28 Jul 2023 2:45 am
The 2024 election will be the first time many students are of age to vote, but we’ve carried the burden of advocating for a livable planet long before we had the electoral power to incite change.
In the wake of the 2016 election, high school students founded Zero Hour, demanding climate justice through protests and lobbying.
We’ve rooted our work in the belief that we have a right to a safe and healthy future—for ourselves, our families, our most vulnerable friends and neighbors, and future generations. But how can we be expected to continue staking our futures on the empty promises of politicians?
During the 2020 election, President Biden made a string of promises to tackle the climate crisis. “No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” He also pledged that in his first four years in office, he would “put our nation on the road to net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Yet his administration has approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands—even more than the Trump administration.
The promise of net-zero by 2050 will be difficult if not impossible with the recent approval of not only the Mountain Valley Pipeline but also the Willow Project and a new terminal for liquified natural gas in Alaska.
When Appalachian communities needed Congress to defend their land, air and water, our leaders bent to the demands of Big Oil and its allies in both parties.
In a debt ceiling deal that uses frontline communities as a bargaining chip, they fast-tracked the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a proposed over-300-mile fossil fuel pipeline slated to run through parts of West Virginia and Virginia; and weakened the National Environmental Protection Act, allowing more projects to be exempt from proper review.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline has already violated environmental regulations over 450 times, proposed more than 400 water body crossings, and seizeddozens of acres of privately owned land under eminent domain.
https://www.thenation.com/article/envir ... ion-biden/
In the wake of the 2016 election, high school students founded Zero Hour, demanding climate justice through protests and lobbying.
We’ve rooted our work in the belief that we have a right to a safe and healthy future—for ourselves, our families, our most vulnerable friends and neighbors, and future generations. But how can we be expected to continue staking our futures on the empty promises of politicians?
During the 2020 election, President Biden made a string of promises to tackle the climate crisis. “No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” He also pledged that in his first four years in office, he would “put our nation on the road to net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Yet his administration has approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands—even more than the Trump administration.
The promise of net-zero by 2050 will be difficult if not impossible with the recent approval of not only the Mountain Valley Pipeline but also the Willow Project and a new terminal for liquified natural gas in Alaska.
When Appalachian communities needed Congress to defend their land, air and water, our leaders bent to the demands of Big Oil and its allies in both parties.
In a debt ceiling deal that uses frontline communities as a bargaining chip, they fast-tracked the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a proposed over-300-mile fossil fuel pipeline slated to run through parts of West Virginia and Virginia; and weakened the National Environmental Protection Act, allowing more projects to be exempt from proper review.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline has already violated environmental regulations over 450 times, proposed more than 400 water body crossings, and seizeddozens of acres of privately owned land under eminent domain.
https://www.thenation.com/article/envir ... ion-biden/