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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

by IsmaelWicks Posted on March 16, 2019

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “loyalty freak,” found a loyal friend and unwavering supporter in former Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah.

So when Hatch’s office sent a letter in mid-March 2017 requesting that the Interior Department shrink the boundary of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to free up fossil fuel-rich lands, as the New York Times revealed, the Trump administration sprang into action.

A little more than a month later, Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of more than two dozen recent national monument designations. It was clear that Bears Ears was the primary target. At the signing ceremony, Trump said he’d “heard a lot about” the 1.35 million-acre site in southeastern Utah and how “beautiful” the area is. He painted the Obama administration designation as a massive federal land grab. And he boasted that it “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of the state’s citizens, and that he was opening the land up to “tremendously positive things.”

He made no mention of the five Native American tribes that consider the area sacred and jointly petitioned for the monument’s creation. Instead, he thanked Hatch for his “never-ending prodding.”

“[Hatch] would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this,’” Trump said. “Is that right, Orrin? You didn’t stop. He doesn’t give up. He’s shocked that I’m doing it, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Again, this was before former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched what he promised would be an objective, thorough review of recent monument designations; one he said would give all stakeholders a voice. In the end, Trump signed a pair of proclamations to cut more than 2 million acres from Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history. Seemingly every action leading to that decision suggested the outcome was predetermined.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing to examine what they described in a news release as Trump’s “illegal decision to shrink” the Utah sites. The event, titled “Forgotten Voices: The Inadequate Review and Improper Alteration of Our National Monuments,” featured testimony from several tribal leaders, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management and other stakeholders. Zinke turned down an invitation to testify through his attorney, according to a committee spokesperson.

Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the committee’s chair, told HuffPost in a recent interview that Zinke created a culture at the Department of the Interior centered on “making life easier” for oil, gas, and mining interests at the expense of conservation and environmental stewardship. The monument rollbacks, he added, “epitomizes” that culture.

Grijalva echoed that sentiment during the committee’s hearing. He said the administration’s review was “hollow and improper” and gave industry “special consideration.”

“It is my firm belief that this was a predestined outcome and that everything that has occurred since then has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva said. “I don’t think it’s justifiable.”

BLM directed to free up coal deposits

One of the biggest revelations about the administration’s motives came during Wednesday’s hearing, when Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, cited testimony from a BLM employee who said he was directed to redraw the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante to exclude coal-rich areas and to be no more than 1 million acres.

“The first area I was told to exclude from the boundary, with no discussion, was the coal leases from 1996,” the BLM mapping specialist told investigators at Interior’s Office of Inspector General, according to Huffman.

Huffman went on to reveal that the expert was told to carve out areas rich in fossils, the very resources the monument was established to protect.

“The big one was the paleontological resources — huge dinosaur area,” the BLM expert told investigators, according to Huffman. “These coal areas are all pretty high dinosaur resources areas. We were told they are out regardless.”

This testimony is included in an unredacted version of an OIG report release in January that concluded there is “no evidence” that Zinke gave retired Utah state Representative Mike Noel preferential treatment when he redrew the monument’s boundary.

Ed Roberson, BLM’s Utah state director, told lawmakers Wednesday that the review was open, fair, and thorough. Huffman told Roberson that the order given to the BLM mapping specialist “does not sound like an honest and exhausted process,” but rather “a pre-cooked decision to allow coal companies to mine this coal.”

In his final report to the White House, Zinke acknowledged the potential for mining coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante, noting that the site contains “an estimated several billion tons of coal.” Downey Magallanes, the daughter of a former executive of coal giant Peabody Energy, was a top Interior official who oversaw the Trump administration’s monument review. She left the agency last year for a job at oil giant BP.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during a visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Zinke cozied up to monument opponents

In the week after Trump signed the orders threatening the future of 27 national monuments, Zinke met with Utah’s Republican delegation and the San Juan County Commission — staunch critics of Bears Ears — to discuss next steps. He sat down with members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five area tribes that petitioned for monument status, only after they traveled to Washington to demand a meeting, claiming that neither Trump nor anyone on his team had consulted with them.

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A week later, Zinke traveled to Utah as part of a monuments “listening tour,” when he spent four days visiting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Monument opponents, including Utah Governor Gary Herbert (a Republican) and members of the San Juan County Commission, joined him on the tour of Bears Ears. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition were given a one-hour meeting with the agency chief.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the coalition, one of several groups now suing the administration, called Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears “devastating” and said the administration “failed to meaningfully engage our sovereign nations.”

“The upcoming hearing will uncover the bias, the outsized influence of the mining and drilling industries and the political motivations of the administration that led them to their illegal decision,” the coalition wrote.

Cherry-picked data

In launching its review, the Interior Department claimed that the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906 “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” early on and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”

The figure formed the foundation of the administration’s argument that Trump’s predecessors abused the century-old law. But a look at early monument designations upends the agency’s math. In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Only a few Obama-era land monuments are larger. Roosevelt also designated the 610,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument and the 20,629-acre Chaco Canyon National Monument. Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both designated monuments of over a million acres. Coolidge set aside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1925, and Hoover designated California’s Death Valley in 1933.

The Interior Department has never substantiated the 422-acre figure, despite HuffPost’s numerous requests.

Not about extraction, they said

Throughout the process, Zinke maintained that the review and subsequent rollbacks were not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development on once-protected lands.

“I’m a geologist,” Zinke, who is not a geologist, said at a congressional budget hearing last year. “I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix.”

Media reporting over the last year suggests otherwise. The New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision. The Washington Post uncovered a lobbying campaign from uranium company Energy Fuels to shrink Bears Ears. And Roll Call reported this month that Energy Fuels, which owns a uranium mill adjacent to the original Bears Ears boundary, met with a top Interior Department official to discuss Bears Ears even before the agency launched its review.

The Washington Post also reported on agency emails that show Interior Department officials dismissed information about the benefits of establishing protected monuments, including increased tourism and archeological discoveries, instead choosing to play up the value of energy development, logging, and ranching.

A man holds a sign in protest, during Ryan Zinke’s visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Nothing to learn from the public

Early in the review process, Interior announced a comment period to give the public a chance to weigh in. It was a move that Zinke said “finally gives a voice to local communities and states” that the Trump administration claimed previous administrations had ignored.

That invitation appears to have mostly been for show. As HuffPost first reported, the agency conducted its review of Bears Ears assuming it had nothing to learn from the public.

“Essentially, barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted,” Randal Bowman, an agency official who played a key role in the review, told colleagues during a May 2017 webinar to train a dozen agency staffers on how to read and catalog public comments. And in a May 2017 email exchange with Downey Magallanes, a former top aide of Zinke’s who played a key role in the review, Bowman said he expected the comments to be “99-1 against any changes.”

The support for keeping monuments intact was indeed overwhelming. An analysis by the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities found that 99 percent of the more than 685,000 public comments submitted during a 15-day comment period voiced support for Bears Ears.

In a report summary made public in August 2017, Zinke acknowledged that the vast majority of the 2.8 million public comments the department received as part of its sweeping review favored maintaining national monuments, which he chalked up to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

He didn’t appear to consider that the comments were the honest opinions of individual Americans.

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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

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These kids are striking for their school to cut its carbon footprint

by RoyDalyell Posted on March 15, 2019

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It was only two weeks ago that 16-year-old Azalea Danes says she officially became a climate activist, but she’s done her best to make that time count.

It all started after the high school junior, who attends Bronx School of Science, read about 13-year-old fellow New Yorker Alexandria Villaseñor’s protests outside the United Nations headquarters. Danes’ hunger to learn more quickly snowballed from there. She watched a TED Talk by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who was just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize after going on strike to protest government inaction on climate change, eventually sparking a global movement. When Danes found out that a massive youth climate strike was coming to the U.S. on Friday, March 15 and thought to herself: “I need to do something about this personally in my community.”

Courtesy of Azalea Danes

Danes is one of the hundreds of thousands of young people participating in today’s global Youth Climate Strike, walking out of classes to protest global leaders’ climate inaction. These kids, many of whom are still in elementary school, may be comparatively new to the environmental movement, but they are among the most motivated stakeholders in today’s climate movement. And they don’t just have their eyes set on a Green New Deal — many of them are looking for solutions closer to home.

The day after Danes found out about the youth climate strike she started an Instagram account to recruit her classmates to join her in a walk out. Within days, she had linked up with other climate-concerned students to draft a mission statement for their strike. And soon, more than 100 of her schoolmates had RSVP’d to the event on Facebook.

The students weren’t just playing hookie. Danes and her peers at the Bronx High School of Science crafted goals intended to make their school greener — demands for which they are willing to suffer through detention in order to make a reality.

Kids at the school are no slouches when it comes to academics — Bronx Science is a specialized public school in New York City that kids must test into to snag a coveted spot  (it’s where actor Tom Holland went undercover for a few days to research his recent role as Spiderman).

Although Danes says she was able to get approval to miss her class for the strike, many others at the school were denied – sometimes because they applied for a pass too late, or because they had a history of tardies or absences. Students without a pass receive a “cut” for missing class, which will only be removed from their record if they serve detention. A “cut” on your record could also have bigger ramifications. Today is the first day that students can select courses for next year — they have a week from now to make their choices. And anyone with cuts on their record won’t be able to enroll in Advanced Placement classes.

With academic pressures working against them, strike organizers at the school had to make a compelling pitch to get kids to skip out on class. “No matter how smart and driven we are to do well in school, we really have to prioritize our own future, take advantage of our civil responsibility, and protest when something needs to happen,” said, Alysa Chen, a 17-year-old senior who is the president of the school’s environmental club.

Chen has been making announcements and organizing other kids in her classes. And on Friday morning, she led roughly 100 students out of around 3,000 enrolled at the school who walked out of their school chanting, “Who’s power? Students’ power!”

On Friday morning, the students walked out through the front doors of the school, past the flagpoles, and across the street to an open sports field. Standing on the bleachers, Chen and other spoke to the crowd of students, including a couple dozen who joined them from another nearby high school.

“I have missed a math test. I’m screwing up my grades,” Bronx Science senior Sebastian Baez told the crowd through a megaphone. But “we are not here to skip school. We are here to change the world.” He then urged his peers to contact elected officials, to register to vote, and to keep talking about climate change after the strike ends — especially back at school.

17-year-old senior Eytan Stanton is another organizer of the strike along with Baez, Chen, Danes, and three others leading the work at Bronx Science. After consulting with his school’s building engineer on how to cut down the campus’s carbon footprint, he worked with his schoolmates to write up sustainability goals, which they included part of their demands for the strike. Together, they broke down the goals for greening the school into short, medium, and long-term deliverables.

Eytan StantonJustine Calma / Grist

The students found the most immediate gains would come from updating the school’s heating system. They want the school to get a summer boiler that they say will be more efficient in heating hot water during warmer months, allowing the school to shut off its larger boilers. They also want to switch from burning No. 2 oil for heat to natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The students are also pushing for smaller actions that have more to do with administrative choices than with big infrastructural changes. They want to make sure all computers are turned off for the weekends, and that utensils used at lunchtime aren’t wrapped in plastic. They also want to see more curriculum on climate change and instruction on how to make personal changes to live more sustainably.

The students have loftier aims for the longer-term, including switching to LED lighting, installing solar panels, and electrifying the heating system.

“It’s all backed by science, and it’s feasible,” said Stanton.

The Bronx Science students say their local focus doesn’t mean they’re ignoring the big picture. Along with those goals, they wrote a mission statement modeled after the format of a U.N. resolution, calling for a “war on climate change” and commitments to stick to goals set in the Paris Agreement.

Around 10:20 on Friday morning, after rallying outside their school for nearly an hour, about half of the crowd returned to class. The roughly 50 remaining students made their way to join a larger rally at New York City Hall. On the subway heading downtown, Arianna Luis, 17, Amara Reid, 17, Maya Schucherm, 16, and May Wang, 16, described what what was at stake for each of them. Of the four girls, only Luis didn’t get a pass to miss class, so she was marked absent for the day, but she had explained to her mom the night before why she was still going to rally. Luis said she feels her community has too much on the line to let an absence stand in the way of taking action.

“If you look at where my family is from in the Dominican Republic, people are farmers,” Luis said. “And if you don’t have enough water to water your crops, nobody’s eating.” Her classmates chimed in, each sharing the effects of climate change and burning fossil fuels that they see all around them — from pollution making people sick in the Bronx and in Beijing, where Wang’s family is from, to dirty beaches that Reid visited the last time her family returned to their native Jamaica.

Maya Schucherm, 16, May Wang, 16, Arianna Luis, 17, Amara Reid, 17,

The students say they know they won’t see changes overnight. Stanton and Chen, who worked to draft the demands for their school, expect the work to continue long after they graduate at the end of of the school year.

For all the Bronx Science students carefully researched demands to their school (they also met with the school’s assistant principal when drafting their plan), the district’s reaction has not yet been fruitful. The New York Department of Education has not endorsed their goals, and efforts to reach assembly members asking them to put pressure on school officials to grant amnesty to student strikes have gone unanswered.

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The New York City Department of Education emailed this response to Grist: “We encourage our students to raise their voices on issues that matter to them, and we also expect our students to be in attendance during the school day. We’ve issued guidance to school communities, and encourage schools to have discussions on current events and about the importance of civic engagement.”

Of the seven authors of the Bronx Science mission statement, Danes is the only underclassman who will still be at Bronx Science next year. Still, she also knows she won’t be alone. She’s exchanged emails with Alexandria Villaseñor, one of the organizers of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. “I really would love to [meet] because she has been really my inspiration along with Greta Thunberg,” said Danes. At 13, Villasenor is three years younger than Danes. So who says your role models have to be older than you?

Alysa and Marian Chen outside City HallJustine Calma / Grist

As the rally continued outside New York’s City Hall, Alysa Chen’s mother, Marian, joined her daughter during her own lunch break from work. Standing nearby, she held her daughter’s bag and took photos as Alysa led chants and paced along the long line of young people singing in protest.

“I’m so happy they’re taking the lead to save everyone on earth,” Marian Chen told Grist. “Including us.”

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These kids are striking for their school to cut its carbon footprint

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Breaking: Across the globe, students go on strike to demand climate action

by AshleeStricklin Posted on March 15, 2019

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It’s Friday, March 15, and hundreds of thousands of students are expected to walk out of school to protest global leaders’ inaction on climate change. Young climate activists across the globe have been anticipating this day like Christmas without the consumerism. Inspired by newly minted teenage Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg, Gen-Zers are rallying to send adults a clear message — you need to take our future seriously.

Several Grist reporters are in the field today covering the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. We will update this post throughout the day as the strikes unfold worldwide. For more news on the student walkouts, follow @grist on Twitter.

Here’s the latest on the Youth Climate Strikes:

Some of our favorite signs yet

As Seattle strikes wrap up, kids are laser-focusing their message at politicians

“To all those politicians who can’t imagine my and many other futures in a ruined climate, imagine being out of a job in 2020, 2022, 2024, or 2026 when I personally get to vote.” — Taro Moore, 12-year-old climate striker from Kenmore Middle School

“I really can’t conceptualize an idea where people wouldn’t believe this is a real issue. The way the environment has changed over past decade, droughts from America to Africa to Australia, it’s just preposterous that some people in the Republican party are opposed to this.” — Kevin, 17-year-old climate striker from Bellevue High School

“Anybody who wants to run for president, who wants to run this country, they’ve got to pay attention.” — Athena Fain, 15-year-old organizer from Ingraham High School

Police respond in New York as protestors block roads

Per 350.org, the protests surpassed 1 million participants worldwide

Strikes get going in the Pacific North West (Grist’s backyard)

California groups join in the fray

Spotted in San Francisco!

The pace picks up across the country

Strikes get underway in other East Coast cities

New York City is up and at ’em

International Youth Climate Strikes kick off

The night before the strike, youth across the country prepare for protest

At Columbia University in New York, students worked late into the night to make signs for the protest.

Grist / Rachel Ramirez

Ahead of the strike, student leaders across the country share their motivations for participating.

Image courtesy of Shania Hurtado

As united as Friday’s protests will be in their call for meaningful climate action, the reasons young people have for participating are also grounded in their regions’ unique climate concerns.

“Hurricane Harvey devastated our city,” said Shania Hurtado, 16, who lives in Houston, Texas. “It was a time when my family and my friends were in a state of fear. It was terrible. This is truly why I’m striking. It’s why I’m organizing the strike. It’s something that affects me personally and we have the power to prevent and we should do something about it.”

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

by CheryleKaufmann Posted on March 15, 2019

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When the EPA and the Department of Interior announced plans to scrap Obama-era regulations to curb methane leaks last year, they were transparent about their rationale — they wanted to help the oil and gas industry. The EPA estimated that its revised regulation for new wells would save companies $380 million every year. The Department of Interior touted that its updated rule would “reduce unnecessary burdens on the private sector.”

Now at least one member of the Big Oil club is balking at the Trump administration’s efforts.

At a conference in Houston earlier this week, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell’s U.S. division, told Reuters that methane leaks are “a big part of the climate problem” and that she wants the EPA to establish more aggressive regulations that plug leaks. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, packs more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. (And leaks mean Shell “has less product to sell,” Watkins wrote in a LinkedIn post).

“We don’t usually tell governments how to do their job,” Watkins reportedly said, “but we’re ready to break with that and say, ‘Actually, we want to tell you how to do your job.’”

Watkins’ comments reflect shifting attitudes in the oil and gas industry. Shell, for instance, has fracking and refining operations in more than 70 countries. But Shell wants to invest up to $2 billion in “New Energies”, and it announced plans to become the world’s biggest power company by 2030 as part of a move, away from its core oil and gas business. An executive at ExxonMobil also said this week that methane regulation has “an important role to play” in “helping industry as a whole rise to the challenge” of producing energy while minimizing the effect on the planet.

“The big oil and gas companies see the writing on the wall in terms of climate change,” said Lauren Pagel, interim executive director at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “They spent so many years denying climate change is happening, denying that they caused climate change, they spent a lot of years in denial, and this is their new tactic — that they can be part of the solution.”

The two regulations in the Trump administration’s crosshairs are aimed at curbing methane leaks from wells on public lands and new oil and gas sites on private land. The Department of Interior published the final rule rescinding methane leaks on public lands in September, and the EPA is in the process of rolling back regulations for new drilling.

Methane leaks from well sites and pipelines undermine the industry’s argument that natural gas can help the country shift to a cleaner economy. A recent study estimated that 13 million metric tons of natural gas — enough to fuel 10 million homes — is lost through leaks each year. That’s roughly 2 percent of all natural gas produced in the country.

Leaking natural gas also poses numerous health risks. It contains benzene and a slew of other hazardous pollutants and volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to increased cancer risk and respiratory illnesses. An Earthworks report found that some 750,000 asthma attacks in children are attributable to smog from oil and gas pollution nationally. It estimated that 12.6 million people live within a half mile of an oil and gas facility.

Pagel said that as long as oil and gas companies are in business, strict regulations, such as those to decrease methane emissions, are required to protect public health and the environment.

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

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Mozambique braces for ‘extremely dangerous’ Cyclone Idai

by GabrielBJQ Posted on March 14, 2019

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A major port city on the coast of southeast Africa is bracing for a direct hit from a powerful tropical cyclone — in a situation the World Meteorological Organization has called a “potential worst case scenario.”

Cyclone Idai is targeting Beira, Mozambique, a booming city of about 500,000 people. The storm packs sustained winds of 115 mph and threatens a month’s worth of rainfall for an already waterlogged region — the makings of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. Meteorologists have called the conditions “extremely dangerous.” So far, blurry social media videos during landfall convey eerie sounds of wind and rain and crashing metal.

In Mozambique and neighboring Malawi, 122 people have died in cyclone-related rains according to a U.N. briefing issued on Thursday, making Idai the deadliest extreme weather event on Earth so far in 2019. More than a million people have already been directly affected by the disaster.

U.N. officials have spent much of the week preparing communities for the worst, which may still be ahead. Government authorities in Mozambique have ordered a coastal evacuation and raised the national alert level to “institutional code red,” its highest state of emergency.

Idai is the strongest tropical cyclone — the generic meteorological term for a hurricane or typhoon — to approach Mozambique since 2000, and the strongest to affect Beira in at least 56 years.

In Beira, residents have been working for years to prepare for a storm like Idai, building retention ponds for floodwaters and trying to focus the city’s growth on higher elevation neighborhoods. But Mozambique is one of the most disaster-prone countries in Africa, and climate change is increasing the severity of flooding events there — as it is nearly everywhere.

That, in combination with the fact that 40 percent of the city lies just three feet or less above sea level, means that Idai could be a huge disaster. In the days before landfall, meteorologists predicted Idai’s storm surge could be as high as 26 feet.

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Mozambique braces for ‘extremely dangerous’ Cyclone Idai

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Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike

by OrvilleMcfall Posted on March 14, 2019

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Young people around the globe are gearing up for the International Youth Climate Strike on Friday, March 15. Students at tens of thousands of schools are expected to leave their classes and take the streets to demand world leaders act on climate change.

The global movement started last year when Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, who was just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, began a solo protest calling for climate change action by holding up handmade signs outside her country’s Parliament every Friday. Thunberg’s actions sparked the hashtag #FridaysForFuture — now a worldwide youth climate movement.

Following last month’s massive youth walkouts in Europe, the March 15 Youth Climate Strike will now bring the school-based environmental action stateside. According to the U.S. website for the strike, the students’ demands include a Green New Deal that will prioritize communities most impacted by climate change, a 100 percent renewable energy target by 2030, and comprehensive education on the impacts of climate change.

“It’s important to talk about what climate change does to marginalized communities, and what it could do to your community,” said Isra Hirsi, one of the U.S. co-leaders of the walkout who also happens to be the 16-year-old daughter of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. “I think that’s a really great way to get more people involved.”

As united as Friday’s protests will be in their call for meaningful climate action, the reasons young people have for participating are also grounded in their regions’ unique climate concerns. Grist reached out to Youth Climate Strike organizers around the country to get a sense on why they’re participating and how climate change is impacting their communities.

The following quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

Image courtesy of Aditi Narayanan

Aditi Narayanan, 16 – Phoenix, AZ

I have seen the impact of climate change on my community members, such as extreme heat and lack of trees in urban, more low-income, majority-POC areas in South Phoenix. Extreme heat, lack of water, the use of solar energy, and fracking are all huge issues on the Arizona state legislature’s plate right now.

Solar energy is one I care about most, as Arizona is so capable of using solar energy, but big energy companies are disincentivizing consumers from using solar, and in turn promoting fossil fuels. [Adults here] have had mixed responses, but, disregarding some not-so-nice online comments, most have been nothing but supportive.

Chelsea Li, 18 – Seattle, WA

Here in North Seattle, we definitely are more concerned about the issue compared to other parts of the country. But it’s kind of ironic — we have a fairly privileged perspective. Even though we emit the most greenhouse gases with our lifestyles, we’re not the ones who are most impacted compared to people living on islands that are going to flood or need to be relocated, or climate refugees. I feel like, even though — our community, even in Seattle, does care about the issue, the amount of caring doesn’t match the amount it’s talked about.

Climate change will be brought up in classes, of course, but outside of that, no — it’s weird, to me it’s such a pressing issue! Why isn’t everyone talking about it all the time? I don’t feel like it’s talked about that much. Not only at my school, but outside of that in the greater community either.

Image courtesy of Athena Fain

Athena Fain, 15 – Seattle, WA

These past couple weeks have been spent going to a lot of club meetings, trying to spread the word [about the strike] at my school. I want the strike to be a diverse movement because marginalized people get left out of climate movement, so I’ve been going to the Black Student Union, the Human Rights Club, the Gay-Straight Alliance, and telling them about it.

For me, it’s not just me trying to protect my future, it’s trying to protect my [present]. I’ve been doing climate activism for five years. People in government and people who have power in society, they’re not taking the proper actions. I care about the environment and nature and I love the world around me but the biggest thing I care about is humans. I want us not only to be able to survive but to prosper. If we allow this to continue, that won’t be an option.

Nadja Goldberg, 15 – San Francisco, CA

(Goldberg was one of the students who gathered to ask California Senator Dianne Feinstein to support the Green New Deal. She and the group will be marching from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to Feinstein’s office. She says students plan to put sticky notes on either the politicians’ doors or the doors of the building.)

We were there with a small group of people on a Friday, and now we are coming back with thousands. I hope.

Image courtesy of Virginia Gaffney

Virginia Gaffney, 19 – Austin, TX

Texas summers have been getting progressively warmer every year for longer than my entire lifetime. It’s getting to the point where we’re breaking 110, 115 degrees F during the day. We’re going way too long without rain so everything is evaporating, but then it gets caught in the coastal winds because Texas has a significant coastline. It’s all being pushed away. So there are areas that are getting flooded and areas that have been in a drought for a decade.

Texas covers just about every major biome. We have Hill Country, coastal plains, forest, desert, marshland. Because of that [climatic] divide and [with half the state] getting too much rain and the other no rain at all, Texas faces the unique problem of not being able to make any direct action at the legislative level so far because when you tell the Eastern half we need to do something about the drought, they say, ‘What drought?’ And when you tell the Western half of the state, ‘Hey, we need to do something about the flooding, they say, ‘What flooding.’

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Melissa Patterson, 20, Portland, OR

For some students, leaving school for one day is a very taxing ask, so there are some concerns about unexcused absences during the walkout — although, that is what makes the event so powerful. This is a global movement encouraging young people to advocate for a safe future, so in perspective, many young people are eager to miss a day of school to participate. Portland Community College has been receptive to the idea, and local high schools have also been generally cooperative in allowing us to promote the strike.

It has been challenging to get this movement the momentum it deserves in the U.S. In other countries, it has really taken off. Considering the enormous role our country plays in climate change, the success of this event and future events involved with this movement is vital to the future of young generations.

Image courtesy of Shania Hurtado

Shania Hurtado, 16 – Houston, TX

I live in Houston and recently, in 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated our city. It was a time when my family and my friends were in a state of fear. It was terrible. This is truly why I’m striking. It’s why I’m organizing the strike. It’s something that affects me personally and we have the power to prevent and we should do something about it.

Climate very rarely comes up in the classroom. It’s come up on occasion. Ninety-nine percent of the research I’ve done on climate change, I’ve done on my own. The school system was very lacking. If schools were involved in teaching climate change then we wouldn’t have this doubt and we wouldn’t have this negligence we have today. That’s one of the biggest parts. Education is power.

With that being said, Texas is strong. We are all so very passionate. Especially because Texas has so much oil and gas, it’s important that we acknowledge this. We really believe that we can make this change as long as our voices are united in one single front.

Gudrun Campbell. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Stark.

Gudrun Campbell, 11 – Charlottesville, VA

I’m choosing to participate because time is running out. We have 11 years to save our planet, and it’s the only planet we have. We cannot spend precious time, of which we have too little, in silence. We must fight for our futures if others will not.

The main local issues are stopping the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and Mountain Valley Pipeline and divesting from fossil fuels. I think stopping the pipelines is important because it’s a way to combat the fossil fuel industry at a more local level and in an achievable and impactful way. The pipelines have also raised issues of environmental racism.

My parents have been pretty supportive from the start. I think I first started getting into environmental activism when my teacher showed us a video of Greta Thunberg giving a speech. She told a room full of adults that they were acting like children. When I got home I showed the video to my parents, and a few weeks later, my mom showed me an article about Alexandria Villaseñor and the school strike, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’

Sabirah Mahmud

Sabirah Mahmud, 16 – Philadelphia, PA

“It’s really important for every single student in America to have their voice heard. [There are] definitely barriers. People tell us that we can’t change climate change because we’re just kids. Of course, we know we can’t vote but we still have a voice. We still have the ability to stand up for something. We need to stand up for our right to protect our future, and I’m just baffled. It’s often very discouraging.

The strike isn’t just an opportunity to leave school or to walk out, it’s an opportunity to make change. All my life I’ve been asked, ‘What are you going to do in the future? What are you gonna do when you grow up?’ I can’t really think about the future with all this. It’s really ironic. That’s why it’s really important for this to happen, not only just Philadelphia but everywhere. Because we are the young people, the next generation and we need to take action now.”

Image courtesy of Kendall Greene

Kendall Greene, 17 – Atlanta

I’m striking for my future, for the air that I breathe, for the land that my grandparents have been living on, and for the land that my children, I hope, can live on.

I’m really passionate about food and food justice and specifically how marginalized communities are impacted by food and food scarcity and food security (and lack of food security). Just thinking about farmers in Georgia and how they recently dealt with a drought last year and the year before with peaches and pecans. I just don’t know what that looks like long term for farmers and people that rely on that mode of work, being in the South, being in Georgia. I’m really passionate about a lot of the organic farms here and locally-owned farms. I prefer to get my food from farmers markets, and I’m worried about how they’ll be impacted if climate catastrophe is on the way.

The adults in my life have been supportive [of my striking]. My mom has been really supportive. We’re about to go to a talk at a church about the morality of climate change tonight. At my school, they’ve been incredibly supportive — one of my teachers actually introduced this movement to me. I’m the leader of our sustainability group, “The Green Team,” and they’re hosting their own strike during lunch. But I want to connect the whole city of Atlanta at the Capitol.

Additional reporting by Eve Andrews,  Justine Calma, Teresa Chin, Eric Holthaus, Nathanael Johnson, Naveena Sadasivam, Zoe Sayler, Nikhil Swaminathan, and Claire Thompson.

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Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike

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The best zingers from Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee

by MadelineLiddell Posted on March 14, 2019

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Kids don’t get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for skipping school — with the exception of Greta Thunberg. The 16-year-old climate activist has been playing hooky every Friday since last August to protest outside Sweden’s parliament building.

On Friday, hundreds of thousands of students inspired by Thunberg are expected to walk out of class as part of the worldwide Youth Climate Strike.

“We have proposed Greta Thunberg because if we do nothing to halt climate change it will be the cause of wars, conflict, and refugees,” Norwegian politician Freddy André Øvstegård told international news agency AFP. “Greta Thunberg has launched a mass movement which I see as a major contribution to peace.”

Thurnberg is among some 300 candidates for the 2019 prize, the Guardian reports. There’s a precedent for the Nobel Peace Prize going to a courageous teen who speaks truth to power: The 2014 prize was given to Malala Yousafzai, 17 years old at the time, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt and advocates for girls’ education.

Over the past half year, Thunberg has been taking world leaders to task over climate inaction with blunt, fiery speeches. Here are some of the best moments:

“For way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer,” Thunberg told the crowd at a school strike in Antwerp, Belgium this month. “We are striking because we have done our homework and they have not.”
Thunberg became the icon of the United Nations climate talks in Katowice, Poland, in December. Not that she was too impressed by them. “I expected it to be more action and less talking — it’s mostly just small-talking,” she said during the event. “This is an amazing opportunity. But if it continues the way it is now, we are never going to achieve anything.”
At the end of the climate talks, Thunberg delivered a firecracker speech condemning inaction. “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you’re stealing their future in front of their very eyes,” she told the gathered leaders.
The activist took another swipe at the global elite during a rousing speech in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories,” Thunberg said at the World Economic Forum. “But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag.” Ouch.
Thunberg showed off her knack for metaphor, too. “Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around — we can still fix this,” she said in Davos. “I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”

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The best zingers from Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee

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Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

by CiaraPikegestwd Posted on March 14, 2019

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After a handful of trips across the country, a few shaky Facebook live streams, 10 angst-ridden, stream-of-consciousness Medium posts, at least one trip to the dentist, and a Vanity Fair cover about wanting to be “in it,” Beto O’Rourke is now … in it.

Last night, the former congressman from Texas confirmed to an El Paso TV station that he is running for the White House, and then made the official announcement on Twitter this morning.

In the launch video, O’Rourke called voters “the last great hope of Earth” and said that we’re in a “moment of maximum peril and maximum potential.”

“Perhaps, most importantly of all, because our very existence depends on it, we can unleash the ingenuity and creativity of millions of Americans who want to ensure that we squarely confront the challenge of climate change before it’s too late,” he said.

So what does his presidential bid mean for the environment and tackling climate change? It’s complicated. First, the good news: O’Rourke is no climate denier. Even in deep-red Texas, O’Rourke, who had no name recognition nationally until he launched a grassroots, seat-of-your-pants campaign against Senator Ted Cruz in 2017, was clear from the get-go that climate change is real, that it’s happening now and humans are driving it. O’Rourke also sports a lifetime score of 95 from the League of Conservation Voters.

In his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Cruz, climate change was rarely part of the discussion. Over two debates, Cruz and O’Rourke clashed over energy and climate just once. In response to a question about ExxonMobil acknowledging climate change, O’Rourke said, “Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, we should be able to listen to the scientists.”

In Texas, campaigns are awash in money from Big Oil, and his campaign was no different. Last year, he was taken off a list of politicians who’d signed a “No Fossil Fuel Money” pledge, after he received $430,000 from people working in the oil and gas industry. Three-fourths of the donations were larger than $200 and 29 of them were from oil and gas executives.

When he traveled to parts of Texas dependant on fossil fuel extraction during his Senate campaign, O’Rourke promoted fracking as fundamental to national security. In the heart of the Permian Basin, for instance, he told the Midland Reporter-Telegram that he didn’t want the United States to be dependent on other countries for energy but that fracking should be done “in a responsible, safe way that does not jeopardize the environment.” At a debate with Cruz, he called the decision between renewables and fossil fuels “a false choice.”

Environmental advocates have also been troubled by a handful of votes in favor of the oil and gas industry during his time in Congress. O’Rourke was one of few Democrats in the House to vote to lift the ban on oil exports in 2015. And he backed a Republican bill to fast-track natural gas exports and opposed a bill to limit offshore drilling.

Maybe this campaign will be different. There’s the prominent mention of climate change in the launch video, along with his support for the Green New Deal. In an interview with BuzzFeed last month, O’Rourke said that it’s “the best proposal that I’ve seen to ensure that this planet does not warm another 2 degrees C, after which we may lose the ability to live in places like El Paso.”

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Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

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The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement

by MeridithShade5 Posted on March 13, 2019

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Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.

If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.

“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, with consequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.

This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.

Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom are indigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.

The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.

These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.

And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.

As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

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The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement

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New York City public schools will adopt ‘Meatless Mondays’

by cherihomer74079 Posted on March 13, 2019

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Bye-bye, sloppy joes. Hello, tofu! Earlier this week New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that starting next school year, New York City’s public school lunchrooms will not serve meat on Mondays.

“Cutting back on meat a little will improve New Yorkers’ health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement (which was released, naturally, on a Monday.) “We’re expanding Meatless Mondays to all public schools to keep our lunch and planet green for generations to come.”

The New York City school district is the nation’s largest and includes more than 1,800 schools and  1.1 million students. The city’s “Meatless Monday” effort started out as a pilot program in 15 Brooklyn schools, where it proved to be both cost-effective and popular with students.

The fact that kids in NYC are down to munch on vegetarian or vegan meals once per week isn’t really a shocker; plant-based diets are more common among young people. Plus, the younger generation is pretty riled up about climate change, and there is no shortage of evidence that large-scale meat production plays a significant role in greenhouse gas emissions.

“Reducing our appetite for meat is one of the single biggest ways individuals can reduce their environmental impact on our planet,” said Mark Chambers, Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, in a statement. “Meatless Mondays will introduce hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers to the idea that small changes in their diet can create larger changes for their health and the health of our planet.”

New York Public Schools is not the first district to adopt the policy — more than 100 other districts across the country have also signed on. So, so long, Monday mystery meat! You will not be missed.

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New York City public schools will adopt ‘Meatless Mondays’

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