There’s a really big opportunity to do movement building, and we have to reach more people. We have to get more people engaged and activated on the issue of climate change. Most people agree that climate change is a problem, and they agree that it will affect them at some point, but we have a government that does not agree with that, and that means that our government is not aligned with the people that they’re representing by getting these passive supporters of climate justice, of renewable energy, of phasing out oil and gas, and actually activating them to be active participants in the movement we can grow power.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Zanagee Artis on the program. Zanagee is the NRDC fossil fuels policy advocate. He’s also the author of a book, a kids book about climate change, and he also is the founder and director of zero hour. So welcome to the program. Sanaji, thanks for having me. Well, I always like to get the kind of backstory of how it is that you came to the climate space, and what’s kind of the arc of your story on that front Yeah. Yeah.

So I honestly, I really did not know a lot about climate change. Growing up, I always loved the ocean. I grew up on the coast of Connecticut, and my parents would always bring me to mis aquarium, which was just a short drive away from where I lived. And I loved seeing the jellyfish, the cow nose, rays, sharks, and my favorite the blue whale.

And those visits to the aquarium and to the beach just down the street from me were really formative in deepening my appreciation for the marine environment, and so that got me involved in working on plastic pollution, and I would go to beach cleanups. I raised money for my high school to install a water bottle fill station so that our cafeteria would stop selling plastic bottles.

And this whole time, I was thinking about this issue and thinking that our own individual actions, and if enough of us, individual people would just stop using plastic, we would solve the plastic pollution problem and protect our oceans, and then I learned about climate change, which is a whole nother story, but that’s really what got me involved.

And I also grew up around activism, and so my parents were involved in cases that legalized same sex marriage in Connecticut, and then they did that at the federal level too. And so engaging on climate was my way of seeing, taking what I was seeing my parents doing and advocating and using my own voice myself.

That’s beautiful story. Yeah, I think starting at a young age is terrific. And so then where did it go from there? What was, what was your next step? And far as you know, college or Yeah.

So, so when I learned about climate change, and I was learning about ocean acidification, absorption of greenhouse gas emissions from the ocean, and also just that the ocean is the biggest heat sink in the world, I thought, okay, like now is really time to do something about climate change. And I really thought that climate change was an issue for the Arctic, something that was affecting the beluga whales, the polar bears, distant places remote from people.

But then I learned about the connection between the plastic industry and the oil and gas industry, that all plastic is petroleum. I learned about the Jacobian Access Pipeline and people putting their bodies on the line to protect access to water at Standing Rock. And this is all right around 2017, and so I’m learning about all this still in high school, and I’m just stunned by the gravity of the crisis that we’re facing, and also incredibly alarmed that I am discovering this mind blowingly dangerous problem. It seems like no one else around me seems to know about it, that no one is aware that like this is a huge deal, and people in high school were making jokes about global warming.

They were like laughing at activists for standing outside with signs and protesting, and in 2017 in the summer of 2017 This is the first summer after President Trump was inaugurated, he was rolling back clean air standards, pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accords. And wildfires were burning in the West Coast. And that summer, I attended a summer program where I met Madeline too and Jamie Margolin, who were two of the founders of zero hour, and together, we came together that summer to actually decide that we would use our voices for protest and use our voices to mobilize our generation to fight for climate justice.

Because we didn’t have the opportunity to use our voices at the ballot box. We were too young to vote in the. Actions that put these people in our office who were shipping our rights to clean air, clean water and a livable planet. So almost eight years ago, we came together to co found zero hour with Nadia Nazar as well to lead the Youth Climate marches. And we did that in 2018 and launched a global youth climate movement.

That’s fantastic. Yeah, around the same time Greta Thunberg was starting her movement, I can’t remember the exact year that she kind of came out, you know, with the protests, was it Fridays for future in Europe? But I think the youth movement definitely kind of ignited a lot of intensity, and thought that maybe hadn’t been coming from the young people up to that point in time.

Yeah, absolutely. And we actually connected with her about the strike movement, and then we worked together for the 2019 climate strikes that happened globally too, which was really awesome to see.

Yeah, so tell us about what you’re doing at the NRDC now and how things have shifted for you in the last few years.

Yeah, it’s been, it’s been a long time since we founded Zero Hour, and now I’ve graduated. I was doing zero hour while I was a student my whole time, and also in my early career, and now I’m working full time at NRDC and really organizing and advocating in a different way. So I started organizing during the Trump administration, but we were doing a lot of environmental justice, education, awareness about climate change, and then bringing in policy advocacy into that, really, after 2020 when the Biden administration took office and the Democrats won Congress, and now it’s just a whole different ball game.

So this is my first time really working on policy issues in hostile administration, which is both the Trump administration and the Senate and the House of Representatives are all controlled by the Republicans. This is the administration that is working to dismantle the federal government our right to public input, our right to protest, and our rights to clean air and water, and we we are here to fight that on every step of the way. They’re rejecting public health expertise.

They’re rejecting climate science, also that billionaires and oil and gas executives can get even richer at the expense of everyone else, and our role is to get people engaged, get get people to see that and actually hold the line for climate.

I just noticed that, I think it was within the last day or two, Lee Zeldin, who’s now the chair of the EPA, has dismantled, or is dismantling, the office in the EPA that focused on, you know, areas where, you know, people who are disadvantaged and people of color were kind of, you know, had particular pollution issues, because a lot of these major polluters set up shop and set up their factories in poor areas where they can kind of get away with polluting and they don’t get called to account and and they also pulled the plug on a big case that was down, I think, in Louisiana, where there was a cancer cluster around this factory, and, you know, people were getting poisoned by a lot of toxins going into the air and the water.

Yeah, I mean, it’s wild that this administration is attacking environmental justice, and these are offices that were created decades ago to uphold standards for clean air, clean water, and in particular places like you said, black and brown communities, low income communities, communities that have always borne the brunt pollution in the country, and they are choosing not to uphold that because there are oil lobbyists who don’t want that.

It’s kind of shocking, because Trump campaigned on hey to you know, black and brown communities, hey, I’m going to be your guy. I’m going to help you out so on and so forth, and then immediately dismantles the office that was there to protect these folks from pollution that is extreme and extraordinarily dangerous.

Absolutely, yeah, and it’s happening across agencies of Department of Energy, NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All of these are vital services, and they are cutting them. And honestly, like people, the natural park service, too are rights to access our public lands. There’s interest in opening up monument areas for drilling and in the fact that that’s even being explored is just absurd. And if you’ve never considered yourself an activist like now is really the time to start thinking about how you see yourself getting involved, and how you want to see the direction of this country go.

Well, I guess are you? Is he in our DC and your office focusing on on local and state government as well. And you know, places where activism maybe is hearing the voice of or legislators are hearing the voices of activists more so than they’re hearing them in Washington.

Yeah. So a lot of my work focuses on federal issues, and so a huge share of my work is opposing offshore drilling and working to phase out fossil fuels in general. And we’re really making the case to end new oil and gas leasing, because once a lease sale happens, it’s really incredibly difficult to claw it back. And it takes up to a decade to actually develop a lease, if they start immediately.

And some of these leases are being held for years and years in our public waters, in the ocean, and they’re just not drilling on them at all. And so we have this industry that is stockpiling leases, buying even more, and what that’s going to do is lock in offshore drilling for decades to come.

And so right now, Congress is considering a budget bill that includes mandated offshore drilling leasing and and the Trump administration, on day one, has attempted to open up protected areas of our oceans to offshore drilling off the Atlantic, off the in the Pacific coast, off of Washington, Oregon and California, and off the coast of Alaska, and we’re fighting that.

And I guess the question is, if they do vote against it, are they going to hold a hard line to strip those provisions about the oil and gas leases out of the bill. And what are you hearing from senators, Democratic senators, on that issue.

Through the budget reconciliation process, we expect that that will happen over the next few months, and there’s also a parallel spending bill process that’s happening to continue funding for the government, but for the budget resolution really like this is, this is the responsibility of the Republicans, because it needs just a simple majority in both chambers.

And so it’s a really weird process, but that’s that’s the function of the budget, and that is how the inflation Reduction Act passed. It’s it was a process that we used to pass really critical climate legislation, and now it’s being used in a very different way to actually fight for drilling in places that that deserve protection. And most of my work focuses on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, where there is a critically endangered Rice’s whale.

There are fewer than 100 of this endangered whale. It’s endemic to the Gulf of Mexico, the only great whale species that exists only in our waters. And and they want to drill there. And when you drill, you spill. And what they’re they’re trying to raise revenue from these offshore oil and gas lease sales to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, and at the same time, they’re cutting health care and they’re unwilling to pay for student debt and all of these other things that the people actually really want. Instead, they’re choosing corporate interests.

Well, I guess the question is, is there, is there something we can do as consumers to just stop using oil and gas powered cars that would certainly dry up the demand for all the drilling that’s being done? Is that? Is that realistic, or is it that we really should focus on the public policy changes in Washington.

Yeah. So I think there is definitely a role for all of us choosing to be more sustainable in our daily lives. And I applaud those who are able to do that. I ride a bike personally, and I really love that. And of course, people will be using cars for a really long time.

But I also think that the issue of the oil and gas industry is an institutional and systemic issue, and to actually adequately address the transition in the way that we need to to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even two degrees Celsius, based on the United Nations scientists goals, we have to do a full transition of the supply side, and that’s oil and gas production.

It means phasing out drilling. It means stopping new leasing so that there isn’t more into the future. It means stopping the expansion of pipelines and and that doesn’t mean that the tap will be shut off immediately. It means that we we want to have a just transition.

We want to create jobs for people in the oil and gas industry, to cap wells, to decommission pipelines, to actually be involved. In, in the phase out of this industry, and then get a transition to a new economic model that is sustainable, that is healthy, that doesn’t risk cancer and heart disease from toxins that are always leaking from the sector. That’s the vision, and it has to be a system level issue.

Well, it was interesting. I was talking to a NASA scientist the other day, and he was the person who replaced James Hansen, the famous scientist who called the Congress’s attention to the problem of global warming. He was saying, hey, for society to kind of flourish and ever to reach other planets and stuff like this, it would have to be sustainable. So if, like, we look generations or 1000s of years out, that is the trajectory we have to be at. We have to be sustainable, or else we’re toast.

I mean, that really is it. And it kind of helped me to see, oh yeah, of course, if we’re going to sustain life on this planet. We cannot continue to waste our resources and dirty our soil, our air, our water like there’s there is a zero hour coming right absolutely, yeah, but people don’t seem to see it. So what are you doing to kind of wake up Gen Z and say, Hey guys, stop focusing on your gaming and other you know, pleasure that we see on the internet and all the fun things there are do and focus on things like the environment.

Yeah, I think a big part of it is really like what I shared about my early experience in climate advocacy was that I thought that climate change was this distant threat. I didn’t think it was an immediate problem. You know, there are so many other things that young people are caring about. The price of rent, like rent is too high, group costs of groceries, maybe you’re looking into buying a car and EVs are too expensive, so you go with the gas option.

People are paying back their student loans and climate change, while such an important issue is sometimes not at the forefront of people’s lives, but what I think is really important to do is actually like, lead a movement that inspires empathy, and we do that by storytelling. We do that by uplifting the voices of people in the Gulf South who are impacted by this immediately, because the impacts of offshore drilling do not end at the coastline.

There is a complex infrastructure in a vast system of onshore oil and gas refineries and processors that will take that oil and gas onshore and and that’s so important to recognize, because they’re toxic and and so nearly half of the country’s petroleum refining capacity and over half of the natural gas processing capacity can be found along the Gulf Coast.

And it also at the same time, most of the basic chemical production takes place there because of the byproducts of refiners and processors like ethylene propylene and benzene, which are cancer causing byproducts, and these cause respiratory illness, cancer, rashes, eczema, all sorts of different health problems. And these are issues that are affecting people right now.

And so even aside from climate change, there’s this whole other issue of environmental justice that’s connected, where all of this impact is happening in communities. And the same is the case for our ecosystems, for rice as well, for other species as well.

So what’s one climate policy change that would make the biggest difference right now?

Yeah, well, so it depends on what you mean by making the biggest difference. So a big part of what I’m working on now is preventing new emissions. So stopping new leasing does not actually stop emissions today. It’s going to stop new offshore drilling from happening years and years down the road.

But we also need to be thinking about, what are we doing to phase out current drilling? What are we doing to actually ensure that polluters are held accountable for oil spills? Because right now, taxpayers are on the hook. Taxpayers paid billions and billions of dollars for the Deep Water Horizon oil disaster, even despite a settlement from BP.

And so we’re also we need to make it that the industry financially accountable for the messes that they’re causing. And I think that would really go a long way in accountability and also level the playing field for energy resources. We’re subsidizing the oil and gas industry to the tune of $20 billion a year. That is an unfair market advantage. It’s market distortion.

And at the same time, the administration is canceling offshore wind leasing. Altogether, and so we Yeah, this is just, it’s an entirely unfair playing field, and they’re also spending millions of dollars lobbying the government.

Well, certainly the oil companies have had an unfair advantage for 100 plus years and have benefited from government taking care of them every step of the way. But if you could tell every Gen Z activist one thing, what would it be?

I love this question. So if I could tell them one thing, it would be that if you care about climate change and you want to take action, you are not alone. There are so many people out there who want to work on this. And when we co founded Zero Hour, there wasn’t really a vibrant youth led movement in the US or anywhere else in the world.

And it was hard to tell whether or not, yeah, we were, we were the crazy ones, you know, like, there weren’t other students who were organizing in a really big way. And now there are, and there are so many ways to plug in, and I would say that the best thing you can do to find out how you want to plug in is really identify the issue that you care most about.

For me, it was the ocean and and think about what unique skills you can bring to the movement, because everyone has something to bring them to the table. Could be writing. Could be your story. Could be that you know how to organize your neighbors, to write letters to your member of Congress. And there is an endless amount of things that you could do. And the oil and gas industry is a multi billion dollar multinational industry, and it’ll take all of us to go up against.

Absolutely. Tell us about some of the big climate wins that you think have have happened in recent years, and why you think they’re important.

Yeah, so one of the really big wins that we were excited about at the start of this year was actually President Biden’s withdrawal of federal waters from offshore drilling. And what that meant was that over 625 million acres of our ocean were protected from the prospect of offshore drilling. It protected the East Coast and the Atlantic. It protected the Pacific, along Oregon, Washington and California, and then parts of Alaska and on his first day in office, President Trump attempted to revoke those protections, which are permanent.

And so that was a huge win, and now we have to fight to protect it. And so some of my colleagues who are attorneys are fighting that battle in the legal system. And just to highlight two cases, those are northern Alaska Environmental Center and League of Conservation Voters. And those are both filed in February, and they’re challenging this administration’s attempt to undo Biden administration protections that protect our coasts from oil and gas development.

And in northern Alaska Environmental Center, we’re co counsel with earth justice and Sierra Club and a host of other organizations across the country that are co plaintiffs, and in the LCV case where CO counsel with earth justice and joined by the League of Conservation Voters and other co plaintiffs. And it’s so huge that so many organizations all across the country are coming together for this to say that we want to protect our coasts everywhere.

And that was the first environmental lawsuit that was filed against the Trump administration, and that’s a huge deal, and we’re going to court to protect our oceans. And so that will be happening over the coming years, I expect, but the Trump administration lost on this issue during its first term, and we’re confident that the law is on our side again.

Well, that’s great work, and I think that a lot of people may not recognize how important organizations like the NRDC and others that have great legal teams ready at the go to challenge these illegal actions by the Trump administration are just absolutely mission critical to protecting our environment.

So great work to the NRDC and all the stuff that you guys do over there, absolutely discussing the concept of ocean climate justice and its importance to safeguarding rights and all that. Tell us what it is that you’re doing, kind of on the ground right now to affect those rights.

So a lot of our partners are doing really awesome work, organizing people in the Gulf. So groups like Surfrider in Florida, groups like healthy Gulf working in multiple places in Louisiana and Florida and Texas, actually getting the word out about this issue on the ground and ensuring that people actually know that what happens in our ocean affects people on shore.

And they’re doing education about Rice’s whale. They’re doing education about offshore drilling and. Getting people to engage with their members of Congress, so telling them that that we have an opportunity to save Rice’s whale, that that it is recoverable, and that they can continue to reproduce if conditions improve, and we have an opportunity to actually not allow this species to go extinct, which would be the first great whale species that humans caused extinction of, and humans are its biggest threat today.

For our part, NRDC, we are doing a lot of work centered in Washington, and we have some of my colleagues in government affairs up on the hill all the time actually getting members of Congress to hold the line on on giveaways to the oil and gas industry, to say that we they don’t need more of our more millions of acres of our ocean, that they don’t need more access to drilling.

And that actually they haven’t been on the hook for the spills that they’ve caused for years, and they should be paying for that, and then just getting supporters across the country to write in and call in, because all of us have a responsibility to use our voices to tell our representatives that we agree that big oil does not need more of our federal lands and waters.

I know in Denmark. I was in Denmark a few years ago, and they are getting an enormous amount of power from offshore wind, and they’ve gotten to the point where there are days where 100% of their power needs are met by renewables. So and I think they’re talking about how they’re going to be the Saudi Arabia of wind, essentially creating green hydrogen from from wind power, which, of course, we have the potential to do as well.

I mean, there’s so much there’s so much opportunity for for renewable energy in this country and the US really has, I think, a responsibility to be a leader on this issue. And we’re so far behind other countries around the world, especially in Europe, on on renewable energy deployment, and like now’s the moment.

We’re five years away from this critical deadline of 2030 for reducing emissions, and this President will be in office until 2029 so our job really is to keep keep the pressure up and keep fighting and get Congress on board with actually adopting renewables.

Well, it seems as though, realistically, for the next two years, or at least until the 2026 midterms, that they are going to continue to do things that are probably adverse to the environment. It’s only in 2026 that there’ll be a chance to really put some pressure on the executive branch through flipping, possibly the House of Representatives, maybe the Senate, if, if that doesn’t happen.

I think the it seems as though we have to kind of work around him to a certain extent, and work around the administration. Say, Hey, what are the things that we can do independent of the Trump administration? And what’s your answer to that one?

Yeah, so there’s a few things. One, I think, is there’s still a really big opportunity to do movement building, and we have to reach more people. We have to get more people engaged and activated on the issue of climate change, and I think that most people, and actually like there is data to confirm that most people agree that climate change is a problem,

And they agree that it will affect them at some point, perhaps there is a little bit less visibility that climate change is an imminent threat to themselves. But by and large, people agree that climate change is a problem, and we have a government that does not agree with that, and that means that our government is not aligned with the people that they’re representing.

And so by getting these passive supporters of this issue of climate justice, of renewable energy, of phasing out oil and gas and actually activating them to be active participants in the movement we can grow power and power to actually shape what our vision for our economies are, for our energy systems, for our communities and and that’s so important, because we live in a representative democracy, and so people have to be engaged.

So over the next few years, we’ll we’ll be doing that, and we’ll be engaging people to actually actively be involved, because even though this administration opposes so many of the things that we care so deeply about. President Trump represents all Americans, not just the people that voted for him. The members of Congress in office represent all of their districts, all of their states, not just the people who voted for them. So they’ll be hearing from us this whole time, and at the same time, we have opportunities to.

Organized in states, not on offshore drilling, unfortunately, because most of that is happening in federal waters, but on other issues. There are so many things that we can work on. We can make polluters pay. There’s a huge campaign about that. We can work on ending state oil and gas subsidies, actually ensuring that oil wells are not sited near where people are living that could leak methane, like leak benzene and other toxic chemicals.

How do we make climate change cool again?

Well, climate change was never cool, I think, unfortunately. But although I will say, I mean, millions and millions of people came out for the first Earth Day, which I was not around for. But yeah, I think there are ways that we can really breathe life into this movement, and I think that that honestly, like goes back to student led organizing, and also diversity and tactics of organizing.

We’re seeing a lot of content creators create opportunities for people to submit public comments and engage in a very different way than than we’ve seen in the past, and so I think it will take a lot of innovation and a lot of interesting spokespeople, and I think also continuing to uplift people who are most impacted, people on the front lines of this issue, living in Louisiana and Texas, living near pipeline infrastructure, living up in Alaska on the North Slope, because we when you hear from someone who is actually being directly impacted.

I think that has a far greater impact than hearing from a scientist or a lawyer. And I say that with the caveat that NRDC is made up of all lawyers and scientists and policy wonks, but it’s so important to us that people actually hear from people on the ground who are impacted, because that inspires action.

Yeah, I think that’s true. So we need to elevate the stories of the people who are actually being hurt by climate change. And you know, I recall the people I lived in Louisiana for five years, and those communities that are close to the water, who’ve had their areas carved up by the oil and gas industry, that have destroyed 40 miles of coast land every year because of the oil and gas industry.

And those stories just need to be told constantly, because people it’s easy to forget about people that are far away from you, but it’s, it’s destruction of a magnitude that we would, we would never accept some other country coming in and destroying 40 miles of our coast land, but somehow we allowed the oil companies to do it every single day.

Absolutely, yeah, and there’s so much at stake. It’s our own health, but also our ecosystems, our environment, our air and water, right?

Well, amen to that. Yeah, one word that I think you used was stewardship, which I think we can be good stewards of this earth, and that’s, that’s what we’re called upon to do, and I think that’s concept needs to be out there more in the conversation of all of us are called to kind of be that and and it isn’t kind of raping and pillaging the land to just get the next dollar.

It’s it’s protecting for generations to come that this land is is sacred for everybody, so we need to protect it. So thank you for the great work that you’re doing, and tell the audience where they can get in touch with you and how they can stay engaged with the work that you’re doing.

Absolutely. So you can find me at nrdc.org you can check out my blogs. You can check out all of our work at NRDC, and then you can follow my work at zero hour at this is zerohour.org and the same on social media.

Okay, fantastic. Well, wishing you all the best going forward, and we’ll stay in touch.

Thank you.

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