sunrise mvmnt

see Gen Z

hu agenda talk i missed

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FDR ARREST MINNESOTA? 8 26

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an 3 22

Students in Montgomery, County Maryland are asking the school system to greenify their campuses by abandoning fossil fuels as sources of power.

The young activists drafted a petition with an itemized list of demands, including that Montgomery County Public Schools "get serious about climate change." Hundreds of people have already added their names in support of the campaign.

"MCPS must act on the climate crisis. We, the students, will face widespread crop failure, yards of sea level rise, and increased natural disasters. To avert runaway warming and an even worse crisis, every level of government must take sweeping action immediately. But our schools are only making the climate problem worse," the document states.

"Currently, only 38% of MCPS’ energy is purchased from renewable sources, and MCPS still builds schools with fossil fuel furnaces. Their so-called progress to install solar panels in schools has inched up to 17 of MCPS’ 209 schools. The Board of Education claims to commit to continuous improvement, but they lack the action necessary for this. The Board recently committed to reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2027 and 100% by 2035 -- but they took no action to make this happen. MCPS’ inaction actively hurts their students, especially students of color and low-income students," the petition continues. "Through MCPS’ continued use of fossil fuels and their inertia and resistance to any positive change, they endanger the young people whom they have committed to educating. It is time for MCPS to start treating climate change as the crisis it is."

There are six key goals:

1. Buy ONLY renewable energy.
2. Electrify (stop using fossil fuels to heat) any new buildings and find the money to switch those under construction or in planning.
3. Install solar panels at every school, either on rooftops or over parking lots, by 2027.
4. Increase energy efficiency which can be done at no cost to MCPS due to energy savings.
5. Demand necessary funding from state/federal sources to retrofit gas-heated schools with electric systems.
6. Provide good “prevailing” wages, a fully just transition, and targeted hiring from low-income, MoCo communities for all MCPS-funded work.

Janani Krishnamurthy, a sophomore at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, told DCist.com that "we want to ensure that while our schools are educating us, that we have a future to be educated on. We definitely cannot learn on a dead planet."

Krishnamurthy added that the actions that MCPS have taken thus far are "definitely not enough."

Students across Montgomery County have held protests and rallies while holding banners that say, “Fossil free schools now,” and “Can’t learn on a dead planet.”

The local Sunrise Movement group and the Montgomery County Green New Deal Internship worked in tandem with the activists, according to DCist.com.

biden be brave rally aoc DC

calling for corp free cabinet

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-surprisingly-cheap-and-simple-plan-could-put-a-huge-dent-in-climate-change/

no lnx many

A surprisingly cheap and simple plan could put a huge dent in climate change

written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams July 5, 2019

Amid record-setting temperatures worldwide and predictions by experts that this year will be among the hottest humanity has ever seen, researchers behind a new study say a rapid global effort to plant billions of trees and the restoration of forests would be the “most effective” strategy for battling the planetary climate emergency.

Based on a model of the potential for restoring trees worldwide to capture atmospheric carbon that is heating the planet, a Europe-based research team found that currently “there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares (2.22 billion acres) of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests.”

Lead researcher Tom Crowther, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, explained to Metrothat “if we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent to levels last seen almost a century ago.” A worldwide planting program, researchers estimate, could remove two-thirds of the carbon that human activity has put into the atmosphere.

In terms of cost, Crowther said that “the most effective projects” do restoration at about ¢30 per tree, meaning that restoring a trillion trees would be about $300 billion—which, he added, makes tree restoration “by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed.”

Putting that figure into context, the U.S.-based youth-led Sunrise Movement tweeted, “For a fraction of the cost of the Trump tax cuts, we could pay for a trillion new trees and offset 2/3rd of all emissions to date.”

Sunrise Movement ??

@sunrisemvmt

For a fraction of the cost of the Trump tax cuts, we could pay for a trillion new trees and offset 2/3rd of all emissions to date.

(^rough cost estimate but still crazy cheap)

We have solutions ready to go; we’re just missing the political will to act.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions …

2,690

Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis

Research shows a trillion trees could be planted to capture huge amount of carbon dioxide

theguardian.com

1,161 people are talking about this

The report, published Friday in the journal Science, describes tree restoration on a global scale as “our most effective climate change solution to date” while also warning that “climate change will alter this potential tree coverage.”

We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares (₅₅₁ million acres) by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

In its reporting on the new research, Vox noted that “there is distinction here between restoration, also known as reforestation, and afforestation. The latter refers to planting new trees where there were none before. The former refers to bringing trees back to areas that were previously forested, whether that’s through planting trees or allowing the woodlands to regrow on their own.”

This research team focused on the former—planting trees where they once were. While the potential is great, accomplishing it is no easy task, Vox reported, because “deforestation is still rampant and is accelerating in some parts of the world. Rather than building up forests as a resource to offset greenhouse gas emissions, we’re currently losing them, and emitting more carbon in the process.”

Crowther, however, appeared optimistic—given the potential impact and wide range of people and institutions that can actually take action.

“What blows my mind is the scale,” Crowther told The Guardian. “I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”

According to the newspaper:

Crowther emphasized that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.

Some activists and experts—including Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and Glen Peters, a research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research—responded to the new study by emphasizing the importance of also changing human behaviors that produce planet-heating emissions, considering how long it could take to plant enough trees to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Greta Thunberg

@GretaThunberg

Yes, of course we need to plant as many trees as possible.

Yes, of course we need to keep the existing trees standing and rewild and restore nature.

But there’s absolutely no way around stopping our emissions of greenhouse gases and leaving the fossil fuels in the ground. https://twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/1147037393725329408 …

Glen Peters

@Peters_Glen

“The only way we can keep below 1.5°C or 2°C is to stop emitting fossil fuels”...

It could take hundreds of years to add enough mature forests to remove what we will emit in 20 years at the current rate of 40GtCO2/yr.@StephenLeahyhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/07/how-to-erase-100-years-carbon-emissions-plant-trees/ …

Crowther pointed out that planting trees is a solution that doesn’t require U.S. President Donald Trump “to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

“It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible, and every one of us can get involved,” he said, considering that in addition to any government-backed efforts individuals and charities can plant trees.

The model reveals restoration opportunities worldwide, with the six largest countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Russia, and the United States—collectively containing about half of the sites.

Crowther described Brazil—which contains the majority of the Amazon rainforest and is currently under the control of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro—as his “dream hotspot to get it right,” but he reiterated that “the potential is literally everywhere—the entire globe. In terms of carbon capture, you get by far your biggest bang for your buck in the tropics, but every one of us can get involved.”

Author and anthropologist Jason Hickel praised the research as “brilliant” and noted that in addition to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to combat the global climate crisis, tree restoration could provide job opportunities.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/voters-candidates-and-activists-all-want-a-democratic-debate-on-climate-why-are-tom-perez-and-the-dnc-refusing/

no lnx

Voters, candidates and activists all want a Democratic debate on climate. Why are Tom Perez and the DNC refusing?

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon June 23, 2019

The Democratic Party is making two huge mistakes right now — and they’re related, both in terms of the muddled, backward-looking thinking and the cluelessness about how to communicate to the American people. Democratic leaders are still blocking impeachment in the House — based on a bevy of mistaken arguments rooted in a misremembered past — and blocking a debate on climate change in the 2020 presidential campaign. That too is based on a visionless miasma of misdirection that includes debate rules reformed to fight the last war, the continued influence of donations from the fossil fuel industry, and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez’s myopic claim that it’s “just not practical.”

“What’s actually unrealistic,” the Sunrise Movement tweeted in response, is “the Democratic establishment saying we’ll stop climate change when they aren’t even willing to have a debate on it.”

Together with the global Climate Strike movement, the Sunrise Movement, organizing via the #ChangeTheDebate hashtag, represents a generational shift in consciousness about the global climate crisis, which has been called “this generation’s Vietnam War.” In this light, the DNC’s disconnect from younger voters, whose support is so crucial and who represent the future, is blatant evidence of political malpractice.

“Once you have one single-issue debate, then every debate needs to become a single issue debate in order to address the concerns,” Perez said, in his effort to save face. But climate change isn’t a single self-contained issue, activists responded. “Climate is not an ‘issue’ — it’s the backdrop for all other issues,” author and activist Naomi Klein tweeted. “It’s the fabric of life on Earth and it is unravelling.”

...

fox & f

MORANO (CLIMATEDEPOT.COM): No. First of all, pollution, carbon dioxide, humans -- we inhale oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide, so he's calling CO2 pollution, which it's not. No, this plan is as pie in the sky as the Green New Deal except it's a little bit more tepid. What's happened here is Beto O'Rourke is not satisfying the Democratic base. Within minutes of him releasing this plan, the Sunrise Movement, which was instrumental in the Green New Deal, is going after Beto O'Rourke for going back on his pledge from 2030 zero emissions to now 2050. They are saying that Beto's plan could result in 100 million climate refugees and tens of million dead. So that's the thanks that Beto O'Rourke gets for coming up with a lighter version of the Green New Deal and a massive federal boondoggle, just not as big a boondoggle as the Green New Deal's proposal.

Hundreds of Kentucky high school students and climate campaigners with the youth-led Sunrise Movement descended on the Capitol Hill office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday to deliver 100,000 petition signatures and stage a sit-in to make clear to lawmakers that young people want a Green New Deal for their communities and futures.

For calling on McConnell to heed public demands for federal lawmakers to pass policies that will phase out fossil fuels and combat the global climate crisis while also creating green jobs and a more just economy, more than 40 demonstrators were arrested:

BREAKING: arrests happening now outside #OilMoneyMitch‘s DC office pic.twitter.com/S4AyB73aZY

— Sunrise Movement ?? (@sunrisemvmt) February 25, 2019

As recent polling shows more than 80 percent of Americans back key elements of the Green New Deal put forth by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., the mobilization to increase pressure on McConnell comes after the majority leader announced last week that he plans to rush a floor vote on the resolution, which critics denounced as a ploy to fuel divisions in the Democratic Party.

“Kentucky youth traveled here today because their state needs a Green New Deal. Mitch McConnell’s Green New Deal vote is a political stunt to score some points for his wealthy donors,” Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash said in a statement. “We’re here to warn him and all senators: if you refuse to back the Green New Deal, young people will remember next time you ask for our votes.”

Demonstrators who carried signs that read “Oil & gas $$ or our lives?,” “Green New Deal,” and “Mitch, Look us in the eyes” as well as supporters posted updates on social media from Monday’s demonstration with the hashtags #OilMoneyMitch and #LookUsInTheEyes:

Young Kentuckians with @sunrisemvmt were just kicked out of #OilMoneyMitch‘s senate office because he won’t #lookusintheyes as he condemns our generation.

Join the livestream: https://t.co/eTkLp9cibC pic.twitter.com/ZCZgl53ju3

— matthew miles goodrich (@mmilesgoodrich) February 25, 2019

?? Stand with the young folks risking arrest in Washington, DC today to stand up to #OilMoneyMitch & fight for the just climate solutions we need.

If you’re in the US, call your Reps to ask them to co-sponsor the resolutions for a #GreenNewDeal: https://t.co/EhEdyGq9LV pic.twitter.com/Vy5wcIwx4J

— 350 dot org (@350) February 25, 2019

“I am here because people in my community don’t have jobs, are starving and turning to opioids and dying,” 15-year-old Lily Gardner of Lexington, Kentucky, said in a statement. “Mitch McConnell refuses to do anything about it. His own constituents — high schoolers — have traveled here to meet with him. All we want is for him to put our lives above the interests of his campaign donors.”

Both from McConnell’s office and outside the Capitol building, the youth demonstrators shared why they felt compelled to visit their senator in Washington — with some pointing to warnings from a recent U.N. report that the international community has about 12 years to pursue “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented” systemic changes needed to avert climate catastrophe:

Young Kentuckians w @sunrisemvmtlou….

??? visited #OilMoneyMitch‘s office in KY multiple times last week

?? camped out when he wouldn’t meet with them

??traveled to DC to confront the Senator directly

?? are now getting arrested bc he is too cowardly to #LookUsInTheEyes pic.twitter.com/YX28IwhhXS

— matthew miles goodrich (@mmilesgoodrich) February 25, 2019

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who is among the scores of co-sponsors of the Green New Deal resolution, voiced support for the sit-in at McConnell’s office on Monday, urging the youth climate activists to “keep fighting.”

.@senatemajldr claims that a #GreenNewDeal is unattainable, as if he suddenly cares about climate. Instead of his obstruction, we need these bold and transformation solutions to save our planet and economy. Keep fighting, @sunrisemvmt!

— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) February 25, 2019

horo discv the net bs

https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/sunrise-movement-sm-2

The Sunrise Movement (SM) is a 501(c)(4) environmental advocacy organization that, while publicly denying partisanship with either “the right or left” side of the political spectrum, in fact places its full support behind left-wing Democratic Party candidates and agendas. Most notably, SM endorses the enactment of a “Green New Deal,” environmental legislation whose multifaceted mission is to rapidly eliminate all fossil-fuel use from the U.S. economy (in favor of renewables like wind and solar energy); create a basic income program and a federal jobs guarantee that would provide a “living wage” to every person who wants one; implement a government-run, single-payer health care system; and replace free-market capitalism with a socialist framework.

Rooted in the premise that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity are a major cause of potentially catastrophic “climate change,” SM is composed chiefly of what it terms “an army of young people” who aim to take “immediate and decisive action to transform our energy system” and address the “climate crisis” that threatens to consign humanity to “a future ravaged by wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes.” In pursuit of this objective, SM vows to “end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics.” That “handful of wealthy oil and gas executives,” says the organization, “will stop at nothing to squeeze the last bit of money out of the earth” – no matter how many “children must breathe toxic air,” or how many “parents must choose between a dangerous and polluting job, and no job at all.”

SM was launched in April 2017 by six principal co-founders. Two of those were former Wesleyan University students Matthew Lichtash and Evan Weber, both in their twenties, and the latter of whom had participated in the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. During their student days at Wesleyan, Lichtash and Weber developed a friendship with then-visiting professor Michael Dorsey, a Club Of Rome member and former Sierra Club board member whom President Barack Obama had appointed to the EPA’s National Advisory Board in 2010 and 2012. In 2013, Dorsey, who likewise would become one of SM’s co-founders four years later, used his influence to secure a $30,000 grant to help himself and the two Wesleyan students write a plan outlining how climate change could most effectively be addressed; the Sierra Club’s Washington, D.C. branch allowed the trio to use its office as a home base. Within a few months, Dorsey, Lichtash, and Weber had produced a 35-page treatise emphasizing the need for carbon taxes that would discourage reliance on fossil-fuel-combustion technologies, and in January 2014 they helped incorporate a new group called the U.S. Climate Plan.

Two additional SM co-founders were Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash, both members of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, an alliance that pressures universities and other institutions to divest their assets from the oil and gas industries. Prakash, for her part, seeks to galvanize “a rising tide of people” to combat “the greed and selfishness of wealthy men, of fossil-fuel billionaires who plunder our earth for profit.” By “build[ing] the largest youth political force this country has ever seen,” she hopes to “make a Green New Deal a political inevitability in America.”

The sixth major co-founder of SM was William Lawrence, a young man who argues that “a massive overhaul of [the] nation’s infrastructure and economy” is “exactly what we need to do.”

SM’s first public appearance in 2017 was a climate protest in Washington, D.C., where its members promoted a “Sunrise Semesters” initiative that would permit college-age supporters to join the organization for one school semester to help promote Democratic political candidates committed to the Green New Deal. The first “Sunrise Semester” drew approximately 85 young volunteers who worked across five states during the 2018 election cycle.

During that same cycle, SM encouraged congressional Democrats to sign a pledge not to accept any campaign contributions from fossil-fuel industries. One noteworthy backer of that pledge was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who subsequently proceeded to unseat a longtime incumbent Democrat from the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2018 elections. According to SM co-founder Evan Weber, Ocasio-Cortez’s support gave the organization “added star power and firepower that took it through the roof.” As The New Yorker noted in December 2018, “Sunrise has established itself as the dominant influence on the environmental policy of the Democratic Party’s young, progressive wing.”

On November 13, 2018, More than 200 Sunrise Movement demonstrators staged a protest outside the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to demand that Democrats make the battle against climate change a top priority beginning in January 2019. The protest, which was praised by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, resulted in 51 arrests.

During a single weekend in December 2018, a number of SM members joined likeminded staffers of Ocasio-Cortez as well as members of Justice Democrats and New Consensus, in drafting the text of the aforementioned Green New Deal.

In additional to mostly non-financial support from organizations like the Sierra Club and 350.org, SM has received monetary grants from the Wallace Global Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Winslow Foundation.In 2018, approximately 55% of SM’s donations derived from institutional funders, while 35% came from individual donors and 10% came from nonprofit partners.

Further Reading: “Our Road to Victory on a Green New Deal” (SunriseMovement.org); “Who We Are” (SunriseMovement.org); “Inside the Sunshine Movement” (EENews.net, 12-3-2018, re: SM’s co-founders, the $30,000 grant, “Sunrise Semesters,” the anti-fossil fuel campaign pledge, the Weber quote, & the protest outside Pelosi’s office); “Sunrise Movement Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on the ‘Green New Deal’” (Capital Research Center, 1-3-2019); “The Optimistic Activists for a Green New Deal: Inside the Youth-Led Singing Sunrise Movement” (New Yorker, 12-23-2018, re: Prakash quotes & New Yorker quote); “Sunrise Movement is Shaking Up the Climate Debate” (Inside Philanthropy, 1-7-2019, re: SM funding); “Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ to Transform the U.S. Economy Was Drafted over a Single Weekend by a Bunch of Millennial Staffers, Activists” (Daily Caller, 1-18-2019).