Every Friday, every week, for the past three years, young climate activists have staged a silent protest in front of the Utah State Capitol. No matter the weather, they are there—on the off chance that someone in power might take notice.
They never do.
In 2018, Raquel Juarez heard about a growing climate movement that started around the work of Greta Thunberg. Holding a "school strike for climate" sign, Thunberg began weekly sit-ins outside Stockholm's Parliament House. She was just one kid, but by the next year, 25,000 people had turned out to chant and hear Thunberg's message.
That was the beginning of Fridays for the Future, a global movement in which students skipped school on Fridays to demand climate action, including Juarez, who at the time was attending Ben Lomond High School in Ogden. But after a strong start, Juarez said the energy dwindled.
"I was kind of confused," she said. "I kept striking weekly and during the last seven weeks of high school, it was only me."
But slowly, people started to join in again. Then came a big, global demonstration in 2019. Locally, major organizations like the Sierra Club and the Southern Utah Wilderness Society participated, part of the roughly 2,000 people who marched to the Utah Capitol.
The so-called "Extinction Rebellion"—or XR—was a thing, particularly for young people. It still is. But lawmakers seem to have forgotten it or ignored it. Started in London, XR was a cry of desperation, taking a page from other grassroots movements like Occupy, the suffragettes and even the civil rights movement.
"While we were taking the reins in organizing climate strikes, we had less and less help from other organizations. It was mostly the youth," Juarez said.
In 2020, Ava Curtis and Melanie Van Hook joined the movement. Curtis, now at the University of Utah, was attending Taylorsville High when she was asked to set up a booth urging Granite School District to convert to clean energy. She never looked back. Van Hook, now at West High School, was in 8th grade at Salt Lake Arts Academy when she began striking every week.
While the weekly demonstrations were composed entirely of youth during 2020, the number of participants was growing. Then COVID hit. But teenagers are not easily thwarted.
"I got in contact with Raquel, then we got Instagram," Van Hook says.
By maintaining a presence at the Capitol, people began to notice. The Sierra Club helped organize and social media played a big hand in getting the message out to what Juarez now calls a "leaderless movement" that has taken on a life of its own. "There are so many moving parts," Juarez said.
Curtis said consistently showing up each week makes the urgency of climate activism visible for both lawmakers and the general public.
"This is an issue on the front of everyone's mind, and it's something young people really do care about," Curtis said.
But do legislators see them—or do they care? Juarez says she can't remember any elected officials talking to them, although former Democratic Rep. Patrice Arent says she did stop by. "Maybe I didn't introduce myself as a legislator," Arent said.
Arent was one of the few legislators who consistently focused on clean air and the environment. While public health is among the top concerns of Utahns, it doesn't often make the list of priorities for lawmakers.
"The Legislature is dominated by people from rural areas who really don't care about urban air pollution," says Brian Moench, M.D., of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE). "They have a conservative ideological aspect and a baseline skepticism of various things that scientists have long established."
The skepticism over climate change is baked into Utah, where Republicans have a vice grip on policy. Climate change is among the most partisan issues in the United States, reports the data-driven organization Fivethirtyeight: "Those on the left care a great deal about climate change, while those on the right are more likely to identify immigration and border security as an important issue."
Better late than never, the fate of the Great Salt Lake may now be grabbing lawmakers' attention. Like everyone else, they are seeing reservoirs drying up and how Utah's fondness for fossil fuels has shrunk the lake to a third of the size it once was.
"There are various environmental issues about the disappearing Great Salt Lake that are getting more traction because they can see [it] with their own eyes," Moench said.
In a prepared statement, Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, said that remarkable things happen when the people of Utah come together. And doing so, he said, is the foundation of the so-called "Utah Way."
"This session, we will look to enact policies that address Utah's most pressing issues—from safeguarding our natural resources, to keeping Utah affordable, to investing in our future."
That aridification is a looming health disaster is obvious, but legislators may get serious now as the lake's environmental fate is becoming an economic and financial catastrophe. Gov. Spencer Cox has taken a band-aid approach to the lake, although he sees it as a dire issue. He suspended new water appropriations for the Great Salt Lake Basin and, of course, encourages conservation (and prayer).
The Legislature, on the other hand, has funded conservation efforts, but often with an eye to their own interests. Former Rep. Joel Ferry—now executive director of the Department of Natural Resources—added a provision to legislation for holders of water rights, like him and his wheat farm, to lease water for up to 10 years without losing their rights, according to the Deseret News.
Then there was what Wilson has called a "pipe dream:" the notion of building a saltwater pipeline from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Salt Lake—at a cost of maybe $100 billion.
"We look forward to debating and crafting policies that will ensure our state continues to be the best place to live, work, learn and play—not only now, but for generations to come," Wilson said.
But beyond conservation and some updates to water infrastructure, there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite to call out broader climate change-accelerating behavior, or to address its long-term consequences ... yet.
"They may start to pay more attention if frequent dust storms start blowing over the Wasatch Front, if real estate values fall, if in-migration and overall growth suffer and we can't attract good workers," Moench says.
And let's not forget the Utah inland port and the air pollution it promises for the valley. UPHE recently financed a report evaluating the commercial potential of the port's transloading facility.
"We totally dismantled the whole economic viability—the heart of the port," Moench said. "But they're still trying to resurrect some economic nirvana they tried to sell someone on several years ago."
And in May 2022, UPHE released a stunning report on the health consequences of air pollution, one of many such papers from around the world that found virtually every type of lung disease is caused or made worse by bad air, and that polluted areas correspond with higher rates of breast, lung, prostate, cervical, brain and stomach cancers, as well as childhood leukemia.
The report also noted that even the lowest measurable exposure to pollution corresponds to an increase in mortality.
"[Air pollution] has detrimental effects in concentrations even well below the EPA's national standards," the report states. "In other words, in the same way there is no safe number of cigarettes a person can smoke, there is no safe level of air pollution a person can breathe."
Regardless of what specific disease air pollution may cause, the common denominator is inflammation, which is like "tissue barbecuing," Moench said.
Some life stages have more of an impact. A pregnant mother's placenta will suck up pollutants and transfer them to the fetus. "It's not much of a leap that everybody's health is affected," Moench said. "We only get one shot at normal brain development"
Thunberg was warning the world—a world that wouldn't listen. In her famous speech at the 2018 United Nations Climate Action Summit, she said that younger generations see the betrayal of their government leaders. "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"
Juarez heard that call, but she was a kid, and her father was less than enthusiastic. He didn't want her missing school and told her not to go protest.
"I went anyway," she said. "He became more supportive when I kept up my grades. It just sounded odd to him, like, why should I be missing school?"
Juarez is 21 now and studying political science. She said the issue of climate change is highly political, and that it's important to understand how and why the people in positions of power make the decisions that they do.
"There's so much misinformation out there, and so much to learn," she said. "It will equip me to be a person who can lobby. I mean, why not me? People don't generally grow up to be politicians."
Maybe not generally, but some do. This year, Maxwell Alejandro Frost became the first member of Generation Z to be elected to Congress, at age 25. He won in his Florida district after running on two issues—gun violence and climate change.
Curtis just entered the University of Utah in environmental sustainability studies, with an eye to nonprofit work. "When you get hundreds of young people together chanting and singing, you know this is important," she said.
She, Van Hook and Juarez are just three of the countless youths nationwide who have been drawn together through Instagram and a powerful network of activists. They are part of a long line of climate activists who are likely to be at the Capitol every Friday—every single Friday—waiting for the older generations to pay attention and act.
"It's not going to be possible without coordinated efforts with the younger and older generations," Juarez said.