BIDEN MULLS CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATION -ACTIVIST REVEALS HOW WE GOT HERE
Climate Emergency Fund has led the campaign to make rhetoric match reality.
From Margaret Klein Salamon, Ph.D., Executive Director, Climate Emergency Fund
July 20, 2022, New York, NY — It’s been reported that President Biden may soon declare a national climate emergency. The United States would join 23 countries, the European Union, and 2,247 local jurisdictions in doing so. More than a billion people live in a location where the government has declared a climate emergency.
One of the people responsible? Margaret Klein Salamon. As you plan your coverage of this announcement, consider interviewing Margaret on the context of these declarations as well as their effectiveness.
Climate Emergency Fund, founded in 2019, and Salamon, its Executive Director, have been cited by US News and World Report, Vox, The Guardian and other outlets for pushing the climate movement to enter “emergency mode.” Salamon and Ezra Silk founded The Climate Mobilization in 2014, for precisely this purpose.
“As a clinical psychologist turned climate activist, my goal is to wake people up to the climate emergency. We need to exit our pluralistic ignorance – our collective delusion of normalcy – as fast as possible. These declarations are an official recognition of the truth: we are in an existential climate emergency, and we need to act like it, and initiate a whole society mobilization towards zero emissions as quickly as humanly possible. Further, climate emergency declarations work. They have been shown to help local governments make “big new moves to decarbonize.”
Salamon and Silk also worked behind the scenes at the national level, winning the commitment to a Climate Emergency Declaration in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform, and working with Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Earl Blumenaur to introduce Congressional Resolution 52 Declaring Climate Emergency introduced into Congress in 2019.
“Climate Emergency Fund is proud to be the leading institutional funder of the Climate Emergency Declarations campaign, making more than 1 million dollars in grants towards these campaigns. Climate Emergency Fund funded the groups starting the campaign— The Climate Mobilization, whose local chapters, led by Ezra Silk, introduced the declarations in the United States, first in Montgomery County, Maryland, then in Berkeley, California. Climate Emergency Fund also was one of the first institutional funders of Extinction Rebellion, which took these declarations global.
Salamon’s fund, which has drawn celebrity backers like Don’t Look Up director, Adam McKay, and Succession star, Jeremy Strong, currently supports three organizations: Action on Climate Emergency, Declare Emergency, and Elected Officials to Protect America, all of which have pushed for an emergency declaration as a key demand.
Climate Emergency Fund backs grassroots, high-stakes climate activists making headlines all over the world. Recently, some of these groups disrupted the Tour de France and demonstrated near famous artworks in national museums in London.
