Activists disrupt an event titled, “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation” with friendly singing at the COP23 United Nations Climate Change Conference on November 13, 2017, in Bonn, Germany. (Photo: Lukas Schulze / Getty Images)
Last week, nations of the world gathered in Bonn, Germany, for the annual United Nations Climate Negotiations. This year’s conference was pivotal — the first meeting since Trump announced his intentions to pull the US out of the historic Paris Agreement.
The Trump administration’s plans for the conference drew attention well before the meetings began, when it became known that the administration was preparing an official event touting fossil fuels as a solution to the climate crisis.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, UN special envoy for cities and climate change, put it well: “Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit.”
As a youth delegate with the US People’s Delegation, my purpose at the UN was to stand up for the 70 percent of American people — and the majority of Americans in every state — who agree the US should remain in the Paris agreement. It was our duty to make sure the White House would not get away with selling coal at a climate conference, and to remind President Trump how isolated he is on this issue.
More than 1,000 Americans, along with tens of thousands across the world, have died from climate disasters in the past few months. I spent part of my October quarantined at home in the Bay Area due to hazardous smoke from wildfires raging just 60 miles north of me. The fires burned thousands of acres and destroyed over 8,000 structures in one of the deadliest wildfires California has ever seen. Climate change is making wildfires more frequent and more intense across the American West.
On the second day of the conference, Syria made news in a surprise announcement that it would sign the Paris Agreement. The United States now stands alone as the…