This is the second in a series about episodes in season seven of Connect the Dots, the Center for Progressive Reform’s podcast on climate solutions. Subsequent posts will be posted throughout the summer.
Connect the Dots season seven has arrived. Listen to a teenage advocate reform climate transportation justice on episode two.
This season, host Rob Verchick, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans and president of the Center for Progressive Reform, is joined by guests from around the country to talk about climate wins.
Our second episode — Climate Win: Youth Activist Takes on State Government — features youth climate and transportation justice organizer, Adah Crandall. At only 16 years old, the Portland, Oregon, native works as an organizer at Sunrise Portland Youth and co-leads the Portland Youth Climate Strike. Crandall focuses on how pollution from cars, trucks, planes, and other transit contribute to global warming.
Crandall first learned about the negative health effects of diesel pollution in her middle school, which was adjacent to a Portland freeway. Being able to hear, see, and smell the exhaust from the freeway traffic every day was unacceptable to her and unfair to children. With the help of a teacher, she and classmates created an Environmental Justice Club at school and began lobbying the state government in protest of a freeway expansion, intended to be constructed even closer to her school.
Now in high school, Crandall has been working with Sunrise Portland Youth, an organization of young people advocating for climate justice around the country. She has also been liaising with the Portland Department of Transportation to build out educational programs, improving information and access to mass transit.
Crandall even testified before a government committee hearing, bringing attention not only to her goal, but also to her unique story as a teenager growing up with a climate crisis.
Though Crandall noted she feels betrayed and dismissed by politicians that haven’t taken climate policy seriously enough, she is hopeful and encouraged by the thousands of youths across the country like her who advocate on behalf of a sustainable future.
“The work that we’re doing does make an impact, and we are starting to change things,” Crandall told Connect the Dots. “It’s not only a sad story. There have always been people who are standing up against these injustices.”
For all the details to this episode, listen to Connect the Dots on your favorite podcasting platform and be sure to subscribe to catch the next episode on community solar solutions in a state where solar energy is growing faster than most of the country: North Carolina.
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Faith Duggan | June 16, 2023
When pollution from a neighboring freeway was seeping into the playground and classrooms of her middle school, Adah Crandall said enough was enough. She founded an Environmental Justice Club at her school and began protesting the freeway's proposed expansion, citing health hazards to children and an unsustainable future.
James Goodwin | June 15, 2023
Following all the partisan rancor on the Hill lately, yesterday’s hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources of the House Natural Resources Committee was a breath of fresh air. It focused on two important bills that can help Appalachian communities transition to a post-carbon economy in a way that addresses the harmful environmental […]
Shelley Welton | June 12, 2023
The scientific concept of net-zero emissions has quickly become an organizing policy paradigm, enshrined in the Paris Agreement and manifested in thousands of “net-zero” pledges developed by countries, states, cities, and private companies. Collectively, these pledges now purport to cover more than 91 percent of the global economy. If this figure sounds too good to be true, that’s because it likely is. Net zero is anti-democratic, inequitable, and imperial. For related reasons that I focus on in this post, it is also unlikely to work as a strategy to achieve the collective global aim of net-zero carbon emissions.
Faith Duggan | June 9, 2023
Our first episode of Connect the Dots Season 7 — Climate Win: Maryland’s Climate Solutions Now Act— takes us to Maryland for a major legislative win and its key elements to success. Verchick spoke with the Center’s Katlyn Schmitt, a senior policy analyst who helped steer the Climate Solutions Now Act into law last year.
Daniel Farber | June 8, 2023
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed over 50 years ago. It created a new tool for environmental protection — the environmental impact statement. It also created the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which issued guidelines for implementing NEPA in 1978. Lawyers will need to retool quickly because of recent changes. Here’s a roadmap to recent developments.
Robert L. Glicksman | May 30, 2023
The following post provides detailed analysis of the recent Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency U.S. Supreme Court decision. It was originally posted to The George Washington Law Review and is cross-posted with permission. The current Supreme Court is not a friend of the administrative state. A majority of its members seem to take particular umbrage at administration of the regulatory programs […]
David Driesen | May 30, 2023
In Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the federal government’s power to protect wetlands. The Court required “Congress to enact exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the Power of government over private property.”
William Buzbee | May 25, 2023
On May 25, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its much-awaited decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This is the Supreme Court’s fourth foray over several decades into what count as protected “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act. This language provides the key jurisdictional hook for all important federal powers under the Act.
Sidney A. Shapiro, Sophie Loeb | May 25, 2023
There are ways to meet North Carolina's carbon reduction goals and protect ratepayers from catastrophic increases in the cost of electricity, but the regulatory system is set up in a way that makes it more difficult to get to this result.