The New York lawmaker condemned the fatal attack on Twitter, focusing her message on the American gun group.
“At 1st I thought of saying, ‘Imagine being told your house of faith isn’t safe anymore.’ But I couldn’t say ‘imagine,’” the lawmaker wrote, citing the deadly shootings at a Charleston, S.C., church, a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church.
“What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?” She added.
Ocasio-Cortez noted that “thoughts and prayers” is a reference to the NRA phrase she says is “used to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies.”
At 1st I thought of saying, “Imagine being told your house of faith isn’t safe anymore.”
But I couldn’t say “imagine.”
Because of Charleston.
Pittsburgh.
Sutherland Springs.
What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don’t even keep the pews safe?pic.twitter.com/2mSw0azDN8
The progressive congresswoman called on communities to “come together, fight for each other & stand up for neighbors.”
“Isolation, dehumanizing stereotypes, hysterical conspiracy theories & hatred ultimately lead to the anarchy of violence,” she wrote on Twitter. “We cannot stand for it.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that she greatly admires New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Ardern called the shootings “one of New Zealand’s darkest days,” according to The Associated Press, adding that it was “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”
“It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack,” Ardern said.
The prime minister raised the national security threat to the second-highest level following the shootings.
Authorities have charged one person and detained three others in the attack. They also defused explosive devices after the gunman published live footage of the shooting and published a “manifesto” calling immigrants “invaders.”
As oil trains roll into Portland, city residents keep watch
Without state oversight, activists step up to monitor the traffic in their own backyards.
By Carl Segerstrom March 13, 2019
Oct. 3, 2018: No train cars. Reuters reports that oil shipments to China have “totally stopped” as a casualty of escalating trade tension.
October 30: Twelve train cars behind the wall; 15 waiting just outside to the south. Placard number 1267: Crude oil.
November 26: No trains.
Jan. 16, 2019: Yes. More than 20 cars. Placard on side of train cars reads: “Toxic Inhalation Hazard.”
At Zenith Petroleum’s Portland Terminal in Oregon, multi-story oil drums rise along the banks of the Willamette River. Backhoes scratch dirt into a dump truck as sparks fly from welders building a metal structure behind walls topped with razor wire. Trucks rumble through on the last day of February, while black cylindrical oil-train cars line the rails. To the activists who fear they will remote detonate the global carbon budget — or even explode in their community — they look like rows of bombs.
Oil train cars park near the Zenith Energy terminal. Communities worry about the lack of documentation of potentially hazardous trains traveling by their homes and rivers.
Samuel Wilson for High Country News
After reports of Canadian tar sands moving through Portland surfaced last March, a small group formed to try to track local oil train shipments by visiting the terminal and writing down what they saw. Since then, the group has watched the terminal expand in front of their eyes, as Zenith adds new rail spurs and retools the facility to increase export capacity. The watchers know about the risks of oil-train spills and explosions across the Northwest. By bearing witness to the trains and their dangerous cargo, they aim to fill the gaps in public knowledge left by limited official information — and hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the threats it poses to their communities, and to the climate.
Dan Serres is the conservation director for Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that works to protect the Columbia River.
Samuel Wilson for High Country News
Natural light filters through a long window as Dan Serres, a train watcher and the conservation director for Columbia Riverkeeper, describes the project. “You would think that we would know how much oil is moving and when,” said Serres, who grew up just outside of Portland. “This is definitely a soft spot in how states are able to address oil-train traffic.”
The public is largely in the dark when it comes to what’s moving through their towns. In Washington, the Department of Ecology issues quarterly reports on oil trains; between October and December of last year, it said, 24,693 oil train cars and more than 16.8 million barrels of crude oil travelled the state’s rails. But that undercounts the total: Trains that merely pass through the state aren’t included. And Oregon has significantly less transparency. While the Oregon Fire Marshall publishes some information on Bakken crude oil train traffic, the state does not share comprehensive quarterly crude oil by train reports with the public. That’s because they are “security sensitive,” according to Jennifer Flynt, an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality public affairs officer.
Since 2016, when an oil train exploded in Mosier, Oregon, along the Columbia River, some state legislators have tried to institute stronger monitoring standards and safeguards, most recently this year. But so far, their efforts have fallen short. State Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, D, who represents communities in northeast Portland, sponsored oil-train safety bills in 2017 and 2018. She said part of the reason Oregon hasn’t regulated the shipments is because, unlike other states, Oregon doesn’t have in-state refineries from which to collect fees or information.
Without comprehensive reporting, Northwest communities look to email lists, Twitter hashtags and smartphone ship-tracking apps to monitor trains. Loosely affiliated groups from Idaho, Washington and Oregon operate on a “see-something-share-something” basis, but are left putting together a puzzle with missing pieces as they try to understand what dangerous materials are rolling past their houses, schools and rivers.
Mia Reback, a climate justice organizer, takes pictures of new construction at the Zenith Energy terminal in Portland, Oregon.
LOOKING OUT AT THE DOZENS OF TRAINS parked outside Zenith’s terminal in Portland, Mia Reback describes how different the train watching is from her usual climate justice organizing, which she typically fuels by tapping into the energy of community gatherings and street protests. Coming to this industrial zone to bear witness to local fossil fuel infrastructure is lonelier, and isolating.
But for Reback, the chance to have an impact is worth that discomfort. As she takes pictures to document the new construction, she recalls visiting the terminal in the summer of 2015. She had joined a crowd gathered to remember the 47 lives lost a year earlier when an oil train exploded in the town of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec, Canada. Black-and-white placards commemorated the name and age of each person who died in the disaster: “To see the visual of children holding a sign of another child their age next to an oil-train car was incredibly, incredibly powerful.”
Portland politics tend to favor organizers like Reback and Serres. But even in a city that has passed ordinances to prevent new oil infrastructure development, fossil fuel companies seem to have figured out a way to peek through the green curtain the city hopes to close on their industry. Reback said she hopes the watchers’ work will “re-center power in our communities, when fossil fuel companies and other polluting industries have taken power from us.”
Carl Segerstrom is a contributing editor at High Country News, covering Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies from Spokane, Washington. Email him atcarls@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor.
School climate strikes draw thousands to the streets in cities around the globe
By Griff Witte , Luisa Beck , Brady Dennis and Sarah Kaplan, March 15, 2019 at 12:11 PM
Thousands of students demonstrate in Lausanne, Switzerland, as part of the global climate strikes on Friday. (Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
BERLIN — A movement that began with a single teenager distributing homemade fliers outside the Swedish parliament last summer became a global phenomenon on Friday, as students worldwide skipped school and took to the streets to urgently demand that adults combat the perils of climate change.
Starting in the South Pacific and moving west with the sun, the protests blanketed grand city centers and humble village squares. Organizers said they were expecting demonstrations in at least 112 countries, in more than 1,700 locations.
The coordinated demonstrations were planned as the largest manifestation to date of the Fridays for Future movement, in which students forgo classes each week in favor of something they have said is more important: pleading for action on an issue that will affect every person on the planet, but young people most of all.
Young people raise their fists during the protests in Berlin. (Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)
“You’re stealing our future!” an estimated 20,000 demonstrators chanted outside the German government ministry in Berlin that sets energy policy.
The adults most responsible for the ravages of climate change “are going to be gone soon enough,” said 14-year-old Ashton Assa, who was on the streets of Sydney on Friday with an estimated 30,000 other Australians. “It is up to us kids to make a difference.”
Cassa held a placard reading “Stop the Fossil Fools” — a reflection of the contempt protesters have shown for the grown-ups who call the shots, and who are widely seen as having reacted with complacency and caprice to the world’s gravest threat.
‘We are afraid for our future’: Thousands of students join global climate strike
From Sydney to London, thousands of students walked out of classes March 15 in a global strike to protest government inaction on climate change.(Reuters)
Despite their frustration, the protesters have been consistently peaceful — as was the case on Friday. Their message has been delivered respectfully, but also with an exasperation and urgency that reflect the stakes.
U.N. researchers have said the world has only the next dozen years to halt the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. These effects, they say, include rising seas that inundate cities, crop failures that spawn famines and more severe and frequent weather-related disasters that ravage communities and cause billions of dollars in damage. But politicians remain far off track in their efforts to address the issue.
Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who inspired the strikes, takes part in the demonstration in Stockholm. (Henrik Montgomery/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Students hold up a placard depicting Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg in Barcelona. (Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images)
“Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago,” Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who launched the movement, told a U.N. climate gathering in December in a speech that, with equal parts clarity and audacity, rocketed her to fame.
“I don’t want your hope,” Thunberg, her hair braided in pigtails, told the world’s elite at Davos a month later. “I want you to panic.”
The 16-year-old, who started protesting by herself in Stockholm, has inspired young people around the world to follow her example. Protests have been especially large in European capitals, but Friday’s demonstrations were expected to include large gatherings on every inhabited continent.
“The first day I sat, I was all alone,” Thunberg has said. Now, “it’s amazing to talk to these people who are doing the same thing and fighting for the same cause . . . all around the world.”
Students on Friday were joined by parents, educators and other concerned adults. But the demonstrations were dominated by youth of high school age and younger, who planned, organized and led the rallies, marching on the front lines, bullhorns in hand.
An estimated 150,000 people turned out in dozens of demonstrations across Australia. Protests were also held in cities across Asia, but were comparatively smaller.
In Europe, capitals such as Berlin, Paris and London were filled with placard-wielding students who had packed into trains and subways to reach the demonstrations. Tens of thousands of people were estimated to have turned out in each of those cities.
“I can’t learn if I’m dead,” read one among a sea of handmade cardboard signs that the demonstrators brought in Berlin.
“Make the earth cool again,” read another.
The protesters overflowed a park that was set aside for the occasion and marched for hours through the city under overcast late-winter skies.
Students call for climate action in Kampala, Uganda. (Isaac Kasamani/AFP/Getty Images)
Indian students and members of different nongovernmental organizations protest in Bangalore. (Jagadeesh Nv/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Children hold placards as part of the climate strikes in Manila. (Mark R Cristino/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Some said the demonstrations have become so popular that to be in school on a Friday during a protest was the exception, not the norm.
“The last time, only four people were left in class, and I didn’t want to be one of them,” said 18-year-old Berlin resident Enrico Csonka.
In Paris, the march started at the symbolic Place du Panthéon, the site of the French Republic’s mausoleum for its most cherished citizens.
The students climbed atop bus stations, hung onto streetlights and chanted: “One, two, three degrees. It’s a crime against humanity.”
“There’s no point taking the bac if we have to graduate into a world that’s on fire,” said 15-year-old Maelis Clain, referring to the baccalauréat, the French prerequisite for finishing high school.
A large, boisterous crowd — chanting, “Solutions, not pollution” — marched through central London, weaving by landmarks such as Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.
Amelie Ashton, 15, held aloft a sign that read: “I can’t swim.”
“There are people who will be underwater in the next 50 years, and we’re acting like there’s not a problem,” she said. “This is huge. This is now and we need to make a change.”
As the protests in Europe wound down, they ramped up in the United States. The planned strikes spanned the country, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Bellingham, Wash.
Friday marked 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor’s 14th week striking in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Since December, she had sat there alone through rain, snow and the polar vortex to demand aggressive action against climate change.
But on Friday morning, roughly 50 middle and high school students were protesting with her.
Last month, as the Fridays for the Future protests ballooned into a weekly event in Europe, Villasenor had lamented the relative lack of climate activism in the United States. She expressed anger at President Trump’s decision to withdraw the country from the Paris climate accord and frustration with her peers’ seeming lack of concern about the issue.
But with 12-year-old Haven Coleman and 15-year-old Isra Hirsi, Villasenor helped orchestrate protests in all 50 states on Friday. There were 10 planned for New York alone, with a culminating rally at Columbus Circle.
“Today, we are declaring the era of American climate change denialism over,” she declared to the morning’s crowd at the United Nations, reading a speech she had handwritten on loose-leaf paper.
For all the urgency and fever among the young people filling streets, descending on capital buildings and protesting outside the offices of local and national leaders, real questions remain about whether their protests will spur action from policymakers.
Thunberg and others have said they were inspired by students from Parkland High School who became activists after last year’s deadly shooting at their school. But those efforts, along with a massive youth-led demonstration last year in favor of stronger gun laws, known as March for Our Lives, have not yet led to legislation.
Polish students take part in a demonstration in Warsaw. (Jakub Kaminski/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Young people rally in Brisbane, Australia. (Stringer/Reuters)
One of Friday’s first planned demonstrations — in Christchurch, New Zealand — had to be cut short when a heavily armed gunman attacked a mosque. The massacre of at least 49 people brought together two scourges that have been the ominous background to young people’s lives worldwide: mass shootings and a warming planet.
Many young climate advocates in the United States have said they want to see the so-called Green New Deal — or pieces of it — embraced by lawmakers. But so far, Democrats themselves have remained divided over the ambitious proposals, and many Republicans, including President Trump, have mocked them as absurdly expensive while also deriding the idea of man-made climate change as “a hoax.”
Still, the teens have won the backing of many leading environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sunrise Movement and 350.org. This month, more than 250 scientists released a letter of support for the school strikes.
Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann, who helped coordinate the letter, said it would be a “moral failing” if adults did not bolster the young activists’ message.
“These kids are putting themselves out there, on the line, risking so much, because they know better than any of us what the stakes are: nothing less than the future of human civilization,” he said.
Students stage a protest in front of the Duomo Gothic cathedral, in Milan, Italy. (Luca Bruno/AP)
Students take part in a demonstration in Paris. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
Portuguese students protest in Lisbon. (Rafael Marchante/Reuters)
In Europe, where the climate strikes have been filling plazas in capital cities for months, leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel have endorsed the movement.
But other politicians have mocked it. Christian Lindner, leader of a pro-business party in Germany, urged students to stay in school and dismissively offered that “politics is for professionals.”
Across Germany on Friday, more than 180 individual strikes were planned, according to 22-year-old organizer Luisa Neubauer. On Friday, she and thousands of others gathered in a park in front of the country’s Economics and Energy Ministry. Neubauer said their aim was to pressure politicians to meet the country’s carbon reduction targets — targets that Germany is now on track to miss.
“It doesn’t make sense to put out targets and not move anywhere near them,” said Neubauer.
Climate strikes have a long history in Germany, most notably contributing to the rise in the 1980s of the country’s Green party, which is now a major force in German politics.
But this is the first time a climate movement is being led by people who are not even yet eligible to vote, according to Sabrina Zajak, a youth researcher at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research.
The movement has already had an impact on the way politicians discuss climate politics, Zajak said. In negotiations, she said she has noticed them increasingly wield a new rallying cry: “We need to do it for the youth.”
Students take part in a global protest for climate change in Cambridge, England. (Stefan Rousseau/AP)
Dennis reported from Washington and Kaplan from New York. A. Odysseus Patrick in Sydney, James McAuley in Paris and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
The climate change generation wants to be heard – ‘I’m fighting for my future.’
By Rebecca Leber, March 15, 2019
This article was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 2040, Haven Coleman will be 33 years old. Having grown up in Colorado, she may have left the state to attend college or start her career, but wherever she goes will be a stunningly different world from the one she inhabits today.
The planet will have already warmed past one scary threshold — 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages — and will be fast approaching the even more frightening mark of 2 degrees Celsius, long considered a catastrophic marker by the global community. Even at 1.5 degrees, there will likely be tens of millions of climate refugees from regions that have become uninhabitable because of heat, flooding, or extreme weather; fragile coral reefs may be nearly decimated; while recurrent flooding, excessive heat, and a constant risk of wildfires will pose an everyday threat to stability in some of the world’s biggest cities.
Not quite yet 13 years old, Coleman is painfully aware of what awaits her generation should there be continued government and social inaction in addressing the perils of a warming planet. “I’ve grown up with climate change,” Coleman told me. “I’ve grown up listening and hearing about climate change. I’m fighting for my future.”
She is one of the school-age protesters who will be skipping classes Friday to join in protests in more than 1,600 school strikes across 100 countries. Students are joining in, inspired by the example of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, who has been striking most Fridays since 2018 to demand political leaders’ attention. The hashtag, #FridaysForFuture has caught on in other countries, like Australia where 200 young people demonstrated in November.
Greta Thunberg inspired thousands of students in Hamburg to skip school in protest over the lack of action on climate change.
In the U.S., the movement, which is made up of mostly teenage girls, has expanded from a few lone protesters missing school on some Fridays to a nationwide, all-day Youth Climate Strike. Coleman teamed up with 16-year-old Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Minnesota Rep. Imar Oman, and 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor of New York City. Their demands are for the U.S. to embrace the principles underlying the Green New Deal, provide better education on climate change, and connect all government decisions to scientific research.
These young people comprise the first generation who bear little responsibility for the 410 parts per million concentration of carbon in the atmosphere but will face most of the consequences from it. They’re coming of age when the window to ward off this nightmare scenario is rapidly shrinking. Many older adults have been warning for decades that “future generations” will suffer for our selfishness and inertia from continued inaction. Now, those so-called future victims are finding their voice to try and shape the agenda.
“The climate change generation is a generation of young people born into a warming world, who will be alive to see which climate model scenario plays out, and who have spent — and will spend — essentially our entire adult lives fighting for a just and stable future,” says Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow, scientist and activist who has organized to persuade Harvard and MIT to divest from fossil fuels. “Many of my younger peers in the climate change generation will literally outlive the climate projections that scientists run through 2100.”
The youngest activists in the U.S. have found new entry points in the debate by joining the Sunrise Movement and demanding a Green New Deal. The Sunrise Movement is mostly comprised of millennial activists, a portion of whom, like Supran, learned the basics of organizing from the fossil fuel divestment movement on college campuses. Many of those 20-something organizers were concerned about climate change already, but found agency through concrete action like divestment.
Whether intuitively or from having witnessed and learned history, the younger activists understand that climate change encompasses not only the environment but also racial discrimination and economic inequality.
Even in the past, the environmental movement has been more expansive than other single-issue concerns, says Georgetown historian Michael Kazin, an expert in the radical left. He explains that in the sixties and seventies, environmentalism began as an anti-pollution movement that grew out of opposition to the Vietnam War and demands for a better quality of life. “What any movement needs to survive is infrastructure,” Kazin notes, “and to find through-lines to other issues people are about.”
Sunrise is one of the groups that is fast building up that infrastructure and has closely connected the climate fight to racial justice. Rose Strauss from Sunrise is a college freshman, who attended one of the group’s trainings last year and saw the need to recognize its growing number of activists at the high school level. Sunrise does not have hard numbers for its under-20 division, but counts 275 students who are active on their Slack channel. The group, working with a high school-focused climate group called iMatter, has been working to advance Green New Deal resolutions in places like Marin County, California, and Sante Fe, New Mexico. Having a vision, like the Green New Deal, to rally around has drawn new activists to their ranks.
“I’ve been trying to become active for a long time but there wasn’t a solution addressing the problem on the scale that needs to be addressed,” Strauss says. “Having a tangible solution like the Green New Deal to get behind puts a much more positive spin on it than ‘this is terrible we need to stop it.’ That kind of shift in messaging has got a lot more people involved.”
Climate activists across the generations are counting on these new messengers to bring more salience to their arguments. “Politicians and pundits have talked for decades about ‘our children and grandchildren’ who will face the perils of climate change,” Supran says. “But guess what: They’re here, they’re alive, they’re marching in the streets right now.”
Rebecca Leber is a reporter in Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau, where she covers environmental politics and policy. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor.
