You need a boost, right?
We’re living under a dark cloud, with a steady downpour of graft, thuggery and baloney.
There’s the raffling of presidential pardons and the attacks on reporters for doing their jobs, the clownish trade war with Canada, the bungled disaster in Iran, the petty obsessions with the ballroom and the Kennedy Center, the hogwash about a stolen election, the attacks on immigrants and the shameless presidential profiteering while working people suffer the cost of Trump’s countless broken promises.
I could go on, and I will. But rest assured, I have not forgotten about the boost I promised.
For all the affronts, nothing strikes me as more sinister than the Trump administration’s ambitious assault on the planet. Despite nearly daily headlines about the global calamity of overheated oceans, melting glaciers, stark weather transformations and species extinction, Trump keeps shoveling more coal onto a fire that will rage long after he’s dead and gone.
He’s gutted environmental protections and scientific research and dismantled clean energy initiatives. Now his administration is rolling back limits on power plant emissions, attempting to open the California coast to more oil drilling and sabotaging the state’s ambitious goals on emission controls and electric vehicle conversion.
We don’t need AI to threaten the future of humanity. We’ve got Trump.
It’s tempting to duck under the covers and wait for the nightmare to end, but the good news is that a lot of people are standing up rather than rolling over, rebelling against the ignorance and callous disregard that threatens our most precious and fragile shared inheritance.
In August, hundreds showed up to defend California’s authority to govern its own coast at a Santa Monica hearing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and 18,000 more people filed comments online.
The rollback of environmental safeguards is, for many, a call to arms.
“Yes, I am discouraged. … But I am not despairing,” said Bill McKibben, an author and environmental activist who is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day for next year to promote clean energy. “We’re reacting to multiple crises, and we’re led by a pack of fools, so why would anybody not stand up?”
McKibben launched a national movement five years ago called Third Act, and tens of thousands of people 60 and older have signed on to advocate for climate action, voting rights and civic participation. Third Act now operates in about 30 states, with a robust chapter in Southern California.
Former Times reporter Zan Dubin has worked as both a volunteer and a paid communications consultant for Third Act, and I asked her what someone could expect to do if they became a member of Third Act/SoCal.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day next year to promote clean energy.
(Amanda Swinhart / Associated Press)
“We do it all,” Dubin said, from promoting climate-friendly candidates to running phone banks and testifying at public meetings. She said Third Act co-sponsors protests at Dodger Stadium, and she and others planned to meet at Vin Scully Avenue and Stadium Way for Sunday’s game against the San Francisco Giants. They want the Dodgers to stop doing business with Big Oil and bench their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66.
She also called out Disneyland for its exhaust-spewing Autopia attraction, along with former Times climate columnist Sammy Roth, and Disneyland responded by announcing in 2024 that it was switching to electric cars beginning in 2027.
Dubin, co-founder of National Drive Electric Week, said 170 volunteer-led events were being held nationwide over the next month to promote EVs, and she was leading one Friday in Irvine.
“Action is absolutely the antidote to despair,” Dubin said. “I find that despite the onslaught of these horrifying headlines … taking action invigorates me.”
Claremont resident Margaret Davis knows that feeling. She emailed me in 2023, prior to participating in a Third Act event, and said many retirees have time on their hands, which puts them in a powerful position.
“The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat humans have ever faced, hence we live in a time when we can make the greatest change for the better,” Davis wrote at the time.
When I called her a few days ago, Davis told me she’s now a member of Senior Stewards Acting for the Environment. She lives at Pilgrim Place — a senior community with a focus on justice, peace and environment — where residents meet regularly to study, discuss and advocate for sustainability, biodiversity and environmental causes.
“When I was in college in 1970, we had the antiwar movement and that was the first year of Earth Day,” Davis said. “At the time, I thought Earth Day was just a distraction from what was going on in the world.”
Later, she said, “I came to realize it was the biggest issue of all time.”
Climate activist Sim Bilal stands next to pumps at an oil field in Los Angeles in 2024.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Like Davis, I went to college in the ‘70s, and there’s no denying that our aggressively consumptive generation played a key role in manufacturing a crisis for our children and grandchildren. We’ve got matches in our hands and smoke on the horizon, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’d see atonement not as a hobby, but as a duty.
As for the next generation, climate activist Sim Bilal, 24, said he too shares the sense that this is both a wickedly frightening time and a moment of opportunity.
“In the last month, we’ve gotten more young people involved,” said Bilal, executive director of Youth Climate Stewards 4 Local Action. “We usually have to reach out to them, but so many people have been wanting to get involved, and they’re so eager, and that’s been affirming for me. The policies are depressing, but the fact that people are reenergized and want to fight back is really exciting.”
Bilal said faith in politics, government and corporations is not high among his peers, but he’s trying to grow a network of young people to cultivate and support future leaders.
“A mentor told me there are two kinds of power — organized people, and organized money,” said Bilal, whose activism began when his grandmother died and he began wondering if her cancer, and global warming, were connected to the oil drilling in his South L.A. neighborhood. “We don’t have the money, but a lot of the work we do is political and civic education, demystifying power, and making people understand they have agency.”
You needed a boost, right?
There you go.
Whatever your age, do not despair.
Get off the chair.
