--- title: Climate Change Is Destroying American History description: The nation’s legacy is at risk as extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe—and as the history community struggles to meet the crisis canonical: https://time.com/6206790/climate-change-american-history/ author: John Garrison Marks article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-08-25T11:00:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:38:51.367Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Climate Change Is Destroying American History og:description: As climate change increases the severity of extreme weather events, the nation’s legacy is at risk. og:url: https://time.com/6206790/climate-change-american-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte57fd0de91babd6e/698a34da22fb854b88e2dcae/climate-change-destroying-american-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: climate-change-destroying-american-history og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Climate Change Is Destroying American History twitter:description: As climate change increases the severity of extreme weather events, the nation’s legacy is at risk. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte57fd0de91babd6e/698a34da22fb854b88e2dcae/climate-change-destroying-american-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Climate Change Is Destroying American History > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=38620267-3400-4e18-8552-c609e51e0e58&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice [Watch (HLS stream): Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/CIHrS8Mv.m3u8) (14:03)  _Published 2021-11-05. Today’s young people are coming of age just as the stable climate that has allowed previous generations to thrive on our planet begins to visibly break down—and just before our last chance to stop it falls out of reach._ by [John Garrison Marks](https://time.com/author/john-garrison-marks/) ## John Garrison Marks Marks is the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight For American Memory. Aug 25, 2022 11:00 AM UTC by [John Garrison Marks](https://time.com/author/john-garrison-marks/) ## John Garrison Marks Marks is the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight For American Memory. Aug 25, 2022 11:00 AM UTC As Hurricane Ida barreled down on the Louisiana coast last August, all Ashley Rogers could do was wait and hope. Sixteen years to the day from when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Rogers—the executive director of the Whitney Plantation historic site in Wallace, La.— had evacuated to Alabama to wait out the storm and for news from the site. A [former sugar and indigo plantation](https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/) about 50 miles east of New Orleans, Whitney Plantation has established itself as one of the nation’s premiere historic sites and [one of the only former plantations](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/the-plantation-every-american-should-visit) dedicated entirely to sharing the history of American slavery. Like everything in southern Louisiana, it had seen its share of bad weather. With hurricane season [starting earlier](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/11/29/analysis-atlantic-hurricane-season-is-growing-longer/) and [sending a growing number of storms](https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2022-atlantic-hurricane-season#:~:text=NOAA's%20outlook%20for%20the%202022,of%20a%20below%2Dnormal%20season.) spiraling toward the coast each year, however, Rogers knew they had been lucky to avoid a direct hit. With Hurricane Ida, that luck ran out. The storm, which made landfall on Aug. 29, 2021, battered the region and devastated Whitney Plantation. Nearly every building on site was damaged; two slave cabins collapsed completely. Ida felled trees and scattered debris across the site. Power lines lay draped across the site’s only entrance for days with no indication of when electricity might be restored. The scope of the damage made reopening the site—and bringing in the revenue needed to preserve the rest of what was damaged—impossible in the short term. It was immediately clear that some of what was lost could never be fully recovered. After expecting to be closed for just a few days, the site ended up shuttered for more than three months. **_Read more:_** [_The Uncertain Future of Places That Preserve America’s Past_](https://time.com/5870460/museums-coronavirus/) “Overwhelming is the only word I could use to describe it,” Rogers recently told me about the damage Ida caused the site. “I just had no idea how we would even begin to recover.” Sadly, Whitney Plantation’s experience is no outlier. Each year**,** severe weather disasters affect hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the history museums, archives, and related organizations tasked with preserving and interpreting American history. As global climate change increases both the number and severity of such events—and as the history and preservation communities struggle to meet the urgency of this crisis—the nation’s legacy is increasingly at risk. With each hurricane, wildfire, and flood, some of our history is lost forever.  The Whitney Plantation was devastated by Hurricane Ida in August 2021. William Widmer—Redux --- **According to** [**new research**](https://aaslh.org/census/) **published in June** by the [American Association for State and Local History](https://aaslh.org/)—a project I directed—the United States is home to [more than 21,500 history museums](https://aaslh.org/census/), historical societies, and related history organizations. The vast majority of those institutions operate on shoestring budgets and many are run entirely by volunteers, a fragile dynamic that raises major challenges when it comes to both planning for and recovering from any disruption. There are also thousands of additional entities, from cemeteries to community organizations, that hold critical pieces of the nation’s cultural patrimony in their care. Simply put, American history is everywhere. Increasingly, so are natural disasters. Last year, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), [declared 58 “major disasters”](https://www.fema.gov/disaster/declarations?field%5Fdv2%5Fstate%5Fterritory%5Ftribal%5Fvalue=All&field%5Fyear%5Fvalue%5B%5D=2021&field%5Fdv2%5Fdeclaration%5Ftype%5Fvalue=DR&field%5Fdv2%5Fincident%5Ftype%5Ftarget%5Fid%5Fselective=All) in the United States; Hurricane (later Tropical Storm) Ida caused six of those, stretching from Louisiana to Connecticut. Others included wildfires in California and Colorado, mudslides in Washington, and tornadoes in Tennessee. [Twenty separate disasters](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2021-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historical) last year each caused more than a billion dollars in damage, the second highest annual total on record. Already in 2022, the country has experienced 24 major disasters, from wildfires in New Mexico and landslides in Puerto Rico to severe flooding in Kentucky, Montana, South Dakota, and elsewhere. **_Read more:_** [_Did We Just Blow Our Last, Best Chance to Tackle Climate Change?_](https://time.com/6130470/climate-change-2021-build-back-better/) The dispersed nature of the nation’s historical assets makes calculating the precise scope of the resulting loss nearly impossible—a major problem of its own—but evidence of it is easy to find. Just last month, several history organizations in Kentucky were [devastated by flooding ](https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article263958601.html?fbclid=IwAR0%5F%5F0jESaj6KBqJRTeTG%5FWTE15Z9NkHgb-Lh-xW83tCTPmFyYbzycMYR8Q)while the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H., revealed that historic buildings on their campus now regularly fill with [nearly two feet of water](https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/2022/07/19/strawbery-banke-adapts-climate-change-save-history-portsmouth/10085958002/). Last year, the Superior Historical Museum outside Boulder, Colo., [burned to the ground in the Marshall Fire](https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/05/superior-historical-museum-marshall-fire/), losing the entirety of its historical collection. In 2019, staff from the Arizona Historical Society had to rush to [save collections items](https://learn.aaslh.org/products/history-news-spring-2020) from their Pioneer Museum from the encroaching “Museum Fire”—so named because it began near _another_ museum, Flagstaff’s near-century-old Museum of Northern Arizona. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, [rising sea levels are erasing the history](https://www.wusa9.com/article/life/holidays/black-history-month/underground-railroad-how-sea-level-rise-threatening-parts-history-climate-change-eastern-shore/65-5be82a3f-d3dc-43f8-8457-909933c72d53) of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Even the Smithsonian Institution is vulnerable, with the National Museum of American History [fighting back flooding](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/climate/smithsonian-museum-flooding.html) into critical collections storage spaces amid rising tides and heavy rain. A simple search for “flood” or “fire” and “museum” brings up many other examples just from the past year. Yet despite the very real, immediate impact natural disasters have on history organizations each year, there are few resources available for either planning or recovery—and not nearly enough urgency to begin providing them.  Artifacts at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2021\. Flooding has breached rooms containing the museum's collections. Erin Schaff—The New York Times/Redux --- **As Ashley Rogers and the Whitney Plantation staff worked** toward recovery in the days and weeks after Hurricane Ida last year, they confronted a stark reality: for museums and historic sites recovering from a climate disaster, help can be hard to come by. “The whole process was very overwhelming, especially since it wasn’t something we had gone through before and we did not have an emergency plan,” Rogers told me. The museum’s small staff, still evacuated, was forced to manage from afar the multiple crews of people cutting trees and shoring up structures, as well as energy-company personnel, insurance adjusters, and others accessing the site. “Recovery in the weeks immediately following the storm was basically organized chaos.” For museums and cultural institutions affected by severe weather, the Heritage Emergency National Task Force (HENTF)—a partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI)—is among the first responders. HENTF endeavors to protect cultural heritage in the wake of natural disasters by connecting institutions with on-the-ground partners to assist with the delivery of resources and by keeping in touch as they try to navigate the process of applying for relief funds. Those relief funds, intended to aid in recovery and replace revenue lost from extended closures, are typically available from three sources: private insurance, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration (SBA). But actually accessing funding is often an uphill battle. **_Read more:_** [_U.S. Civil Engineers Bent the Rules to Give New Orleans Extra Protection from Hurricanes. Those Adjustments Might Have Saved the City During Ida_](https://time.com/6094221/hurricane-ida-engineering-protection/) “Navigating the process can be overwhelming, especially for smaller organizations,” Lori Foley, HENTF’s coordinator, commented to me. HENTF—one of the only entities coordinating support services for cultural institutions after a natural disaster, and which is primarily staffed by Foley on her own—strives, she noted, “to meet people where they are and provide encouragement to ‘make it to the end.’” Many insurance policies are often focused more on replacing lost operating revenue rather than the value of damaged artifacts and can be poorly suited to the nature of historic sites facing storm damage. At Whitney Plantation, for example, many of the buildings had been left outside the scope of the site’s insurance policy. Meanwhile, for FEMA assistance, the application process—in what Rogers describes as a well-intentioned but infeasible attempt to prevent further damage to artifacts—would have required the Whitney Plantation staff to document the latitude and longitude of every piece of debris or to have an archaeologist inspect the root ball of every downed tree before the agency would fund their removal. And Disaster Loan Assistance from SBA comes with its own set of documentation requirements. Each of these sources of aid are often dependent on the others, meaning months of wait time while the costs of disaster recovery are immediate. “It was an unbelievable challenge,” Rogers said. While Whitney’s national reputation allowed it to raise money from public donations, “we received no federal, state, or local recovery funds….Some of that was simply unavailable or inaccessible, and others were just very complicated systems that were hard to navigate” while carrying out all the other aspects of the recovery with very limited time and resources. Some assistance, though small, is more readily available for cultural institutions. For example, some of the most substantive aid Whitney Plantation received came in the form of a $10,000 grant from the privately operated Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities—a drop in the bucket when facing such extensive damage, but easily accessible in the middle of a crisis. Meanwhile, the American Institute for Conservation coordinates the “[National Heritage Responders](https://www.culturalheritage.org/resources/emergencies/national-heritage-responders),” a source of 24-hour emergency response assistance for anyone seeking advice on how to care for resources (documents, historic objects, clothing, etc.) that have been damaged by severe weather. A year after Hurricane Ida, and many months after it incurred the expense of responding to the crisis, Whitney Plantation is only now receiving some of its disaster relief funding. For the thousands of organizations with fewer resources and less wherewithal than Whitney—about 65% of nonprofit history organizations operate on less than $50,000 in revenue each year—a climate catastrophe not only can destroy historical artifacts, it can also push organizations past the breaking point. --- **Despite the obvious signs of crisis**, ensuring the nation’s historical resources survive to the next generation has remained a niche topic even within the professional history community. “I don’t think enough people are talking about climate change as an immediate, honest-to-God threat,” Rogers said. But there is no longer a question of _if_ an institution will be affected by severe weather disasters; it’s strictly a matter of when, and how the institution will respond. Thankfully, there are some signs that the history and museum communities are beginning to take this challenge more seriously. Several studies over the past decade highlight the climate-related risks to American and global history. With titles like _National Landmarks at Risk: How Rising Seas, Floods, and Wildfires are Threatening the United States’ Most Cherished Historic Sites_; _Cultural Resources and Climate Change Strategy_; _The Future of Our Pasts: Engaging Cultural Heritage in Climate Action_; and _Stemming the Tide: Global Strategies for Sustaining Cultural Heritage through Climate Change_, these studies sound the alarm in incredible detail. **_Read more:_** [_The 250th Birthday of the U.S. Is Just a Few Years Away. Get Ready for Controversy_](https://time.com/6159112/250th-anniversary-american-history/) This past May, newly confirmed NEH Chair Shelly Lowe [highlighted the impact of climate change](https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP06/20220608/114723/HHRG-117-AP06-Wstate-LoweS-20220608.pdf) on cultural institutions as among the issues she hoped to prioritize in her tenure. The agency, in partnership with the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, is also addressing climate risk as part of its [“Held In Trust” initiative](https://www.culturalheritage.org/about-us/foundation/programs/held-in-trust), bringing together leaders from across the field to research the problem and develop scalable, actionable solutions. In the Senate appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2023 released in late July, the Institute of Museum and Library Services—an independent federal agency—is slated to receive $20 million to provide much-needed grants for facilities improvements at U.S. cultural institutions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, meanwhile, has placed “Climate Resilience” as one of the goals of its newly published [_National Impact Agenda_](https://savingplaces.org/impact-agenda) and has made climate action a pillar of its [upcoming national conference](https://savingplaces.org/pastforward-theme#.YvZaEezMIqs). The emergency preparedness planning resource [dPlan|ArtsReady](https://www.dplan.org/) recently relaunched, providing a much-needed tool for arts and culture organizations. The nonprofit [Environment & Culture Partners](https://ecprs.org/)—led by longtime cultural-sector climate and environment leaders Sarah Sutton and Stephanie Shapiro—provides much needed training about risks and opportunities related to sustainability and climate change. More narrowly, individual communities and institutions have launched their own planning initiatives to consider the risks posed by severe weather disasters. But in an environment where staff and volunteers are already stretched beyond capacity—often defending their very existence against political attacks—connecting emerging research with professional practice is a perpetual challenge. Even organizations that want to get organized often lack the know-how to do it. “It is often hardest for the smallest of these institutions to prepare for extreme weather events,” Sarah Sutton told me recently. So what would concrete action look like? History organizations need educational resources to know how to prepare for climate disasters, incentives to advance that work in cooperation with their counterparts at other institutions, and—most of all—funding to carry out these plans appropriately. “After a disaster, more funding is needed to help community and cultural organizations recover,” Foley told me. “We need to raise awareness of the importance of protecting the stories, lore, documents, records, and artwork held in the public trust by cultural organizations, large and small.” When disasters do happen, financial resources to support recovery need to be both more abundant and more easily accessible. Few organizations are equipped to navigate federal funding procedures at any time, let alone in the wake of a catastrophe. Yet the federal government is perhaps the only entity that can address this issue at the size and scale necessary to make a real impact. Making federal history funding more accessible, such as through an increase in funding to the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils operated by the NEH, would make a huge difference. Perhaps the fact that decisions about distributing that funding would happen not in Washington, D.C., but in individual states and communities would allow for such an increase to receive bipartisan support. **_Read more:_** [_Climate Change Used to Be a Bipartisan Issue. Here’s What Changed_](https://time.com/4874888/climate-change-politics-history/) Meanwhile, those of us in the field—along with the general public—must continue difficult conversations about what gets preserved and why. Although we can do much more than we are at present to protect history from natural disasters, there’s only so much preparation a site like Whitney Plantation can undertake. “It is on us to start talking about this—because my generation and the young folks coming out of grad school now will have to face very hard choices about what we save and what we don’t,” Rogers told me. In less than four years, the United States will mark its 250th anniversary as an independent nation. Such anniversaries are not only a time to commemorate our collective history, but also, as historian M.J. Ryszma Pawlowska [noted recently](https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/01/value-looking-forward-we-mark-americas-next-big-birthday/), a time to look to the future. The Semiquincentennial provides us an opportunity to accelerate our national conversation about cultural heritage—and to build broad support for bold, urgent action to preserve it from the threat of natural disaster. If we want American history to survive to the Tricentennial, the time to act is now. ## Transcript [Namrata Iyer]: I think some of the biggest challenges my generation faces is convincing the previous generations about why it's important to talk about what we believe in. [Greta Thunberg]: We can't choose between us young people saying to adults you must behave but we can't wait for us to become the ones in charge because we don't have time for that. [Timothée Chalamet]: Your youth does not have to work against you by way of experience, your youth can be a virtue by way of what you ethically and earnestly expect of the world. [Billie Eilish]: People can be so selfish about the environment and their experience versus the globe and literally our lifespan. [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]: The America we grew up in is like nothing like the America our parents or grandparents grew up in. [Nyke Slawik]: When you have young people who are confronted with not having a future at all of course this is going to radicalize a whole generation. This is a question of survival basically. [John Kerry]: I don't doubt that we will get to a net zero carbon economy. Will we get there fast enough to heed the science and avoid the worst consequences? That's the battle. That's what we're trying to do with Glasgow. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice. [Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice. [Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: Thank you. [Justin Worland]: This generation has reframed the way we talk and think about climate to make it an issue of intergenerational justice. The question is will this anger turn into action? Will leaders who have been listening actually take the message to heart and do something about it? [Kerry]: Our diplomacy is guided by what the scientists are telling us we must achieve. Three years ago they had a report in 2018 the IPCC gave us 12 years within which to make the critical decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. [Hoesung Lee]: Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is not impossible but will require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society. [Worland]: It was alarming in its the seriousness with which it portrayed the consequences of climate change. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people migrating. We're talking about the possibility of countries disappearing in their entirety. We're talking about a world that is totally transformed. Already 85 percent of the world's population has been affected by human-caused climate change. [Jim Skea]: The message is over to governments at this stage. We've told you what you—the scientific facts, the evidence, the costs. It is up to the governments now to decide what to do with it. [Ciara Nugent]: We've had loads and loads of reports about climate change over the last couple of decades and the massive threat to our planet but despite all of the science there are still people who are skeptical about how much of a big deal it really is. And I think for those people it's much harder to dismiss young people, normal school kids because they're part of their communities, they're part of their families often. [Nyke Slawik]: What we need is politicians who implement the policies in their home countries and that's—that's what has not been happening in the last years. And so now young people are saying why go to school? Why go to university? Why start planning a family? Why buy a house when I don't even know that in 50 years time or 70 years time I will still have a future, because right now that's at stake. [Ocasio-Cortez]: If we do nothing this is what's going to happen: sea levels are going rise, crops are going to die out, there will be mass starvation. There's going to be all of these things that are going to happen and kids see that, they internalize it. [Charlotte Alter]: Researchers have found that young voters form their lifelong political attitudes in response to the events of their early adulthood, mostly late teens into the late 20s. And for millennials and gen z that period of time has been defined by climate catastrophe. [Christian Hidalgo]: I'm from Bakersfield, California, central valley. Earlier today I've been getting snapchats from all of my friends talking about how orange the sky is because of the wildfire surrounding us. The closest wildfire is probably not even 60 miles away but we have horrible air quality like we're—I'm in the middle of the valley and it just it really strongly affects us and that's what—that's what's drawn me to climate activism. [Isabella Guariniello]: This is my first strike ever. I watched a bunch of like sad penguin videos on YouTube and I started to get really sad when I learned about the effects of animals and like how much earth that we're actually losing. It's hard not to get discouraged when you're constantly learning about what people before you did wrong. [Sassy Fernandez]: Like I remember being in elementary school and watching Al Gore's documentary about climate change and the effects that we could be seeing within the next 10, 15 years and so far he's been pretty right about everything that he said in his documentary. I totally forgot what it was called but shout outs to my science teacher. [Thunberg]: We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us but we will not back down. And if you feel threatened by that then I have some very bad news for you. We will not be silenced because we are the change and change is coming whether you like it or not. We need to work together intergenerational of course that is the only way and we need to—everyone needs to participate and help out in the way we can. So I'm doing what I can. I'm trying to use my voice to spread awareness and to—to put pressure on those in power. [Alter]: When TIME put Greta on the cover in 2019 she had just gone from being a school girl protesting alone outside of Swedish parliament to being the leader of a global climate movement. That year her activism inspired four million people to join the global climate strike in 2019 which was at that point the largest climate movement in world history. [Worland]: Across the world with very few exceptions there are examples of people who have been inspired by her and have led—who've taken up the mantle the Fridays for Future movement in countries across the world. [Thunberg]: I'm not a leader or the face of the climate movement, I'm just one of many faces. [Vanessa Nakate]: There are far too little evidence of the 100 billion dollars per year that was promised to help climate vulnerable countries to meet these challenges. In fact, those funds were promised to arrive by 2020 and we are still waiting. [Nugent]: Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, is one of many people who have been working to remind us that climate action is going to be expensive and many countries who are most vulnerable to climate change can't afford to pay for it alone. [Nakate]: Historically Africa is responsible for only three percent of global emissions and yet some Africans are already suffering some of the worst and brutal impacts of climate change, so to me climate justice doesn't just have to be about reducing greenhouse gas emissions it goes beyond the primary disasters that we see. It is what happens in the aftermath of those disasters, what happens to families, what happens to individuals, what happens to communities. [Worland]: You think about the fact that the U.S. has emitted a quarter of emissions historically. Africa has emitted three percent of emissions historically and the U.S. is able to isolate itself, to pay for adaptation, to pay for the costs in a way that developing countries in sub-saharan Africa and across the globe just can't. And so climate change is a justice issue on many different levels. [Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala]: We we have to bear in mind that whether you're rich or poor, a rich country or poor country, there are some things you just cannot do on your own. You can't deliver on this pandemic on your own, you cannot deliver on climate change on your own. [Nakate]: So what we really want is a future that is healthy, that is sustainable, that is clean, that is livable and equitable for all of us. [Nugent]: Some of the activists that I speak to are realizing they can't wait for the older generation to take action so they're trying to get elected to governments themselves. In Germany, the Green Party has really been in the ascendancy. In September they've almost doubled their number of seats in parliament and one of the 118 lawmakers they now have is Nyke Slawik. She's a 27 year old German politician who was elected in September to the Bundestag and she has been involved in climate activism for almost 12 years and now she has political power to make a difference. [Slawik]: The time of just implementing small changes has passed and this is a reality we as younger politicians are bringing with us to the parliament now but of course there's lots of older colleagues who have not quite grasped this yet, and I think this is why we might be more determined to not go for the small compromises, to be a bit more rebellious about these things. The last German government has decided to exit coal in 2038 which is still too late way too late but now we even have the chance to accelerate energy transition from coal to renewables way quicker and that's a major achievement of the youth climate movement. [Alter]: In the United States young voters across the political spectrum understand that climate change is a major issue that needs to be addressed, they just disagree on how best to do it. So even younger Republicans, Republicans under 40, they understand that climate change is happening, they understand that something has to be done about it, they just don't agree with their more progressive peers about the scale and scope of what that intervention needs to be. So this is a big shift from a couple generations ago when you had one side insisting that climate change was a problem and the other side basically denying that it was happening at all. [Worland]: When TIME spoke to Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, he spoke about how the youth movement had made him want to do better. When I talked to the U.N. Secretary General he talked about how he was trying to bring youth into the climate discussion because it had enthused him and he thought it would help change the conversation. Talking to members of Congress about how inspirational Greta was really made clear to me that she was changing the conversation. [Nugent]: In my reporting activists are telling me that COP 26 is a crucial moment to find out if politicians are really listening to them and really taking action or if they're just saying they're listening and delaying action. [Nakate]: Leaders keep praising young people for standing up and protesting but saving the world needs action, it needs decisions from the leaders, decisions that prioritize the lives of the people and the planet, and that is not something that we are doing. The words of the leaders are not matching up with their actions. [Thunberg]: Words. Words that sound great but so far has led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises. Of course we need constructive dialogue but they've now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us? [Jane Goodall]: I'm about to leave the world and leave it behind me with all the mess whereas young people have to grow up into it. That's why they need every bit of help they can. And if, you know, if they succumb to the doom and gloom ,which many have, then they lose hope. If you lose hope that's the end, because if you don't hope that there's a way out, if you don't hope that your actions can make a difference then you sink into apathy and do nothing. So hope is absolutely crucial if we're to get through this. [Singing]: We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? 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