A CHILD SHALL

A Child Shall Lead Them Connecticut Youth Lead the Climate Charge

The world has the teenage climate warrior Greta Thunberg, but Connecticut is home to several young warriors of its own: High schoolers in the New Haven Climate Movement convinced the city to declare a climate emergency, while Yale’s Endowment Justice Coalition actively seeks the university’s divestment from fossil fuels and Puerto Rican debt. Green Eco Warriors is a youth climate program founded by Leticia Colón de Mejias, who is one of Connecticut’s foremost mentors to youth regarding the climate crisis. The mostly 20-something group from New Haven’s Sunrise Movement hub promotes the Green New Deal. According to Adrien Huq, a 16-year-old senior at New Haven’s Metropolitan Business Academy and one of the organizers with the New Haven Climate Movement,

by Melinda Tuhus

“There’s new excitement and urgency around the climate emergency. It’s a new decade and we need to see strong action because not a lot happened in the last decade. Earth Day is about taking solid action this time, not just a one-day thing or just planting a tree. Being an environmentalist is great, but we also need people pushing for strong action at the governmental level, especially the state level.” Another group, the Sunrise Movement hub, burst upon the scene shortly after the 2018 mid-term elections when a large group of young people occupied the Congressional office of incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, demanding the government pass legislation for a Green New Deal to “stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process,” says Tyler Wakefield, a leader with the group. “It’s an attempt to center justice

24 New Haven/Middlesex NaturalNewHaven.com in our approach to stopping this crisis. It recognizes our country’s and cities’ long history of racist and classist energy, housing, health care, transportation and food policy that has left communities of color and low-wealth communities far more vulnerable to climate change.” Another area of focus for many of these young climate warriors is the “Stop the Money Pipeline” campaign, based on the idea that if banks and other financial institutions stop extending loans and providing insurance coverage for fracked gas and highly polluting tar sands and other kinds of oil pipelines, then that greenhouse gas-emitting infrastructure can’t be built. Hartford has long been considered “the insurance capital of the world,” and activists recently began planning an “accountability walking tour” to visit a number of insurance companies headquartered in the

city “to demand that they stop their investments in fossil fuels, that they invest in renewable energy and stop insuring fossil fuel companies,” says Angel Serrano, lead organizer for the event with Connecticut Citizen Action Group. While not giving away too much, he says organizers “are mapping out a route without making it too long. We’re hoping to get many organizations and individuals to join – focusing on social justice, environmental justice, climate change and energy.” Sena Wazer, a 16-year-old student at UConn, is co-chair of the Sunrise group and a passionate speaker who roused her peers and elders at three climate strikes at the Capitol last year. The youth’s demands included no new fossil fuel expansion; expanded energy efficiency and renewable energy; and ensured climate education for all public-school children, “because every child deserves to know what is happening to their future,” she says. “We cannot keep building natural gas power plants when we need to be moving away from fossil fuels, and renewable energy is the future.” In a speech last December, she made her case to political leaders, telling them: “I spend every day panicking about climate change, doing whatever I can to help combat it, but yet in your position of power, you continue to sit by and do nothing. But we’re not waiting any longer: Stand up or step aside.” The activists say the bills being debated in the Connecticut General Assembly this year don’t go nearly far enough in tackling the climate crisis. Although the state relies more on fracked natural gas than any other fuel source, it is not a bridge to a clean energy future. Some have called it “a gangplank to catastrophe,” since natural gas is almost 100% methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas that is 100 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide over a 10-year period, which is the critical time for action. Another point of focus for local climate groups is Davis Park in Killingly, the site of a fracked gas power plant first denied, then approved, by the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The Connecticut Climate Crisis Mobilization, a group which came together last summer to promote September’s youth climate strike in Hartford, has been working to organize people from around the state to rally and protest the power plant’s operation. “If it’s built and operates, it will increase greenhouse gas emissions over 5% in the state, which makes it increasingly difficult to meet our climate mandates,” says Kate Donnelly, one of the organizers of opposition to the plant. The plant’s owner, NTE, says it plans to break ground in April, even though it doesn’t have all the required state permits in hand. Opponents say Connecticut doesn’t need the plant, as energy demand has remained flat throughout the region, and ISO New England, the region’s energy grid operator, last year reduced its need for power. Donnelly adds that local residents are concerned because emissions from the plant would increase air pollution, and Windham County already has the highest asthma rates in the state. “We have state reps and senators, farmers, businesspeople, the elderly and parents” involved in efforts to stop the plant, she says. “Our strategy is to educate people as much as we can and then put pressure on the governor through protests, writing letters, lobbying.”

Melinda Tuhus, a New Haven, Connecticut based staff reporter and independent journalist for the past 25 years, has won numerous regional and international awards for her work. Tuhus focuses on the environment, women’s issues and criminal justice reforms. Connect at MelindaTuhus.net.

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