IRVINE, Calif. — Two youth action groups advocating for stronger environmental and climate policy protested Friday, holding colorful signs at an Irvine intersection.
Roughly 30 attendees stood on a grassy patch along the intersection of Culver Drive and Alton Parkway at 10 a.m., the first of two planned protests. One group, a local chapter of Fridays for the Future, hopes to influence politicians to increase climate aid to poorer countries. The other group, Reform and Sustain, had more specific local policies in mind.
Ariane Jong-Levinger, a co-founder of Reform and Sustain, said they want the city of Irvine to stick to its ambitious goals. Jong-Levinger pointed to a resolution the city had committed to last year to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, an ambitious goal described as a moon shot.
“They haven’t done any meaningful work toward achieving that,” Jong-Levinger said. She serves on one of the citizen-run committees the city has established to solicit opinions and advice from engaged local stakeholders.
Irvine has steadily accumulated policies and committees that are engaged in forming green policy suggestions, but while City Council members have appointed some positions, none of them have decision-making power.
The city has also led an effort for a green energy consortium, known as the Orange County Power Authority, which would seek green-energy providers who can sell businesses and residents affordable clean power options.
The power authority, which has been bankrolled in the early days by Irvine dollars, has been criticized for lacking staff with climate change expertise.
Jong-Levinger wants the city to hire dedicated climate staff and declare a climate emergency.
Both groups protesting Friday attempt to leverage high school and college students to protest with Fridays for the Future, encouraging them to strike from school the last day of each week. It’s in solidarity of the founder of the global movement, Greta Thunberg, who famously skipped classes each Friday to protest climate change starting in 2018.
Johanna Speiser, who helped found the local Orange chapter in 2019 with her brothers, said Fridays’ theme was reparations, which includes a redistribution of money and political decision-making.
“Often the countries that have contributed to the problem the least are the ones that suffer the most,” Speiser said.
Speiser, a junior philosophy student at Chapman University, is primarily responsible for organizing her local chapter for climate strikes that follow the theme of its parent organization. Next steps for her organization, she said, is to continue to expand the local communication with area climate groups. These connections, she said, will be important for the groups’ continued lobbying efforts and could include plans to attend city council meetings to pile on the pressure to change.
But the Friday protests, Speiser said, are more about drawing eyeballs to their cause and pulling in more advocates.
“I think it’s important that every age group gets involved, but older generations have been leading countries and the climate has only gotten worse,” she said.
The group had a second protest scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday outside the Orange City Hall.