Climate justice is the strand of climate advocacy that treats climate policy as a question of who bears the costs and who receives the benefits, rather than as an emissions problem alone. In the United States it is most closely associated with youth organizing and with the Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal
The policy framework the movement organized around has a primary text: House Resolution 109 of the 116th Congress, “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal”, introduced on February 7, 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a long list of cosponsors.
It is worth being exact about what that document is. A House resolution expresses the sense of the chamber; it is not legislation and enacts nothing. What the movement achieved here was placing a framework on the congressional record and into the primary campaign, which is a real thing but a different thing from a law.
Organization
The Sunrise Movement, founded in 2017, is the organization most identified with this campaign in the United States. It states that it grew to hundreds of chapters by 2020 and that in 2019 it pushed until 23 of 25 Democratic presidential candidates had endorsed the Green New Deal. Those are the organization’s own figures, offered without independent verification, and this page reports them as its claims rather than as established facts.
Fisher and Nasrin’s study, based on surveys of participants at the mobilizations, examines how the coalitions inside the U.S. youth climate movement shifted over time — which is the kind of evidence that a self-description cannot provide.
What was removed
The previous version of this page carried a four-phase chronology and five claims of political impact, including that the movement mobilized young voters in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections “through targeted social media outreach” and that it shifted Democratic Party messaging. Those are causal claims about elections and party positioning; none was sourced, and all have been removed.
The founded field, which read 1990, has been removed. The page’s own text dated the movement’s
emergence to environmental justice organizing without giving a source for that year, and no source
cited here supports it.
Sources
- 01.
U.S. House of Representatives, 116th Congress. H.Res.109 — Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. (2019). Introduced February 7, 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a large group of cosponsors. A resolution, not a bill: it expresses the sense of the House and enacts nothing. Cited as the primary text of the policy framework this movement organized around.
- 02.
Fisher, D. R. & Nasrin, S. (2021). Shifting Coalitions within the Youth Climate Movement in the US. Politics and Governance, 9(2), 112-123. Open-access study of how the U.S. youth climate movement's coalitions changed over time, by researchers who surveyed participants at the mobilizations themselves. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 03.
Sunrise Movement. About Sunrise Movement. The organization's own account. Source for its founding in 2017, its stated aim of winning a Green New Deal, its claim of hundreds of chapters by 2020, and its claim that 23 of 25 Democratic presidential candidates endorsed the Green New Deal in 2019. All self-reported and unverified independently; used here as the organization's own claims.