A New Generation of Climate Leaders Is Our Last Hope

It is not a great time for anyone concerned with the climate. On Feb. 12, the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency swept away its endangerment finding, wishing away the scientific understanding that burning fossil fuels is harmful to human health and eliminating the mechanism to limit the emissions that are transforming earth systems. 

Winter storms walloped North America as the Arctic, which has warmed four times faster than the global average, is no longer able to contain the frigid air of its polar vortex. Yet the Western United States also had the hottest winter on record, leaving little snowpack behind that might buffer the chance of megafires in the summer. The lack of snow seems almost trivial compared to the black rain that fell on Iran when Israel bombed oil facilities that billowed out toxic pollutants. In the first two weeks of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, an estimated five million tons of greenhouse gas emissions were unleashed, equivalent to a mid-sized nation’s annual contribution to warming the planet.

The climate crisis is no longer a distant warning but our terrifying reality. A new generation of activists may be our last, best hope.

I have reported on the environment and climate for 20 years—from Delhi to Nairobi to West Texas—and the litany of disasters can be exhausting. Born in 1970, my life has paralleled the emergence of the climate crisis. That year—looking back—was a high point of hope for the planet. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, teamed up with Republican Senator Pete McCloskey from California, and the activist Denis Hayes to launch the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. They envisioned youth-led action for the environment, drawing inspiration from student anti-war protests. Soon after, President Richard Nixon’s Republican administration established the Environmental Protection Agency and enacted robust environmental legislation such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. 

The year I became a legal adult, in 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen warned Congress of the grave consequences of a changing climate.“It is already happening now,” he warned. 

His message was almost heeded. President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, had just pledged to work toward a global treaty on global warming. But free marketeers and fossil fuel companies had too much to lose and applied just the right amount of pressure to keep the U.S. from acting. 

The moment passed. Time passed. 

Babies were born and grew into adults. I was a recent graduate from journalism school in 2006, the year Al Gore, in his film An Inconvenient Truth, launched himself up in a scissor lift in order to reach the soaring spot on a graph showing how high and quickly levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen. The film proved as popular in conservative suburban enclaves as it did in hipster Brooklyn. Still, emissions went up.

In the 20 years since then, public interest in the state of the climate has waxed and waned. Climate fatigue is real, and rising authoritarianism commands attention worldwide, sucking the oxygen out of living rooms and newsrooms even as carbon dioxide continues to choke the atmosphere. But climate change is not going away, and I believe it will prove to be the story of the 21st century. Even now, the climate crisis is a silent partner in all sorts of blockbuster headlines. As the Trump Administration invaded Venezuela and threatened Greenland in a grab for resources. As data centers fueling Artificial Intelligence demand more electricity and more water. As a water crisis fomented unrest in Iran, where protesters demanded, “Water, electricity, life––our basic right.” 

Rob Nixon, a professor at Princeton, coined the term “slow violence” for climate change and other disasters that unfold unrushed over time and place, often far from cameras and newsfeeds. But the pace is quickening. It used to be someone else’s problem, in some other place. Another country. Another state. A future shock, to be dealt with eventually.

Now it’s happening to almost all of us as climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” not only posing security risks to nation states and financial risks to businesses large and small, but also making our floods and famines, our hurricanes and tornadoes, more frequent and more fatal. Entire towns now vanish overnight from wildfires. Communities that have already lived through multiple floods quiver with collective PTSD during each hard rain. Wars over fossil fuels burn more fossil fuels and lead to more wars.

The weather is not climate, but it often reflects it, and the weather is getting weirder. Just as surely as the fact that I began writing this from the floor of a warming center, charging up since I, like 230,000 others in Massachusetts, lost power to a record-breaking blizzard, complete with thundersnow. 

What’s coming to your town?

When tomorrow becomes today

The thing about future shock is that we are always living our way into the future. Tomorrow becomes today, becomes yesterday. Carbon levels ascend unabated. The dire predictions of sea level rise and melting ice caps—some of them made by fossil fuel companies in the 1960s—are playing out, some sooner than scientists had thought. And despite NASA scientist Hansen’s use of the word “now” in Congress 38 years ago, the public has been able to keep alive the alluring myth that climate change is distant not only in place, but also in time. 

Government reports littered with future dates didn’t help. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body for assessing climate science, warned that we had until 2030 to nearly halve global carbon emissions if there was any hope of staying within the 1.5 degree Celsius range of warming that would keep the planet behaving the way humans have become accustomed to for the last 10,000 years. We briefly reached 1.5 degrees of warming last year. We had until 2050 to reach net zero, when humans would no longer be tipping the carbon cycle out of its natural balance. We are not even close. The year 2100 is frequently mentioned, but little after that, as though time will stop at the end of the century. It won’t.

There is an entire generation of children running around today who will be alive in 2100. My Gen X yielded to  Millennials who yielded to Gen Z. And here come Alpha, Beta, Zoomers. With the birth of each generation, more greenhouse gas emissions trap more heat and oceans rise, weather gets more extreme, and tipping points arrive. Welcome to your warming world, child.

Passing the torch of climate action

Those who sounded the alarm early have gotten long in the tooth. Al Gore surely has a draft obituary on file at every major publication, and the climatologist James Hansen, who was so alarmed by the science that he became an activist, wrote a book dedicated to his grandchildren 16 years ago.

I find hope in activists who have gone before me, but even more so in our youth. For the last few years, I have researched the lives of teenage climate activists from around the globe for a graphic novel on climate change. Talking with these activists and learning about the organizations they have founded to create the world they want to inhabit as adults gives me more than hope. While Donald Trump breaks things, they are building. Their activism gives me a renewed sense of energy and purpose. I think of the phrase, “strength for the journey,” by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was only 26-years-old when he was tapped to lead the famed bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. 

This new generation of climate activists is picking up the torch, now lit by LED. They recognize they have a life-and-death stake in the climate system they will be inhabiting for longer than anyone in my generation. Some of them are the children and grandchildren of those who have gone before. People like Sophie Kivlehan, James Hansen’s granddaughter, who served as a youth plaintiff in the landmark Juliana vs U.S. government. Although dismissed last year, the case argued that the government was violating the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failing to protect critical public trust resources. 

In Pennsylvania, Ashley Funk served as a youth plaintiff in more than one climate lawsuit, and now her daughter is a claimant, suing Pennsylvania for permitting what would become America’s largest gas-fired power plant, locking in emissions for her lifetime. When lawyers from Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed the suit, the child was 10 months old; Yet another claimant was just eight weeks old. There are thousands of climate lawsuits happening around the world, many of them filed on behalf of the rights of youth to a viable future. 

Another second-generation activist is Xiye Bastida, the daughter of a couple who met in 1992 at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when they were young people advocating for environmental action. Bastida was one of the key organizers of the 2019 Climate Strike that brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets of New York City. It was another moment when the public was prioritizing action, partly inspired by the strike of Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg, that would find a foothold under the Biden Administration. 

Around the country and the globe, indignant young people are taking to the streets and the courts as the policies of grey-haired men repeatedly fail them. They are pulling every lever they can reach with their young hands.  

Speaking up in left-behind America 

In this time of climate hushing, when fewer and fewer leaders are talking about climate change, lawsuits and civil disobedience are key ways for citizens to demonstrate they want action. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who are alarmed by climate change has nearly doubled, even as the U.S. under the “drill-baby-drill” Trump Administration finds new ways to quash renewable energy projects and burn more fossil fuels. 

The rest of the world, meanwhile, moves forward. The fastest-growing solar energy market is now in Africa. China’s carbon emissions have plateaued as it briskly ramps up renewable energy systems. Even India, stubborn about its right to use its coalfields to develop its nation, is constructing some of the world’s largest solar farms.  

Lawsuits and activism might be necessary in the U.S. to drive policy back toward action. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist of my generation, has argued persuasively that “We can’t give in to despair. We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act, and that hope begins with a conversation today.” 

Even the radical act of simply having a conversation expressing your concern to a neighbor can be effective. Perhaps a young person will overhear it. 

Or perhaps they will be the ones to start it. Will you be listening? Will you act? Or is the rally cry for climate action doomed to recur every Earth Day for generations to come?