Excerpt:
Some young climate activists who were galvanized under Donald Trump’s first presidency are taking a different approach to his second.
The youth climate movement that formed under the first Trump presidency is gearing up for his second.
Activists in groups like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour and Fridays for Future have pushed for the Biden administration to step up climate action before its exit next month: They want land protected as national monuments, permits denied for liquid natural gas projects, funds allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down for good.
After the inauguration, they’ll retrench. They might ease off the mass marches and school strikes that built their platform, while refining new strategies like focusing on state politics, reducing the use of fossil fuels at a local level, and re-energizing the country to elect climate-conscious leaders.
The youth climate movement, which widely defines itself as people under 35, celebrated the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in U.S. history. Among other things, it created a conservation-focused job corps for young people.
But the movement also ran into real-world obstacles: a pandemic, disagreements over how to address climate change, and simply the passage of time.
“What always makes this movement so difficult to maintain is that they don’t remain children,” said Viktoria Spaiser, an associate professor in sustainability research at the University of Leeds who has studied the youth climate movement. “They become adults and necessarily move on in different activities, so they can’t maintain the claim that they’re the youth” indefinitely.
The 2018 child activists who were in middle and high school are now in their 20s, moving through college and into their careers. They’re facing the conflict so many generations before them have grappled with: how to balance the scales between hope and despair.
“Covid was a really dark time and made us all slow down and face things,” said Jamie Margolin, the former executive director of Zero Hour. “I’m trying to fight my own cynicism and find a place to actually do the work because who everyone got to know, me at 17, is not the same person I am now…”
