And in environmental news, over 250 youth climate activists from the group Sunrise Movement took over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s D.C. office Monday, calling out the Kentucky Republican and his fellow lawmakers for their inaction in the face of climate change and for accepting huge sums of money from the fossil fuel industry and other polluters. This is the executive director of Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash.
Varshini Prakash: “We have known about this crisis for 40 years. And it was an emergency then. It’s a full-blown planetary crisis now. For 40 years we’ve seen the way that fossil fuel executives have misinformed the public on the science. We’ve seen the way that they have poured billions of dollars into the campaign coffers of politicians on both sides of the aisle. And we have seen the way that politicians like Mitch McConnell and the GOP elite have taken 80 percent of those oil and gas donations.”
The takeover follows a viral interaction with Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein over the weekend, in which she dismissed the young activists’ request to back the Green New Deal.