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By James Healy

If a theme was to define climate change it would be injustice. This injustice can be seen on a global, nationwide and generational scale.

Take South Sudan, one of the world’s newest nations, whose survival as a country is teetering on the edge due to climate change. The state, who recently sought independence from Sudan in 2011, is in the middle of Africa’s largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide. What began as an ethno-religious conflict, has been compounded by a major two-year drought in 2015 which has forced four million people to leave their homes, with two million of those seeking refuge in neighboring countries. South Sudan is seeing the harshest realities of climate change in spite of being one of the world’s poorest nations with an annual carbon foot print one three-thousandth to that of the United States. The country is paying for the West’s inability to act on climate change and the situation is set to worsen. Future rises in temperature are set to decimate crop yields. Such crops like sorghum, an essential grain for millions of Africans in terms of nutrition and income, is set to fall in production by 70 percent if increases in regional temperature continue as predicted. The future stability of South Sudan, and Africa on a whole, is hard to imagine with the destabilizing omnipresence of unmitigated climate change.

The U.S. is also not impervious to its own addiction to fossil fuels and the injustices of climate change. In 2018, California experienced the most destructive wildfire season in the state’s history. These fires are getting more destructive as climate change is causing longer, drier and hotter wildfire seasons. The Camp Fire was the single most deadly and destructive of which, as the inferno took the lives of 86 people, destroyed 18,800 structures and incinerated 153,000 acres of land. The source of the Camp Fire has been traced to the power lines of Pacific Gas and Electric, who have also been named responsible for seventeen of the twenty-one major Northern Californian fires in 2017. Though, instead of being held responsible, PG&E and other utility companies lobbied the Californian legislature to offload the billions the company owed in damages onto consumers. They succeeded and Californians have to pay for the wildfire damages. Now, in a further egregious act of injustice, PG&E and others are looking to offload the damages for 2018 onto Californians again.

That finally brings me to generational injustice. Four weeks ago in this publication I began my piece by asking the reader to relate to the climate anxieties of young people and the potentially apocalyptic future which past generations have left them. While many older folk grapple with the facts of climate change and wrestle with appropriate solutions, for younger generations the facts are clear, the reality is alarming and the solution is obvious – a Green New Deal. This can be seen most clearly by the Youth Climate Strikes taking place throughout the U.S. and the world. The strikes, which have been taking place on Fridays, have seen hundreds of thousands of school goers skip class for the day to fight for their futures. I spoke to one of these school goers, Audrey Lin, who organized the May 3rd strike at the Massachusetts State House in Boston.

Audrey, a high school senior, got worried about climate change in her Earth Science class as a sophomore, “I really started making the connections between climate change in directly impacting and directly hurting human health.” Inspired to tackle the issue she decided to get involved in climate activism and in June of 2018 she joined the Sunrise Movement’s Boston Chapter.

The Sunrise Movement have fervently worked to place the Green New Deal, a plan to decarbonize the entire country in a decade while creating millions of jobs, on the national stage. With the Green New Deal introduced as a resolution by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey in February, the Sunrise Movement has made the resolution central to the country’s discourse on climate change. When asked what a Green New Deal means for her, Audrey exclaimed, “A Green New Deal is really hopeful for me. I really think it’s a promise that my generation will have access to a safe and livable future.” In a somber summation of her reasons for not attending class and striking on Friday, Audrey said that she did not understand why she would continue on the conveyor belt of high school, and then college, and then to some career if her future wasn’t secure.

It’s hard to look past the injustice of young people having to sacrifice part of their education to rectify a situation not of their creation, but seeing the fearless drive and optimism of students like Audrey, I’m certain that the missteps of past generations will be overcome by these courageous young people.