Climate Boomers Will Join Blockade of White House Correspondents Dinner
Elders in Rocking Chairs to Back Youth-Led Climate Defiance Demand that President Biden Keep His Promise: No New Drilling
On Saturday, April 29, youth activists from a new direct action organization Climate Defiance will blockade the 2023 White House Correspondents Dinner to demand that President Biden keep his promise and stop supporting fossil fuel extraction. Members of the Th!rdAct Rocking Chair Rebellion will be there to support them.
While running for president, Biden pledged to end new fossil fuel leases on federal lands, but his administration is now approving new leases at a faster rate than his predecessor, Donald Trump. Among those new leases is the highly controversial Willow Project, which will open up pristine lands in Alaska to new oil drilling by major multinational fossil fuel extractors.
As a former foreign correspondent, it’s not easy for me to decide to join an attempt to blockade one of the premier annual events of my own tribe. People I like and admire will be among those inconvenienced if our blockade succeeds.
But the elite media is complicit in failing to sound the alarm on the climate emergency. We are seeing an upsurge in reporting on climate catastrophes — after all, these are increasingly hard to ignore — but still too little reporting on the dirty fossil money that is blocking action, or on the scientific consensus that avoiding climate catastrophe requires a rapid end to the fossil fuel era.
The World Resources Institute (WRI), my former employer and an organization that is not given to hyperbole, put it this way in their summary of the most recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last month: “The world must rapidly shift away from burning fossil fuels — the number one cause of the climate crisis.”
At the UN climate conference last fall, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez put it more bluntly: “We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” he said. Noting that the planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate change irreversible, he added: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
The Climate Defiance manifesto is forthright and persuasive: “We are young. We are livid. We are no longer willing to be disposable,” it states. “The laws of nature do not care what’s ‘realistically feasible.’ And neither do we.
We will use mass-turnout, peaceful direct action to force our politicians to take action at the scope and speed necessary to avert the worst impacts of this crisis.”
Their video is moving and compelling:
I believe that it’s morally unacceptable for the older generation to leave it to young people alone to tackle this existential threat. My generation — the boomers — dropped the ball on climate change. On our watch, it went from a manageable problem to a planetary emergency. And because the U.S. is the world’s richest and most powerful country — and the biggest historical emitter of the greenhouse gasses cooking the planet — our failure to lead undermined the fragile global consensus for action.
We boomers who understand this have a responsibility to act. And if enough of us join to support young climate activists, we can make a difference.
The White House Correspondents Dinner is proceeding as if there were no emergency. Deadline Hollywood gushes that it will be “one of the biggest social nights of the year for Beltway media and politicos,” adding that “the sold-out event at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night also is expected to draw celebrities and other notables.”
Out on the streets, the youth of Climate Defiance and their allies and supporters will be sounding the alarm. I’m proud to be among the Th!rdAct boomers of the Rocking Chair Rebellion who will be there to support them.
To learn more and join us, sign up at Climate Defiance.
