Wei Zhou emigrated to the United States from Cambodia at the age of 13, fleeing the nuclear-devastated Southeast Asian country. By age 14, Zhou had begun volunteering with the Sunrise Movement, whose climate activism was based on a keen sense that the world’s great injustices — global warming, poverty, genocide — are all connected.
Now 17 and living in Chicago, Zhou is a national organizer for Sunrise, who has spoken to journalists on behalf of youth-led organizations and recently appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.). Zhou, who turns 18 two weeks before the November election, is eager to see former President Trump, a climate denier, defeated.
But when I spoke to Chou in July, they weren’t sure whether they would vote for Trump’s opponent.
“As a climate change activist, it’s hard for me to support Biden in good faith,” Zhou said.
Eleven days later, Biden announced he would not seek reelection, and everything changed.
Just as Kamala Harris, who quickly won Biden’s support and ultimately the Democratic nomination, re-energized the entire Democratic base, Harris inspired new enthusiasm among climate advocates young and old.
She accomplished this remarkable feat even as, as Biden’s vice president, she stood by and oversaw record oil and gas production while approving plans for a massive oil and gas project in Alaska, and even though some younger activists, aware of the severity of the climate crisis, felt she had not yet presented a bold plan for phasing out fossil fuels.
How did Harris pull off such a dramatic turnaround?
“I don’t think this is a huge change in the message. I think it’s a question of who’s delivering the message,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous said.
The Sierra Club has fully endorsed Biden from the start, but many other environmental groups have refrained from endorsing him.
It hardly mattered that Biden had pushed Congress through a landmark $370 billion climate and clean energy bill, protected federal lands as national monuments, established a job-training program called Climate Action and established a natural gas export terminal. Many younger climate activists felt a distinct lack of enthusiasm for an older candidate whose focus seemed elsewhere and who sounded weak in his debates with Trump.
Enter Harris. Not only is she younger and more energetic than Biden, she also has the .
As California’s attorney general, she prosecuted fossil fuel companies for ocean oil spills and leaking storage tanks that threatened groundwater, and investigated whether ExxonMobil violated the law by misleading the public about climate change. As a senator, she was a founding father of the Green New Deal and called for a ban on fracking (though she now says she will not ban fracking).
Politico reported that VP Harris has committed $15 billion to replacing lead drinking water pipes, a feat that speaks to her commitment to environmental justice: As a woman of color, she will bring a unique understanding to the White House about the importance of cleaning up air, water and soil, especially in marginalized and polluted communities, supporters say.
Even before she secured the nomination, Harris had garnered the support of progressive environmental groups that had not endorsed Biden, including the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of the Sunrise Movement, the Climate Justice Alliance and Greenpeace. Sunrise has not endorsed Harris, but its leaders are clearly ecstatic.
“She has a chance to be a historic president,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, communications director for the Sunrise Movement.
If given the opportunity, Harris should make the most of it.
Here are some inconvenient facts: As part of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, nearly 200 countries committed to trying to limit global temperature rise to well below 1.5°C. Anything beyond that could mean even worse things, including more deadly heatwaves, fires, and storms than we see today. Sadly, the planet recently finished its hottest 12 months on record.
This doesn’t mean we’re doomed, it just means that our chances of avoiding more than 1.5 degrees of warming in the long term are decreasing.
Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from industries like coal, oil and gas need to be drastically cut within the next six years to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. As one of the world’s biggest polluters, the United States has a lot of work to do.
And that will be impossible without decisive action from the next president, who will be elected to a term that runs until 2029.
“Momentum is the only really valuable thing we have, and if Trump comes to power that’s exactly what’s going to be lost,” said Bill McKibben, a prominent environmental activist who has worked to mobilize older environmentalists through the movement.
Younger voters understand momentum, too. They know what the stakes are.
But as spring turned to summer in 2024, many refused to endorse Biden, even as Trump loomed.
The CBS News poll was particularly surprising, finding that among voters under 30, the two candidates were nearly evenly matched on climate change, with 32% saying they preferred Biden’s approach to climate change and 31% saying they preferred Trump (37% said they were undecided). This is despite Trump’s efforts on climate change, air pollution protection and renewable energy during his first term.
Faced with a choice between Trump and Biden, why did young voters not rally to Biden?
They are not unconcerned about maintaining a livable planet.
For example, a recent survey concluded that climate issues are likely to influence the choice of most Americans in this November’s presidential election (37%), with roughly equal shares of younger and older voters saying climate issues could influence their decision. The survey also found that 70% of liberal Democrats were classified as “pro-climate.”
“Climate change has become one of the top priorities for the base of one of our two major political parties,” said Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale University Program on Climate Change Communications, which helped conduct the survey. “This is unprecedented.”
Those numbers help explain how the Inflation Control Act got passed. But in a cruel twist of fate for Biden, most people seem unfamiliar with the sweeping climate change bill he pushed through Congress over wholesale Republican opposition.
A Yale University survey that also included researchers from George Mason University found that only 35% of registered voters had heard “a lot” or “somewhat” about the climate change bill, and even among pro-climate change voters, only 47% had heard much about the bill.
The legislation’s lame name, the product of negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin III (R-Va.), probably didn’t help.
With an administration that doesn’t spend enough time touting its climate achievements and news organizations that don’t pay enough attention to the climate crisis, it’s harder to sell legislation whose name doesn’t resonate.
Obamacare, IRAs are not.
“We have the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and now the Curb Inflation Act,” joked climate comedian Esteban Gast. “They’re trying to sell it, and they’re saying, ‘Should we save the planet?’ And people are like, ‘Eh, that’s too partisan.’”
That said, even some very savvy young climate activists were relieved when Biden stepped down.
Simon Aron, an 18-year-old Los Angeles resident who graduated from high school in the spring, said he remembers watching the Biden-Trump debate with friends and being “frozen and very scared” that Biden would lose the election.
Aron first started thinking about global warming after the Woolsey Fire in 2018. He followed in his grandmother’s footsteps and spent several summers there. The following year, his family was ordered to evacuate during the wildfire.
“It took me a few years to realise that this wasn’t normal,” he said.
He began volunteering with Sunrise when he was 14. In July of this year, he visited Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s office in Washington, D.C., shortly after Trump selected Vance, a fellow climate change denier, as his Republican running mate.
But despite his anger toward Vance and Trump, Aron wants to hear more from Harris, how she plans to expand Biden’s climate agenda and what her vision is for fighting what he sees as injustice, including on climate change.
“I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris,” Aron said, “but many young people won’t vote for her unless she implements bold, progressive policies that include a ceasefire in Gaza, green jobs and investing in local communities.”
At this point, some of you are probably thinking, “What’s wrong with these kids? Don’t they know what’s good for them? Don’t they see how bad Trump is going to be for the climate and Gaza and all the other issues they claim to care about?”
But some of you may be nodding in sympathy with the idea that we have accepted the “enough” attitude of politicians for too long, that Biden’s withdrawal is a powerful sign that big things are possible, and that real change will only happen when we demand it.
Clearly, the world has changed over the summer, but some climate voters believe things might have been different even if Biden had maintained the status quo.
At least, that’s what some experts think.
Before Biden’s withdrawal, the advocacy group Climate Power (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) was gauging how well voters were responding to climate and clean energy messaging.
They found that in every state, providing information about Biden’s climate change record to 18-34 year old voters increased their approval rating, ranging from a minimum of 3 percentage points in North Carolina to a maximum of 9 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
For Heather Hargreaves, deputy executive director of campaigns at Climate Power, the poll confirmed her view that as elections approach and people start paying more attention to them, most climate-conscious voters tend to gravitate toward whoever the Democratic candidate is. The Willow oil project “has never had a huge amount of support,” she said.
Could other issues stop millions of young people who care about climate change from turning out to vote and defeating Trump? Hargreaves doesn’t think so.
“No matter who the candidate is, they’re always going to be heavily scrutinized by young people. That’s the way they are,” she said.
But in an election decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, it probably won’t take much effort for young people to simply stay home (for whatever reason) to flip the White House from Harris to Trump.
For Zhou, the Chicago environmental activist, Biden’s decision made their decision much easier: They’ll almost certainly vote for Harris.
But Illinois will be won by the Democrats no matter what; the outcome of the election will be decided elsewhere.
“We can’t expect all young people to vote unless Harris proves she will fight for us,” Chow said.
One more thing
This week’s newsletter is part of a special LA Times edition. Other stories include:
- Alex Wigglesworth writes about teenagers struggling with climate-related wildfires, heatwaves, and floods who are wrestling with climate anxiety and working as activists to address the issue and build a better world.
- Many politicians talk about creating “green jobs” and “clean energy jobs.” But what do these jobs actually look like, and how can you get trained for them? The Times’ Russ Mitchell writes about four people in Southern California.
- What will life be like in Los Angeles in 2050? LA Times climate reporter Haley Smith talks harsh weather, cool lifestyle improvements, healthier neighborhoods (and continuing headaches at LAX).
- Lila Seidman tells a beautiful story about climate and caring for it.
- “Sometimes people think the Green New Deal is idealistic or unrealistic, when in fact I think it’s politicians who are not realistic about where we are,” said Corinne Purtill, a leader of the Sunrise Movement.
- When do the ends justify the means? Some protesters say defacing beloved works of art is worth it if it brings attention to the climate crisis. As my LA Times colleague Sonia Sharp reports, other climate advocates have said the same.
There are many more stories to come. You can also buy a print copy, which hits newsstands on Sunday, September 15th.
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