KPBS Midday Edition

Sunrise Movement Youth Organizing To Stop U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By Megan Burke / News Editor, Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published January 22, 2019 at 8:46 AM PST

This story was published more than 5 years ago.

Young activists with the Sunrise Movement fill the halls of Congress to lobby for a Green New Deal in an undated photo

Sunrise Movement Youth Organizing To Stop U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions

GUEST: Lauren Maunus, deputy political coordinator, Sunrise Movement Subscribe to the Midday Edition podcast on iTunes, Google Play or your favorite podcatcher.

They call themselves the Sunrise Movement. Cynics might dismiss them as hopelessly idealistic. A gaggle of environmentally minded twenty-somethings with little understanding of how the political world works. Their key cause is nothing less than the survival of all living things on this planet. To achieve it, they demand a halt in the use of fossil fuels in the next decade or so.

Except that maybe they aren’t so idealistic. A survey published Tuesday by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication finds a record 73 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening.

Thanks in part to the efforts by the Sunrise Movement, young voters surged to the polls for the midterm elections. They backed Democrats by more than a 2-to-1 margin and helped flip the U.S. House of Representatives.

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Lauren Maunus, the Sunrise Movement's deputy political coordinator, joins Midday Edition Tuesday with more on the group's mission.

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Megan Burke

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Megan Burke is an Emmy-award winning news editor overseeing the environment, health, and racial justice and social equity reporting beats. Prior to her current role as editor, Megan spent more than a decade as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition, a daily radio news magazine and podcast. Other news production credits include KPBS Evening Edition, KPBS Roundtable, and San Diego’s DNA, a two-part documentary highlighting the region’s oldest traditions and culture using personal artifacts and oral histories of San Diegans.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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