Committees to Hold Joint Hearing on Global Youth Climate Movement

Sep 11, 2019
Press Release
Greta Thunberg and US Youth Leaders to testify

 

Washington, DC – Congressman Bill Keating (MA-09) and Congresswoman Kathy Castor (FL-14), Chairpersons of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy, and the Environment and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, respectively, will be holding a joint hearing next week titled "Voices Leading the Next Generation on the Global Climate Crisis."
 
The hearing will take place on Wednesday, September 18, 2019 at 10 a.m. in the Foreign Affairs Committee Room of the Rayburn House Office Building (Room 2172).  The hearing will also be livestreamed on the Foreign Affairs Committee website.
 
The witnesses include: 
 
Greta Thunberg is from Sweden. She is a climate activist who founded Fridays For Future when she began going on strike from school outside the Swedish Parliament on Fridays.  She has spoken on the climate crisis before the EU Parliament.
 
Jamie Margolin is from Seattle, Washington. She is a Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of This is Zero Hour, an international youth climate organization founded in the summer 2017. Zero Hour organized a youth climate march in July of 2018 in Washington D.C. and 25 cities around the world. She is also a plaintiff in Piper v. State of Washington.
 
Vic Barrett is from White Plains, New York. He is a fellow with the Alliance for Climate Education and a plaintiff in Juliana v. United States. 
 
Benji Backer is from Appleton, Wisconsin.  He is the President of the American Conservation Coalition, a nonprofit to educate and engage conservatives on climate change.
 
“Our young global leaders are going to move us forward toward addressing the climate crisis,” said Subcommittee Chairman William Keating. “That is both inspiring and disheartening  - disheartening because we should have been acting on this long before our youth needed to stand up and demand it. I am proud that we have been able to bring together three US youth leaders, Jamie Margolin, Vic Barrett, and Benji Backer, with a youth leader in Europe, Greta Thunberg, and I look forward to hearing their testimonies.” 
 
“We’re at the point where an entire generation has grown up in the climate crisis,” said Select Committee Chair Kathy Castor. “They know the science, they know the stakes and they know how to rise to the challenge. We need to rise with them.”
 
For the past year, students have been going on school strikes on Fridays to demand climate action. More than 1.4 million students participated in global strikes earlier this year. Climate strike leaders have invited adults to join them on Friday September 20th and Friday September 27th, dates that coincide with major United Nations climate meetings in New York.
 
While they are in Washington, DC strikers will also be demonstrating outside the White House and Congress, meeting with members of Congress, and speaking about ongoing federal litigation that would require the United States to address the climate crisis.
116th Congress