Climate Strikes

While the economic future is a bit unpredictable even in normal times, there are plenty of indications that American workers will be facing unemployment at historic levels for many months or even years to come.

On March 19, New York activist and student Erik Forman wrote, “I spent some of today doing deliveries with a volunteer crew of unemployed Uber drivers, mostly to elderly people living in public housing developments.” He asked for a small amount of funds to continue this work and scale it up, and “build momentum for emergency funds to pay for home delivery of meals as a public utility in the crisis.”

The coronavirus pandemic threatens all of us. People are scared, and rightly so. But when we look to our government officials and employers, whose responsibility it is to provide protection in an emergency, what do we find? In the words of the National Nurses United – a union whose members are risking their lives every day on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic — “Federal, state, local, and employer efforts to fight the coronavirus” are “outrageous” and “ineffective.”

In May 2019, Greta Thunberg and 46 other youth climate activists from around the world issued a call for adults to join the youth climate strikes. They demanded that governments “immediately provide a safe pathway to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming.” Emissions must drop rapidly “so that by the time we will be in our mid- and late-20s we are living in a completely transformed world.”

This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on the Future of Climate Strikes. It describes how the determined action of one young woman – and the determination of millions of other youth to act on climate — led within a year to a Global Strike for Climate with more than seven million participants.