The influential youth green group Sunrise Movement is calling on President Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid to “protect” his climate legacy.
Sunrise’s Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay on Friday cited low enthusiasm for Biden among young people, which she said in a statement has continued to drop since his disastrous debate performance last month, and urged the president to “pass the torch to a new nominee.”
“Another Trump presidency would cause catastrophic and irreversible damage to our climate,” she said. “After speaking with young people around the country over the last few weeks, I’m concerned that Joe Biden isn’t positioned to mobilize young people and win in November.”
Other major climate groups have stood by Biden so far, although Climate Defiance has called on the president to drop out.
Sunrise had previously withheld its endorsement of Biden’s reelection and did not formally endorse him in 2020 after favoring more progressive candidates in the Democratic primary.
But the group said it contacted 3.5 million young voters to turn out against Donald Trump in 2020, as it often campaigns in races where it doesn’t endorse any candidate.
Despite delivering the largest-ever investment in climate action through Congress, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies into clean energy, Biden has been criticized by young climate activists dismayed by administration actions boosting oil and gas production.
The Sunrise Movement, founded in 2018, is best known for organizing a sit-in after the November election that year in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office where they were joined by newly elected first-term sensation Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) demanding that the new Democratic majority introduce legislation on climate.
The group soon called for a “Green New Deal,” a progressive framework to transition the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, provide national health care coverage and job guarantees.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) later released a non-binding Green New Deal resolution, and progressives successfully persuaded several 2020 Democratic White House contenders to sign onto the Green New Deal’s tenets.
The Sunrise Movement’s advocacy for the Green New Deal shifted the politics on climate change to open a lane for many of the policies that ended up in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was far more limited than the sweeping vision the Green New Deal presented.
