According to NPR News, climate activists staged a hunger strike in front of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. to demand Congress address climate change through President Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation.
Among the activists participating in the hunger strike were members of the Dallas-based climate activism group, Sunrise Movement. According to their website, the group is composed of young people who seek to make stopping climate change an urgent priority across America.
The Dallas Express previously reported about their efforts for a local New Green Deal.
The Sunrise Movement has gone viral in the past for occupying the Democratic National Convention Building in Philadelphia and for questioning California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein over her climate change positions outside her office in an exchange that became testy.
The North Texas activists held the hunger strike between October 20 and November 2. For two weeks, they survived on nothing but water and vitamins. Their goal was to demand Congress follow through on the climate change pledges included in President Biden’s original Build Back Better legislation he introduced while campaigning.
Julia Paramo and Kidus Girma were two of the protesters involved in the strike. They told KERA that what inspired them to get involved was living through last February’s winter storm that crippled Texas’ power grid.
“We were very desperate to do something that matched kind of like the importance of passing climate in this bill, like, you know, we don’t feel like we have a lot of options left,” said Paramo.
Girma called the February winter storm “a moment where our government didn’t need to fail and if had planned appropriately wouldn’t have failed, but did catastrophically fail.”
The infrastructure bill has now been signed into law with a significantly smaller price tag than the $3.5 trillion price tag that the Biden Administration first proposed. Instead, the bill that passed includes just $1.2 trillion in total funding for several issues, including less ambitious climate change proposals.
The bill was significantly reduced from its original price tag partly due to West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s unwillingness to support its passage, thus not giving Democrats enough votes to pass the bill.
The senator believed its passage and green energy, in general, would hurt his constituents. In response to Senator Manchin, around 100 Sunrise Movement protesters showed up at Manchin’s boathouse in D.C. and confronted him with shouts of “We want to live!” and signs that read, “Manchin knows he is killing us.”
After being in the national spotlight for their hunger strike, Girma and Paramo say they now want to focus more on bringing attention to local issues in North Texas.
“I think it’s really important for us to keep putting pressure on people like [U.S. House Representatives] Marc Veasey, Colin Allred, [and Eddie Bernice Johnson], to recognize that we’re in the climate crisis and that it deeply impacts our area, like we saw back in February,” said Paramo.
