GUEST VIEW: To slow climate change, teach climate literacy By Rep. Terri Cortvriend, Sen. Valarie J. Lawson and Jeanine Silversmith In 2019, inspired by teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, youth around the world took action to demand governments address climate change. While 2020 brought a pandemic that dominated the world’s attention, the urgency of our climate crisis has not abated at all. That this movement was led by students is significant. The majority of today’s youth are keenly aware that the planet they are inheriting has been abused and is undergoing life-threatening changes, and that humanity needs to reverse the course of this destruction to sustain life as we know it. A 2019 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 61 percent of American teenagers say the issue of climate change is very or extremely important to them.