While Kaliko Teruya was on her way home from her hula lesson on August 8, her father called. The apartment in Lahaina is gone, he said, and he’s running for his life.
He’s trying to escape America’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century, an inferno in Hawaii fueled by high winds from a distant storm and largely unstoppable by the state’s weak defenses against natural disasters.
His father survived. But for Kaliko, 13, last week’s devastation strengthened his commitment to a cause that would come to define his generation.
“Fires are getting worse because of climate change,” he said. “How many more natural disasters need to happen before the elderly realize the urgency?”
Like a growing number of young people, Kaliko is involved in efforts to raise awareness about global warming and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, last year he and 13 other youth, ages 9 to 18, sued their home state, Hawaii, over its use of fossil fuels.
With active lawsuits in five states, TikTok videos that mix humor and outrage, and marches in the streets, it’s a movement that aims to shape policy, influence elections and shift a narrative that advocates often say it emphasizes climate disasters rather than the need to make the planet healthier and cleaner.
Young climate activists in the United States have not yet had the same impact as their counterparts in Europe, where Greta Thunberg has energized a generation. But during a summer with record heat, choking smoke from wildfires and now a hurricane bearing down on Los Angeles, young Americans and twenty-somethings who are concerned about the planet are taking it even more seriously. .
“We see what’s happening with climate change, and how it affects everything else,” said Elise Joshi, 21, the executive director of Gen-Z for Change, an organization she joined when she was in college. . “We’re experiencing a mixture of anger and fear, and we’re finally channeling it into hope in the form of collective action.”
The growing disillusionment of the youth vote with the Biden administration’s climate agenda is a wild card factor in next year’s presidential race. They are especially angry that President Biden, who promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period,” during his campaign, failed to keep that promise.
Young people are helping to organize a climate march in New York next month, during the United Nations General Assembly. And their force is felt even in deep states like Montana, where a judge on Monday gave the movement its biggest victory to date, ruling in favor of 16 youths who sued the state over support. its for the fossil fuel industry.
In that case, a long battle resulted in a surprise victory that means, at least for now, that the state must consider potential climate damage when approving energy projects.
“The fact that children are taking this action is unbelievable,” said Badge Busse, 15, one of the plaintiffs in the Montana case. “But it’s unfortunate that it had to come to us. We are the last resort.”
The mixture of pride and anger is not uncommon among young climate activists. Many are encouraged by what they see as the fight of their lives, but are also angry that adults are not seriously confronting a problem that has been well understood for decades now.
“Do you think I really want to stand up and say, like, ‘I have no future,'” said Mesina DiGrazia-Roberts, 16, another of the plaintiffs in the Hawaii case, who lives on Oahu. “As a 16-year-old who just wanted to live and hang out with my friends and eat good food, I didn’t want to do that. And yet, because I care about this world. I care about the Earth and I care about my family. I take care of my future children.”
In Hawaii’s case, young people have sued the state Department of Transportation on its use of fossil fuels, arguing that it violates their “right to a clean and healthy environment,” enshrined in the state Constitution. The state filed two motions to dismiss the case, but this month a judge set a test date for next year.
A nonprofit legal organization called Our Children’s Trust is behind the Montana and Hawaii cases, as well as active litigation in three other states. A similar case it brought to federal court, Juliana v. United States, was dismissed by an appeals court in 2020, days before it was scheduled to go to trial. But in June, a different judge ruled that the case could be retried proceed with the trial.
Vic Barrett, 24 and a resident of the Bronx, is one of the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States and became interested in climate change a decade ago after learning about it in an after-school program not long after Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage throughout the Northeast.
“I began to understand how low-income and Black and brown people in New York were disproportionately affected by Hurricane Sandy,” she said. “People like me are at the forefront of the climate crisis.”
“It’s absurd that while the Biden administration is celebrating this year’s one-year anniversary of the IRA, it is actively opposing Juliana and working to expand drilling on federal lands,” said Zanagee Artis, 23, who quit her job at Goldman Sachs to spent more time working at Zero Hour, a climate nonprofit he founded in high school.
Mr. Artis, who helped organize the youth climate march in 2018, is still sending people into the streets. Zero Hour is now recruiting people to attend the March to End Fossil Fuels, which will take place in New York in September. 17.
Chief among the frustrations of Mr. Artis and his team was the administration’s decision to approve Willow, a major drilling project in Alaska. Earlier this year, TikTok sparked calls for the White House to deny approvals for the project, pushing the issue into the mainstream and giving thousands of young people a common cause. The creators put together the pictures of Mr. Biden on crumbling glaciers, recorded tearful selfie videos and mashed up songs from “Encanto” with slide shows of cute animals.
Their efforts failed. In March, the administration approved Willow, which is slated to produce crude oil for another 30 years. But the #StopWillow campaign, which has garnered more than 500 million views on TikTok, has shown that passionate youth can shape the national debate.
“It’s still a win,” said Ms. Joshi, who posted the first #StopWillow video on TikTok. “Millions of people are talking about why a project in remote Alaska is important to our health,” he said. “That base building will be used for future campaigns.”
Throughout the movement, there is an effort to combat “climate nihilism,” the fatalistic acceptance that nothing can stop runaway global warming. That sentiment, captured in the phrase “OK Doomer,” contributes to the slow pace of development, they maintain.
Turning the fear and frustration many young people experience into positive action is a major goal of Wanjiku Gatheru, 24, who founded an organization called Black Girl Environmentalists that works to get more young people of color involved in the movement.
“Fear doesn’t move people toward sustainable action,” Ms. Gather. “Providing solutions in the middle of a discussion of a problem helps engage people.”
Enthusiasm for the climate movement is spreading in surprising ways. A group of young techno optimists who eschew doomerism embrace the label “Decarb Bros.” And among Republicans, millennials and members of Gen Z are more likely than their elders to believe that humans are warming the planet and support efforts to reduce emissions, according to the Pew Research Center. Overall, about 62 percent of young voters support phasing out fossil fuels entirely, according to Pew.
In Maui, Kaliko and her family are trying to recover from the second natural disaster in five years. In 2018, a flash flood from Hurricane Olivia destroyed their home on the northern tip of the island. Now, the fire.
“We really need adults to wake up,” he said. “If we don’t fix it now, there won’t be a future.”
