Biden, Listen to Students and Declare a Climate Emergency

As educators we have been inspired and moved both to witness and stand alongside young people across the nation who have been at the forefront of campaigns pushing local elected officials and the Biden-Harris administration to declare a climate emergency.

We watched in awe in September when 75,000 people gathered on the streets of New York to attend the March to End Fossil Fuels, organized and driven by the call from youth for climate action. The demands from organizers were clear: stopping federal approvals for new fossil fuel projects and repealing permits for carbon bombs, phasing out fossil fuel drilling on public lands and water, providing a just transition to a renewable energy future, and declaring a climate emergency. This last fall, Oregon youth led a walk out to City Hall demanding that Gov. Tina Kotek declare a climate emergency. And recently, Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group, helped launch two campaigns focusing on a national climate emergency and a local-level Green New Deal for Schools campaign, demanding transformational change within K-12 public schools to better handle the climate crisis.

Students model to the world their passion, care, fears, and visions for our future. As then-16-year-old Greta Thunberg declared in Davos in 2019, “I want you to act as if the world is on fire. Because it is.” We, in turn, as educators, model activities, behaviors, and attitudes for students’ development and success.

Youth activists are now telling us to lobby President Biden, to push him, again, to declare a climate emergency. And so we, educators, responded.

And right now, young people are bravely asking adults to help. Which is why we were so proud of our union, the American Federation of Teachers. In October 2023, the union’s Executive Council passed a resolution “demand[ing] that President Biden take bold action by declaring a national climate emergency” stating that “climate change is a human-caused crisis brought about by the burning of fossil fuels… wreaking havoc on our planet and our daily lives.”

We believe it is time for the rest of the labor movement, as well as the Biden-Harris administration, to join students in defending the conditions for life on Planet Earth. By formally declaring a climate emergency, President Joe Biden can enable a host of executive measures, chief among them restoring the ban on exports of crude oil and halting hundreds of billions in private taxpayer dollars from funding fossil fuel projects abroad. Alongside Biden and Congress’ recent investments and green policies, we can update our infrastructure and provide funding needed to transform our public schools into climate-resilient hubs, creating thousands of safe, good-paying, secure union jobs in the process.

AFT—a union of 1.72 million teachers, para-professionals, professors, graduate workers, bus drivers, nurses, and public employees—endorsed the Green New Deal in 2020, urged our pension trustees to sell fossil fuel stocks in 2022, and pushed for a just transition to protect fossil fuel workers. With help from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), AFT began an ambitious plan to install solar panels in schools everywhere. Education, we hope, will provide reliable, resilient electricity for America’s urban communities. Youth activists are now telling us to lobby President Biden, to push him, again, to declare a climate emergency. And so we, educators, responded.

Labor unions play an important role in addressing injustices within the workplace and in workers’ communities. Black and brown communities on the frontline of the environmental crisis face disproportionate environmental burdens. School communities across the nation experience direct impacts of weather extremes that will continue to intensify and become more frequent due to climate change. Just this past August, Chicago Public Schools, the fourth largest school district in the nation that serves 80% Black and brown students, had to stop all outdoor school activities because of temperatures above 100°F. To make matters worse, fossil fuels continue to create a toxic racial justice crisis in our communities.

We—and thousands of other climate-informed teachers—feel a responsibility to act upon our knowledge and firsthand experience. When we march against fossil fuels and support youth-led green movements, we are marching for conditions that will sustain the work we love. If Biden wishes to be known as union-friendly, he has to be climate-friendly too.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration affirmed that it is listening too. The administration paused the review of new fossil gas—often called liquefied natural gas (LNG)—projects on the Gulf Coast. That is a step in the right direction. Let us continue to walk that path towards a climate resilient future and think bolder than we ever have before.