Hey John, it's Kidus with Sunrise.

This is a longer email than we normally write, but I hope you’ll stick with it.

Trump’s Energy Secretary just cancelled twenty billion dollars in funding for clean energy and walked back 31 environmental regulations designed to protect our air, water, and climate. We have to assume this will only be the start. This can’t help but feel personal to us. This can’t help but feel personal to me.

Eight years ago, when Sunrise first formed, we had one mandate: take climate change from an unfortunately niche issue and transform it into one of the defining issues of American politics.

We were told that we were naive, that we were unrealistic, and that we’d never succeed, not just by Republicans, but by the neoliberal consultants and pundits who exert so much influence over the Democratic Party.

We pushed for the first presidential climate debate questions in history, and we won them. We pushed for seats in Biden’s climate task force, and we won them. We pushed for transformative climate legislation, and we won it.

Along that road, I - alongside a few other Sunrisers - conducted a two week hunger strike outside the White House. I still remember the way my vision blurred, the way my hands shook. I gave everything I had to fight for my future.

Finally, in 2022, President Biden signed into law the IRA, the largest climate investment in history. It was an imperfect, bittersweet victory, but a victory nonetheless, one we had sunk years of our young adult lives into. 

Now, watching it be dismantled by the Trump administration, it would be all too easy to fall into despair, to give up, to conclude that change for the better isn’t possible.

That’s what they want us to do. And I’m not going to lie, it’s what a part of me wants to do, deep down.

But we at Sunrise Movement have always chosen a militant optimism. That doesn’t mean being blind to the difficulty of the moment, or even to saying the glass is half full. It means understanding just how rough the road ahead of us is, and committing to that fight anyway.

So in this moment, I ask you all to choose a militant optimism, to believe that we can win a better world, and put your action - and money - where your hopes are. Become a dues-paying member today, because we are all we have in this fight.

In Solidarity,

Kidus