Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action [View all]
In a coastal town in Washington, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it.
But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” says Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.”
A solid majority of American teenagers are convinced that humans are changing the Earth’s climate and believe that it will cause harm to them personally and to other members of their generation, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.
The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year. Inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, whose year-long “strike” in front of the Swedish Parliament and carbon-neutral sailboat voyage across the Atlantic have made her an activist icon, growing numbers of teens have been skipping school on Fridays to protest on behalf of something they say is more important.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/most-american-teens-are-frightened-by-climate-change-poll-finds-and-about-1-in-4-are-taking-action/2019/09/15/1936da1c-d639-11e9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html?wpisrc=al_news__alert-hse--alert-national&wpmk=1
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