Five days before Donald Trump became the 47th U.S. president and as wildfires burned down entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, members of the youth climate group Sunrise Movement gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on a very cold and windy day to protest the expected Senate confirmation of fossil fuel billionaire Chris Wright as Donald Trump’s secretary of energy.
Inside the Senate hearing room, 10 members of Sunrise disrupted the proceedings and were hauled out as they yelled about lost lives and property fueled by the climate crisis in the Los Angeles fires and their fears for the future.
Speaking on the Capitol steps, Sunrise activist Alejandro Sobrera Barboza described his experience with a previous wildfire while a student in southern California. Other speakers included U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Illinois, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California (Silicon Valley), and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts.
[Web editor’s note: The following transcript may differ from the audio interview due to radio broadcast time constraints.]
ALEJANDRO SOBRERA BARBOZA: So, these fires have been very jarring, knowing that a lot of my loved ones have been affected. But even more so, knowing that this was caused by human-caused climate change.
So, back in 2017, as I was finishing fall semester at UC Santa Barbara, I got a notification saying there was a fire in the mountains nearby. I thought to myself, “Hey, the firemen will get it under control. This happens all the time. They’re usually small.”
But this was not the case. I woke up the next morning to the sun bright red, smoke hanging over the sky and ash literally raining down on me as I was biking to class. Because the air quality got so bad, they cancelled our finals and my dad had to come pick me up, and as we were going down the freeway going back home, I had the Pacific Ocean on this side, and on my left side the burning inferno of a mountain. I could not believe my eyes.
I remember telling my dad, “I think this is what hell looks like.” I said it jokingly to try to break the intensity of the situation, but really, I was terrified. These same mountains I would look at as I was driving to school and now they were completely on fire, plumes of fire and smoke coming out and they were completely gone. They were there no longer.
And once the fire was contained, that wasn’t the end of the devastation. Montecito got hit with a huge mudslide because the fire caused so much devastation that the land loosened up; 23 people were buried alive and died, homes destroyed, hundreds more got sent to the hospital. That same freeway I used to evacuate the school was out of commission for weeks, completely buried by the devastation.
And later that year we had the Camp fire, where people were burned alive literally trying to escape.
So, now in LA when we see this wildfire, the fire isn’t the only devastation. More is coming. Already people are without shelter. Landlords are already raising rents. Developers are already planning to buy the parcels from grieving families – all because they see disaster as a chance to make a profit.
And just like they see this as a chance to make a profit, Chris Wright has seen fossil fuels as his right to make a profit from the disaster that he’s causing on the world. These fossil fuel execs do not care about us. They only care to make more money.
And now with all this devastation happening in LA, we’re here now waiting for the Senate to confirm him for the Department of Energy. That’s ridiculous. That’s unacceptable. This not what we want, and I think this is bullshit. So can we get another chant?!
Reject Chris Wright! We will burn, we will fight! (repeat)
U.S. REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: There’s no better moment than today, right now, to have people who are willing to double down and speak truth to power, and that’s why we’re here today. From Illinois to Texas and from New York to California, we know too damn well the effects of this crisis. We’ve seen summer storms and flooding, we’ve seen 70-degree, 75-degree winters, killer heatwaves and the wildfires and the urban firestorms that are raging through California.
This climate crisis is real despite the number of people in that building who don’t believe it and that climate crisis is here. And we know it’s most devastating always, for young people, for working families whose utilities’ costs continue to go up, to the elderly, to the unhoused who can’t endure these extreme temperatures and to the homeowners whose insurances were just cancelled.
Trump and the unaccountable corporate CEOs are not the ones who are shouldering the worst impacts of climate change. Of course not! They’re actually benefitting from it. They’re actually profiting from it! They’re becoming richer than richer, as if billionaire is not enough, right? All of us – everyone in that building – should be disgusted by it.
But instead, they’re addressing the real challenges that Americans confront, including the destruction and pain the climate crisis is causing right now in California, by doing what? By a confirmation hearing for Chris Wright. Boo! Let me hear you! Boo!
He’s a fossil fuel CEO, a fracking lover and advocate and one of Trump’s billionaire bosses and a $400,000 donor who bought his confirmation to our United States government!
We have Speaker Johnson wanting to condition aid to California. They are doing everything they can to destroy our government, our environment and make themselves rich. And this is why we need people here in Congress who understand what’s at stake, who listen to you who are the advocates, who are the ones who are the movers and shakers, who are willing to speak truth to power and call it out when you see it.
We need to deliver a bold policy like the Green New Deal and we need a transformational investment today!
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