The University of Oregon, located in Eugene, Oregon, is more well-known for its college football team’s brightly-colored uniforms and its prominent alum, Nike founder Phil Knight, than anything else. Now, the University of Oregon is making news in a not-so-great way: Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a march about climate change and social justice.
The University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion partnered with Lane Community College and the local NAACP branch for the march on the annual federal holiday. The march will focus on “the voices of women and youth, as well as environmental justice” in the pre-rally activities and the march. The university will host the pre-rally activity, and then the marchers will go to the Shedd Institute of Art to listen to speeches. Congressman Peter DeFazio and the university’s president, Michael Schill, will give some of the speeches after the march.
One of the co-hosts for the post-march event is Our Children’s Trust. The non-profit organization is better known for sponsoring climate change lawsuits across the country, such as one against then-Florida Governor Rick Scott for allegedly not doing enough to combat climate change.
Climate change has become an important issue for the Left and academics alike. Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer has poured millions of his wealth into climate change-related policies on the state level, in addition to his Trump impeachment efforts that have rubbed the Democratic Party the wrong way. However, climate change activists suffered a significant political setback when Washington voters nixed a proposal to enact climate change legislation, which could have raised costs for Washington taxpayers and businesses. The Big Business and climate change lobbies have pushed for “cap-and-trade” legislation at the state and federal level, but American voters have balked at the possibility of capping America’s carbon emissions and forcing businesses to buy emission credits from the government that consumers would ultimately pay for. But, the Left has not given up on one of their key issues for decades.
As a note, climate change was originally called “global warming,” but that too lost political momentum, which led to the terminology climate change.
