(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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The Sunrise Movement’s Critics Really Don’t Get Climate Activism [1]
['Kate Aronoff', 'Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling', 'Hafiz Rashid', 'Liza Featherstone', 'Heather Souvaine Horn']
Date: 2024-06-05
Sunrise is, to reiterate, already planning voter mobilization efforts aimed at defeating Trump. Opting to endorse Biden—especially now—wouldn’t benefit Sunrise, and would carry relatively few upsides for the candidate himself. The campaign’s very early endorsements from “the nation’s major climate groups,” after all—which it trumpeted in response to Axios’s questions—haven’t done much to buoy its support among progressives.
The odd thing about some liberal pundits’ ire toward Sunrise in particular is that it seems to be rooted in two contradictory arguments: that Sunrise is an astroturfed, perpetually irrelevant shell of an organization that also also holds outsize power to deliver the presidency to Trump if it doesn’t endorse Biden as quickly as possible. Both of these things cannot be true at the same time. It’s easier, though, to yell at the left than it is to grapple earnestly with the fact that Biden is continuing to lend considerable material support to an unpopular and arguably genocidal war and is struggling in the polls for a host of reasons; in the awful event he loses in November, it certainly won’t be because the left was inadequately enthusiastic about him.
Strange too is several commenters’ bewilderment that a climate group and its members would harbor concerns about the war in Gaza or anything other than capital-C climate policies. “If your goal is action on climate, Biden is the only option,” Tré Easton, Senator John Fetterman’s legislative director, wrote on X. “Pretending otherwise is delusional.” But Biden’s foreign policy is hardly unrelated to the climate crisis. Like his increasingly draconian border policies, it has a major influence on how the United States will continue to shape a warming world. The U.S. military is a major contributor to the climate crisis in its own right, and the government’s continued support for Israel’s brutal war threatens to undermine the kinds of international collaboration needed to rapidly reduce emissions worldwide.
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/182295/sunrise-movement-biden-critics-climate-activism
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