Young activists to target Pelosi over Democrats’ inaction on climate crisis

Activists to occupy speakers office to mark start of hunger strike and to demand that she meet with them for an hour on camera

Young activists frustrated and frightened by Democrats inaction on the climate crisis will occupy the office of the top Democrat in Congress this week to mark the beginning of a hunger strike.

The roughly 20 strikers and their supporters, with Extinction Rebellion, are taking part in a global climate hunger strike that nearly 300 people have pledged to join.

They say House speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding back progress, so they are targeting her instead of top Republicans. They are demanding that she meet with them for an hour on camera before they call off their hunger strike. Pelosis office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Every day the evidence piles up at your desk, but you have yet to pass even symbolic legislation recognizing the climate crisis as a national emergency. With all due respect, you have failed, the group said in a letter to Pelosi.

Extinction Rebellion calls for governments to declare a climate an ecological emergency, cut heat-trapping pollution to net-zero by 2025 and create a citizens assembly to direct a way forward. Their demands are far more aggressive than most environment organizations.

They want radical change to keep world temperatures from climbing 3C or beyond the normal of just a century ago and disrupting human civilization. Thousands of scientists warn of a future that threatens untold suffering.

Seventeen-year-old Sophia Kianni, in speech she has planned for the hunger strike said it is deeply saddening and shameful that we must resort to a hunger strike just to get our leaders to care about their childrens futures. Our nations leaders would rather watch climate activists starve than give us the time of day. She accused Pelosi of employing cowardly politics, and worrying about alienating big businesses.

Nick Brana, a spokesman for Extinction Rebellion in Washington, accused Pelosi of holding back a resolution to declare a climate emergency and a Green New Deal and neutering a special House climate committee that does not have the power to subpoena fossil fuel companies or the ability to write legislation.

Twenty-year-old Giovanni Tamacas, whose Washington hunger strike the Guardian reported on in August, said said he joined Extinction Rebellion because he felt other climate activism groups were not disruptive enough. He came to the organization after some of its protesters stripped off their clothes to draw attention to the crisis in British parliament.

Young people around the world have been striking from school on Fridays in solidarity with Greta Thunberg. Celebrity activist Jane Fonda, 81, is also protesting at the US Capitol every Friday too and has been arrested multiple times.

The way that this movement is going is were going to need more and more extreme actions in order to bring the climate crisis to the forefront of the debate, and you know its going to take mass participation in civil disobedience and direct action, Tamacas said.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us