Wednesday, October 30, 2019
"Our rage has to burn as
fiercely as every fire we witness. And we're going to keep sitting in and
striking until our leaders feel it too."
Over 50 young climate
activists from California staged a sit-in at the Capitol Office of Nancy Pelosi
on Wednesday, chastising the Democratic Speaker of the House for failing to act
boldly on climate even as their home state is engulfed by wildfires made worse
by the planetary crisis.
After taking over Sen. Dianne
Feinstein's (D-Calif.) office earlier in the day, the climate activists from
the Sunrise Movement proceeded to Pelosi's office where they displayed signs
reading "What Is Your Plan?" and sang "Which Side Are You
On?"
"Democratic leadership is
failing to treat this like the emergency that it is," organizer Claire
Tacherra-Morrison said in a statement. "Business-as-usual is killing
us."
Several young people shared
their personal stories and pleas for Pelosi to back bold climate action which
could drastically reduce and eventually eliminate climate-warming carbon
emissions.
Firefighters across the state,
one protester said, "are trying to contain some of the fastest-moving
fires that we've seen in the West Coast" while Pelosi is "putting the
lives of Californians and U.S. citizens in continued and escalating danger by
not rising to meet the active dangers posed by climate change."
According to climate
scientists, the warming of the planet that's been accelerated by the hundreds
of billions of tons of carbon released each year by oil and gas
companies is making extreme weather changes and events more frequent, leading
to a longer wildfire season in California.
"We have fires all the
time in Los Angeles," Mayor Eric Garcetti told Democracy Now! recently.
"But our ability to knock them in past years was much stronger because we
didn't have these extreme shifts of wind, we didn't have these extreme shifts
of weather."
Scientists say the climate
crisis has made the state's wildfires five times as dangerous, the Sunrise
Movement tweeted on Wednesday.
To truly serve Californians
who for three years in a row have watched as wildfires burned through thousands
of acres in their state, Pelosi must back a Green New Deal, the Sunrise
Movement said.
Thanks to the grassroots
group's pressure campaign, more than 100 members of
Congress have signed on as co-sponsors to Green New Deal legislation,
the 10-year plan to transition to 100 percent renewable energy.
But Pelosi has not committed
to holding a vote on the proposal and has not endorsed it herself.
Pelosi and all other members
of Congress must support the Green New Deal, the Sunrise Movement says, or risk
being voted out by young voters like those who took part in the Global Climate
Strike in September and whose participation in the 2018 election was 79
percent higher than four years prior.
"Our rage has to burn as
fiercely as every fire we witness—for the retiree who's lost their entire life
savings, for the family forced to evacuate from a home they may never come back
to, for the child suffocating in smoke miles away," said Varshini Prakash,
co-founder of Sunrise. "And we're going to keep sitting in and striking
until our leaders feel it too."
"We're putting
Congressional Democrats on notice," added Tacherra-Morrison. "If you
don't stand up for us, we'll vote you out in 2020."
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