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climate action
Young Climate Activists Are Fueling Hope and Winning Change
While we can’t count on certain stubborn politicians to save our only planet, we can count on the young people at the heart of the climate movement.
Sep 14, 2024
The past 20 years have been critical in the fight for bold and sustainable climate solutions. The next five years will be even more vital—and young people like me are fighting hard to make sure our leaders get it right.
Research shows we have about five years left to avert global warming beyond 1.5°C, the tipping point when even more severe climate disruptions could exacerbate hunger, conflict, and drought worldwide.
Climate change—long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil—impacts our livelihoods and our lives. It harms our health and well-being and threatens our access to vital resources, from water to food to housing.
We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got.
Communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are already paying the price for inadequate climate action. Pacific islands like Tuvalu are already sinking and expected to be completely submerged in coming years. Meanwhile, scientists predict that rising sea levels will leave 60% of Miami-Dade County under water by 2060.
While we can’t count on certain stubborn politicians to save our only planet, we can count on the young people at the heart of the climate movement.
The global youth-led climate movement has a long history of standing up to corporate giants and their political allies who exacerbate climate change. Despite failed attempts by some politicians to patronize, belittle, or discredit the teenagers and 20-somethings leading protests and driving policy demands, young climate activists are fueling hope—and winning change.
In June 2023, youth climate activists won a landmark lawsuit, Held v. Montana, when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional. Similar suits are underway in many other states.
Universities also have a prime role to play in encouraging students to practice sustainability and foster social change. At my university, Virginia Tech, students can participate in a Climate Action Living Laboratory (CALL), where they work with faculty and staff on sustainability projects and research, using our campus and surrounding community networks to work towards the university’s climate action goals.
In my Virginia Tech coursework, I got to harvest food for our dining facilities at our campus farm, compost on an Indigenous farm, visit a local community garden, and tour a food sorting facility—all while working closely with campus partners I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Across the country, institutions like Colorado State, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Dickinson College, Furman, and the University of Vermont have implemented living learning labs of their own. In addition to advancing sustainability initiatives, these labs combine disciplines and skills—and unite diverse groups of people—to incubate innovative climate solutions.
You can help us grow the movement, too. Consider supporting domestic climate activist youth movements in your local community and organizations like Sunrise D.C., a local branch of the youth climate organization where activists in the nation’s capital get involved at both the local and national level.
We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got. Join us.
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4 Signs of Hope in a Burning World
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale, but it must proceed very much faster.
Aug 21, 2024
The recent wildfires in Greece started on Sunday 11 August in Varnavas, 35 kilometres (22 miles) north of Athens. By the time they were brought under control three days later, they had reached the capital’s suburbs, having burnt through 25,000 acres of forest.
Though the fires fortunately did not get fully into Athens, it was a close call. Similar extreme weather events—whether wildfire, drought, storm, flood, or heat dome—are now seen on a near-daily basis somewhere around the world, and are often more intense than even a couple of decades ago. They are the most visible elements of climate change’s shift into climate breakdown.
We are also seeing clear worldwide changes. Last year was exceptionally hot—the hottest year since accurate weather records were first kept in the 1880s—but this year is perhaps more worrying. 2023 was an El Niňo year; one in which the sea surface temperature warms by 0.5°C above the long-term average. It’s a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to seven years and leads to temporary air temperature increases across much of the world in those years.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The problem is that El Niňo has been fading since February, yet the global pattern does not show the anticipated easing of temperatures. Instead, we are seeing the opposite; 15 national heat records have been broken so far this year, as have 130 monthly national temperature records. As Costa Rican climate historian Maximiliano Herrera told The Guardian: “Far from dwindling with the end of El Niňo, records are falling at even much faster pace compared to late 2023.”
In fact, June this year was the 13th month in a row to set a monthly global temperature record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, whose ERA5 satellite suggested that 22 July was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. The World Meteorological Organisation, meanwhile, has reported that at least 10 countries have already recorded temperatures above 50°C this year.
The implications are clear enough. We are heading for a global disaster at a level frequently warned of but even more frequently ignored—whether by politicians, business leaders, or others—while the fossil fuel industries and countries that exploit oil, gas, and coal continue to argue that the problem is grossly exaggerated.
More than 50 years ago, economic geographer Edwin Brooks, in a much-quoted remark, warned of “a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes.” His warning focused on economic inequalities and was made before the full impact of climate change was apparent, yet it is more timely than ever.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The task of avoiding this dystopic future is huge. Four years ago, a U.N. report identified the need to decrease carbon emissions by 7% a year until 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. They are still rising, and the need now is for an annual reduction of at least 10%.
It is a predicament that will require a third societal transition. The first was the farming revolution over several thousand years and the second was the industrial revolution, which started close to four centuries ago and is still under way. The third will be learning to live within the limits set by the capacity of the world’s ecosystem to handle human activity, initially by preventing climate breakdown, which must be achieved in mere decades.
But there are some signs of hope.
The first is that climate science has come on by leaps and bounds in the past 40 years and there is much greater confidence in its predictions. This means intergovernmental panels—which have tended to be overly cautious about not exaggerating the impact of the climate crisis, due to a need to work in consensus—will able to be far blunter in their statements.
Then there is the evidence just about everywhere that climate breakdown is happening. The third reason is that the first two will combine to inspire more activists, both young and old, to act. Many are willing to engage in nonviolent direct action despite elite determination to maintain the status quo through harsh legal measures.
There is a fourth reason for hope: the extraordinary way that rapidly improving technologies mean it is so often (and increasingly) much cheaper to use renewable energy than relying on fossil carbon energy sources.
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale. But it must proceed very much faster. Global net zero needs to be achieved by 2040, not 2050, and that means that richer states must aim for net zero by 2035 while providing funding to speed up the process right across the Global South. It is a huge task, but that is the way to prevent climate breakdown.
To put it in a wider context, three tasks face us all. The first is the most urgent: coming to terms with environmental limitations. The second is an evolution of the world economy to ensure a far more equal sharing of what we have, and the third is responding to security challenges without depending on the early use of military force.
It is a transformational task but thanks to the immediacy of climate breakdown there isn’t really any alternative. Luckily, for now, there is time to do it, just.
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Most People on Earth, Even in Petrostates, Want Quick Fossil Fuel Phaseout: Poll
"There can be no doubt that citizens across the world are saying to their leaders, you have to act and, above all, have to act faster," a U.N. official said. "This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on."
Jun 20, 2024
A large majority of the global population, including people who live in oil, gas, and coal producing countries, supports a fast transition to clean energy and a phaseout of fossil fuels, a poll released Thursday showed.
Across 77 countries, 72% of those surveyed supported a quick fossil fuel phaseout, while an even higher percentage, 80%, supported stronger climate action in general, according to the poll, called Peoples' Climate Vote and conducted for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) with the University of Oxford and GeoPoll.
"There can be no doubt that citizens across the world are saying to their leaders, you have to act and, above all, have to act faster," UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner toldThe Guardian. "This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on."
📣 Our #PeoplesClimateVote 2024 results are live! The world’s largest standalone public opinion survey on #ClimateChange.
The results are clear. People want more #ClimateAction, and they want it now.
Explore a world of views on the climate crisis: https://t.co/mJsEzN3NGy pic.twitter.com/2kwA4KcPnn
— UN Development (@UNDP) June 20, 2024
People in most major fossil fuel producing nations support a quick energy transition in their own countries, the poll showed. In the United States, the world's largest oil and gas producer, 53% supported either a "very" or "somewhat" quick phaseout; in Saudi Arabia, the second largest, 75% did so; and in China and India, the leading coal producers, the figures were 80% and 76%, respectively.
The poll also showed overwhelming support for transnational cooperation, even if it requires setting aside other differences: 86% of those surveyed said want countries to tackle climate change together. Steiner called this a "stunning" level of consensus.
Steiner noted that fossil fuel subsidies distort the market and subvert the public will for change.
"There are very narrow, self-interested agendas that maintain artificially inflated [profits] for fossil fuel-based industries that ultimately are coming at the cost of everyone," he said.
The poll—the largest standalone public opinion survey on climate change to date, building on a first edition that was run in 2021—clarifies the will of the global public and strengthens the moral case for climate action, commentators said.
"Brilliant to see clear, credible evidence that the overwhelming majority of people across the world—oil rentier economy or not—want to see transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy 'quickly,'" X user Dave Drabble wrote. "Let's not let oil and gas interests determine our fate."
Similarly rejecting the influence of fossil fuel interests, Steiner said, "It is so important we let the people speak for themselves."
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