The New York Times huddled with the leftist “youth climate movement” as they girded for battle against Trump II, in a so-called news story that appeared in Thursday’s paper: “As Teens, They Fought Trump on Climate. Now What?” by Austyn Gaffney, who has previously written freelance for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Grist, three left-wing publications.
Activists in groups like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour and Fridays for Future have pushed for the Biden administration to step up climate action before its exit next month: They want land protected as national monuments, permits denied for liquid natural gas projects, funds allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down for good.
After the inauguration, they’ll retrench. They might ease off the mass marches and school strikes that built their platform, while refining new strategies like focusing on state politics, reducing the use of fossil fuels at a local level, and re-energizing the country to elect climate-conscious leaders.
The activists and the reporter were quite cozy -- almost like a huddle, as if Gaffney is plotting strategy and tactics against Trump alongside the kid radicals on climate (and Gaza, and capitalism, and whatever else.) The article even featured flattering posed photos and pull quotes from four youth activists.
The 2018 child activists who were in middle and high school are now in their 20s, moving through college and into their careers. They’re facing the conflict so many generations before them have grappled with: how to balance the scales between hope and despair.
She dredged up Greta Thunberg, whose placement on the autism spectrum didn’t stop the left from using her as an environmental mascot. Currently Thunberg is serving as a vulgar mascot supporting the anti-Israel terrorists of Hamas. (Gaffney’s story came with a noteworthy correction – she’d first described Thunberg as some expert mariner who’d made a solo journey across the Atlantic Ocean while protesting climate change.)
There was no journalistic concern displayed over the extremist tactics used by Just Stop Oil, with “throwing cans of soup on famous paintings….” relegated to a single sentence.
Zero Hour sent Jamie Minden, the group’s senior director of global organizing, who at 13 was lying in her bed staring at the ceiling when she decided to devote her young life to fighting the climate crisis. But almost a decade later, Ms. Minden, now 21, knew to brace herself.
COP29 was a disappointment, she said, if not a death sentence for poor nations.
The intellectual incoherence of this “climate” movement was only implied by Gaffney noting the splintering of various factions over non-climate causes.
….. Zero Hour did not endorse a candidate because of the group’s opposition to the war in Gaza. Some of the nine youth climate activists who spoke to The Times said they voted for Jill Stein, the third-party candidate, in protest.
The Times better hurry, all these woke terms are surely past their expiration date:
Leah Thomas, 29, made a social media post in 2020 that popularized the term “intersectional environmentalist.” Her platform was based on links between racial and environmental justice, looking at “the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected.”….
The reporter's call to arms near the end unwittingly underlined that incoherence, while trying to pat the young radicals on the back.
Whatever the next round of youth climate activism looks like, youth activists overwhelmingly agree that it will be about more than just climate.
