"On Saturday, hundreds of teen-agers—loud, pensive, stubbornly determined—marched through Manhattan. They represented a movement that other teen-agers had started, last year, called Zero Hour. They were gravely concerned about politicians doing almost nothing for climate justice, and they had created a list of demands—including, most importantly, achieving negative carbon emissions by 2030. All across the country, other kids were marching, too, with the biggest group in a rainy Washington, D.C., where the movement’s founders led the way down the National Mall, around the Capitol, before ending with a rally in Lincoln Park. In New York, the route wound through midtown, from Columbus Circle to the United Nations headquarters, below some of the luxury skyscrapers that account for only two per cent of New York’s nearly one million buildings but a full half of the city’s emissions.
As the march passed a TGI Fridays, on Seventh Avenue, I talked to Puneet Johal, seventeen, who was at the back of the crowd. She had braces and wore checkered Vans. “I mean, this is our reality,” she said. “Our politicians? They should be embarrassed that they’re not doing anything.” Her friend Benjamin Hu was beside her, wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon kid popping out of a volcano. “People are scared of how difficult the change could be—the trade-off between renewables and non-renewables. Changing their mind-sets is hard. My parents are verbally supportive, but they don’t know what to do. They’re busy with their lives.”
Juhal and Hu are both rising seniors, at Bronx Science and Stuyvesant High School, respectively. Both want to study computer science after they graduate and remembered first learning about climate change in “Arthur” and “The Magic School Bus” cartoons. Their biggest concern is sea-level rise. “Especially because we’re both from Queens,” Johal said. “We live on an island. It’s really scary to think it won’t exist in the future.” (By the end of the next decade, sea-level rise around Queens could be greater than a foot.)"
Carolyn Kormann reports for the New Yorker July 22, 2018.
SEE ALSO:
"U.S. Loses Bid To End Children's Climate Change Lawsuit" (Reuters)
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