Jeff Biggers at Salon writes—Climate Strike: Youth activism is giving their parents' generation a second chance. I've been writing about climate change for 20 years. But my teenage sons have given my work a new meaning:
For 11 weeks this spring, my 14-year-old kid refused to go to school on Fridays, setting up a climate strike picket line in front of his school district building or the city hall in Iowa City, Iowa, where we live. A handful of other students joined him, including his older brother, as did a cadre of activist “grannies.” The numbers picked up when former NFL football star and local school alumni Tim Dwight showed up with a solar-powered sound system.
Inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, who launched the strikes a year ago, the kids quickly joined a global network of climate strikers from Iowa to New York to Uganda to India and Australia.
In the end, my sons' weekly persistence paid off: The school district, which initially dismissed their efforts and told them to do something "productive," has agreed to pass a climate resolution that commits to dramatically reducing CO2 emissions and enacting a climate curriculum. The local city council members, who once proudly defended their toothless climate plan, have agreed to update it and fall in line with the exigencies of a climate emergency.
The students’ success in cracking business-as-usual policies should not be minimized. The climate strikes managed to accomplish more than any endless meetings or committees or recent movements by adults; they completely changed the climate narrative in our burg and forced adults to recognize the climate crisis as an emergency.
They accomplished this by reclaiming an old tactic that would have made my grandfather — a coal miner in the militant Progressive Miners Union — proud of his progeny: An uncompromising strike, with clear demands, and a fierce sense of urgency that made it clear they would never back down. [...]
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“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
~~Theodore Roosevelt, Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—What would 62 mpg give Americans? 700,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars in their pockets:
The Obama administration has already established a standard 35.5 mile-per-gallon fuel-efficiency average for cars, light trucks and SUVs manufactured in 2016 and beyond. The discussion now is over how much the standard should be increased to by 2025. The administration has slated an announcement on its decision about this for September.
Eco-advocates are seeking a 62-mpg standard. The big car companies, including GM, the one that taxpayers still own one-fourth of, are aghast. It's the usual whine, which comes down to the usual claim: no-can-do, too-expensive, unsafe.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump's scatterbrained speech was the best argument yet that he's still alive. NЯA collapses, Gop frets. Next tariffs: cheese & booze. Why is Holocaust history important? Don't ask the Holocaust museum. Plus, peacearena on the real costs of “news deserts.”
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