is you actually hold power. So few people hold genuine reins of power, but our elected officials do. And they could actually show up as good ancestors to future generations. Hell, they could show up as just good leaders for current generations and instead, they're just out to lunch, they're bystanding, they're delaying, or they're just straight up in the pocket of fossil fuel companies.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein have actually tried really hard to make a change and they've run up against fossil fuel opposition and they're kind of almost tired or they've kind of given up. I can understand why they feel that way. These are people who have actually worked really hard on climate change, but we cannot give up, we cannot wait more years. And that's really how young people feel because it's true.
Katharine Wilkinson: I mean, the climate crisis is actually just the most extreme example of intergenerational injustice, and there's a battle that's going on here between young people and the people who are supposedly representing them in government.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and you know it's not even just sort of like young Democrats lefties or things like that, there's actually polls that show that young Republicans are also terrified of this issue. There's actually a bigger intergenerational gap in some ways on the right and even on the left.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, I think it's a lot bigger on the right actually, that young people are awake. They see what is awaiting them when they're going to be alive in the year 2100. That's a terrifying thing. And if the people who are making decisions about your future don't seem to give a damn about your future, you'd want to rise up, you'd want to take action in whatever ways you're capable of doing.
Leah Stokes: And it's not just Isha and Erin, right? The actions that they took ended up being seen by millions of people and they planted seeds in people's minds. Lots of young people watch what they were doing and they thought, “I want to do that too. I want to speak up to adults and get them to wake up to the problem that we're facing.” These kids really changed the conversation.
Katharine Wilkinson: They totally did and so many things happened after that first Pelosi sit-in. That December, Sunrise held another D.C. sit-in and it was even bigger than the first one. Freshman Congresswoman AOC and the rest of the squad officially assumed office and they proposed the Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And today I think is a really big day for our economy, the labor movement, the social justice, indigenous peoples, and people all over the United States of America.
Katharine Wilkinson: And Pelosi ultimately responded to the protest by saying that she would put together a special committee on climate and actually followed through. And they're report came out this year and it was genuinely a big deal.
Nancy Pelosi: Now, today, we're here on the steps of the United States Capitol to take a bold step for climate action now with the Congressional Action Plan.
Leah Stokes: And then in March 2019, on the heels of this Green New Deal proposal in Congress, Governor Jay Inslee says, “Hey, I'm going to run for president because I want to elevate the climate issue.”
Jay Inslee: If I'm elected to this high honor, I will make defeating climate change the number one priority of the United States.
Leah Stokes: He ends up developing more than 200 pages of climate policy and it affects so many other candidates in the race. It ends up being like a competition, where each candidate is trying to outdo the other ones for who can be the boldest and biggest on climate.
Katharine Wilkinson: And of course, the youth keep at it. Friday school strikes become a massive global strike for climate. And September 2019, Greta Thunberg comes to New York and suddenly something that she started alone becomes something that millions of people are doing around the world and adults are showing up.
Young activist: If at this point, you've got no idea why we're striking then like, what on earth? You must be utter idiots.
Leah Stokes: And in early 2020, when it becomes clear that Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, he really starts to listen to the young people who are saying that they don't feel that he's bold enough on climate. And so he puts together this unity task force and actually puts Sunrise leader, Varshini Prakash as well as AOC on that task force and it ends up proposing a really big acceleration in the Biden targets, which he then adopts.
Katharine Wilkinson: It's been pretty incredible when you think about how stalled climate progress has been for so long. And I guess I have some nervousness. It's made me wonder, how much of this will stick? Like, will we keep building on these things that have happened the last two years?
Leah Stokes: Right. I mean, it's one thing for the youth climate movement to get a bunch of articles in the press and have an amazing social media campaign and even organize in-person confrontations with all kinds of politicians, particularly during the Democratic primary, but it's quite another to get those ideas into law. And we've just seen all the challenges that the climate movement has had in doing that. So, will this resurgence of the youth climate movement create lasting change?
Katharine Wilkinson: I think that's really the big question, and I wanted to go to someone else for some perspective on this. Someone who, once upon a time, was herself a young person trying to build the environmental movement.
Mary Anne Hitt: Well, you know what comes to mind as I went to the University of Tennessee and I wanted to have an environmental major and there were none, and so I had to literally create my own major. And then I went to the first meeting of the student environmental group on campus. Someone had put up a flyer. We go to this meeting and then no one stands up to run the meeting. There's like 15 of us in the room. And so finally, I stood up and I said, “Is anyone in charge of this meeting?” And no one was and so I said to everyone in the room, “Well, this doesn't seem like a very thriving organization. Maybe we should take it over and start one.”
Katharine Wilkinson: So, that's Mary Anne Hitt.
Leah Stokes: I love it. Mary Anne is one of my true heroes in the climate movement.
Katharine Wilkinson: She is such a badass. She has been running the Beyond Coal Campaign for the last decade. And now, she oversees all of the campaigns for the Sierra Club. And the work that she has done to fight coal pollution has been so incredible. And given her incredible death of expertise in the movement, I really wanted to know what's her sense of this moment, are we hitting a breakthrough?
Mary Anne Hitt: Here's how I would describe it, if you're talking about the climate movement. All of the focus on a very big scale turns to the issue that you're working on. So, Greta Thunberg on Fridays for Future is a movement moment where she suddenly galvanizes all these folks and then suddenly there's marches in the streets all around the world. Or the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, people were so compelled and came from all over the world to stand with indigenous folks there to try to stop that pipeline. Those things, sometimes you can't plan them, but when they start to emerge, it's clear that you're having kind of a breakthrough. I mean, I think this summer we've had a lot of movement moments around racial justice. But an election could be a movement moment too, because we all know this is coming, we all know how high the stakes are, and that's another place where we need to show up in large numbers and win the day.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. When Sunrise kind of burst onto the scene with the Pelosi sit-in, do you think of that as being one of those kind of catalytic movement moments?
Mary Anne Hitt: I do. Yeah, now that you mentioned it. I mean, I remember when that happened and I just thought it was awesome. And I know some people thought, “Oh my gosh, you know, this is ... You know, she's the Democratic leader, we shouldn't be behaving in this fashion.” But I just thought it was fantastic because I do think that we don't elect perfect people, we elect the best people we can and then we have to push them and hold them accountable. And that's what Sunrise was doing in that moment. And I think that's a big part of the reason that climate became central to the agenda in the House and in the Democratic party. So, I think we all owe them a lot and I do feel like that was a movement moment.
Katharine Wilkinson: It's interesting to me that I think youth are managing to have kind of like a public discourse breakthrough, but I also feel like they are managing to educate the climate movement and move the perspectives within the movement in really interesting ways too.
Mary Anne Hitt: Again, I just think the stakes are different for them. In the same way that you see the young people who are leading the gun violence work, who are literally scared to go to school because of gun violence, they are fed up with these problems not being solved and they feel physically in danger. And I think that sense of urgency is something that we'd frankly did not have in the way that we needed to, to really galvanize folks.
Katharine Wilkinson: How do you feel about the moment we're in right now? Pandemic, fires, election season. It's a complicated moment.
Mary Anne Hitt: At my core, I feel like the greatest transformations come out of the moments of greatest darkness. The Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act came when Jim Crow America was at a breaking point. It's just one example. And I think there is the potential here to have some incredible breakthroughs on racial justice, on climate change, on air and water pollution in people's communities. It's also really hard. It's scary, and it's exhausting, and it's also possible to see a world where we'd slide into authoritarianism and we kind of lose our country. And so I really feel, it feels just like everything is on the line and it's a very hard time to show up as your full self, and so I think figuring out how to do that is a daily struggle.
Katharine Wilkinson: Leah, obviously we had a great conversation. I'm really curious to know, what do you think?
Leah Stokes: I think Mary Anne has hit on a profound truth there. There's a book by Rebecca Solnit called Hope in the Dark, and it's the idea that in these moments of profound darkness, much like the moment we find ourselves in right now, where we see racial injustices, we see the Supreme Court in such a perilous position, we see these fires ripping across this country, that's such a dark time for so many people. But it's in those moments that we actually have the seeds and the potential for profound change.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think that's so true and there's so much about climate that just will break your heart. There is no way to look at more than 3.5 million acres burned in California and not be absolutely shattered. But I think we have a choice about whether we're just brokenhearted or whether our hearts are broken open, and that wrenching experience can actually become the fuel for the work that we do together.
Leah Stokes: So many more Americans have been waking up to this crisis. We see celebrities talking about it. We see more and more politicians stepping up. Governor Newsom in California responded to the fires by saying, “We're not going to sell gas powered cars anymore in 2035.” I feel like people are really hearing these youth climate strikers.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think they are and Erin thinks that they might be too. She and I both live in the South, which is not often thought of as the bastion of climate action and climate justice. But Erin says that there are things in her own life in Kentucky where she is seeing some transformation.
Erin Bridges: My dad is someone that I grew up driving around town in his beat-up old Subaru and he would listen to conservative talk radio and we'd fight about it in the car. 10 years ago, he would fight me a little bit when I would talk about the work I was doing around divestment. He'd say things like, “Well, the climate has always changed, what's different now?” And I have seen such a change in him in the course of my time doing organizing with Sunrise. He is so proud to see me out organizing and not really talking about the Democrats or the Republicans, but saying like, “You're either for change or you're against change. It doesn't actually matter what party you're in.”
Leah Stokes: I really like that story because the fact is that Americans of both political stripes want action on this issue, and that is only getting to be a bigger issue amongst young Republicans in particular. It's easy to think that because we have Republicans in Congress with their very strong ties to the fossil fuel industry and they don't want to act on climate change, that that's how every day Republicans feel. And it's just not true. And I feel like we have to ask ourselves like, which side are these politicians on? Are they on the side of history and are they on the side of what's right, or are they really in the pockets of these big oil companies?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, that's totally right. And the thing is that deniers of climate are not the only problem, delayers of climate action are too. And unfortunately, we have delayers in both parties. That's why sunrise and other youth activists are often pushing Democrats even harder than they're pushing Republicans.
Varshini Prakash: I still don't think that Democrats understand the true crisis and emergency that is on our hands.
Katharine Wilkinson: That's Varshini Prakash. She's the 27-seven-year-old executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which she also co-founded. And she was one of the people who led that sit-in inside Nancy Pelosi's office. Since that 2018 movement moment, Varshini has been able to get even deeper inside the Democratic party, even inside Joe Biden's campaign to create that greater sense of urgency.
Varshini Prakash: You know, you can see the ways in which like you're looking at the DNC and you're like, “Where's the climate crisis in the first five pages?” I'm on the platform committee and being like, “Can we get this in here? Like, hello, like this is a pretty big crisis.” And it sort of feels like people, I don't know exactly why, but they still are stuck in this mentality of like this is a political loser, this is a lightning rod, we don't want to touch something like climate. But the truth is so many people, especially young people who we know, like the Biden campaign has to work to energize to some degree, climate change is their top issue.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, this is one of the big wins we've had lately. The climate movement is actually getting inside the Democratic Party. And there's energy around this issue in a way that we just haven't seen lately. So, the question to me still remains, can we turn this momentum into meaningful change? Can we actually pass climate laws?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, definitely. Varshini totally feels that tension between optimism, realism, pessimism, all three every day as she does this work. I mean, take the story of that involvement with the Biden campaign for an example.
Varshini Prakash: It's been tough and it's also personally really hard I think, to both maintain this like being really clear that we have to take the opportunities on the table to push things forward, and we did. Because I was on the table, his timelines around moving to 100% electricity moved up 15 years. That's huge. The investments, targeting investments, 40% of his investments to environmental justice communities, the expansion of indigenous sovereignty. All of that was because we were at that table and arguing for things that we really deeply believed in.
Katharine Wilkinson: It's pretty unique that you all are playing both an insider at the table role and an outsider pushing challenging kind of role, and that those two are meeting, right?
Varshini Prakash: And that they're essential. We literally wouldn't have been at that table if we hadn't done all of the organizing leading up to it. We wouldn't have the opportunities to push even further if I hadn't necessarily been at that table. But I think you've got to be clear, we need both the inside and the outside pressure. And you only get what you get at the negotiating table based off of how much power you have built.
Katharine Wilkinson: Do you think climate is having a breakthrough moment now, and how do we keep the momentum going?
Varshini Prakash: Yeah. It's a good question. I think yes, but I think in order for it to keep going we have to have a series of breakthrough moments again and again and again for the next 30 years. I think we need to have breakthrough moments to finally introduce and pass legislation. We have to have breakthrough moments to build willpower. We have to have breakthrough moments to actually implement. We have to have breakthrough moments when laws are ignored and regulations are ignored and industries go rogue. We have to have those moments when justice is denied to ensure that those laws are enforced. I think it is just the beginning of a battle that is going to be decades-long. And it's no doubt in my mind, we can't allow this to be a blip in people's imagination, because things are getting worse every single day, every single year. And so I really believe that we can have more breakthrough moments and we need to have more breakthrough moments if we want this particular moment to stick.
Katharine Wilkinson: Leah, it seems pretty clear that this is a breakthrough moment for the climate movement, but how would you describe it? I mean, how do you see the moment that we're in?
Leah Stokes: It's a transformational time. You and I, Katharine, we've been at this for more than a decade now. We've seen the highs with the climate movement and the lows, when nobody will even talk about this issue. And the youth climate movement has said, “Enough of that! We are going to talk about this. We're going to have it on the front page of our newspapers. We're going to confront politicians who refuse to act.” And I really think that they have changed what's possible in this moment.
Katharine Wilkinson: And so I wonder, what does all of this mean for our listeners, for climate curious people who are watching all of this unfold?
Leah Stokes: Well, I think it's a call to action. If you see what these young people are willing to give up. They're not even going to school so that they can protest. They're giving up their own education, their own time. They're out there in the streets, they're giving up their own comfort. It's not easy to stand in front of a politician and to criticize them, but they're willing to stick their necks out there, they're willing to protest, they're willing to do the work. So, if you're lying in bed at night freaked out by the world that we find ourselves in, ask yourself, are you doing as much as these youth climate strikers and what more can you do? And it's not about changing your straws, it's about pushing the levers of power to make better decisions. And so many people in our society have more power than they think. We should all be inspired by the climate movement and all show up to do more.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah. I mean, the climate crisis is a leadership crisis and what Greta, Erin, Isha, they all remind us that the only thing it takes to be a climate leader is to show up with the intention to fight for a livable future and to link arms in the work to make that happen. And we should all carry that spirit with us to the ballot box this fall. We have got to vote out the folks who haven't been getting the job done and vote in the folks who will, because we really are at a crossroads of peril and possibility. The politics of the possible have changed and we need to go out and make them reality.
Leah Stokes: A Matter of Degrees is co-hosted by me, Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And me, Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Post Script Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jamie Kaiser, Sydney Bartone, and Stephen Lacey produced the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed, and scored the show.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions. The show art was designed by Karl Spurzem. Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono. A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made this show possible, The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara, and others. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcast, or any other place you get your shows.
Leah Stokes: And you can follow both of us and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts in the show notes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.