Dozens of high school, college, and community environmental advocates skipped work and class Friday, protesting NJ Transit’s proposed power plant along the Hackensack River in Kearny.
“We want to be in school, we want to be working, we want to be participating in our everyday lives, but it’s about disrupting those everyday patterns to make a statement,” said 16-year-old Ananya Singh of Morristown, a facilitator of the ‘North Jersey Climate Strike.’
The strike took place in Newark, where Jeff Tittle with New Jersey Sierra Club was one of many leading a march to NJ Transit headquarters.
“Four hundred million dollars of public money that could be spent on having solar trains or running the trains off of solar and wind and clean energy, versus another dirty powerplant,” Tittle said. “We have so many already. There’s four powerplants in Newark alone, there’s one in Kearny. It would be the sixth powerplant in a small radius.”
17-year-old Jordan Muhammad helped organize several dozen students from Columbia High School in Maplewood. They held a rally at school before travelling to Newark.
“Some kids were picking up trash on the way,” she said. “Exactly what we were talking about in our speeches. You can never stop the effort in combating the climate crisis. It’s the little actions as well as the giant incremental actions that are essential.”
Environmental advocates say a new fossil fuel power plant in New Jersey creates a major setback to the state’s goal of reaching one-hundred percent clean energy by 2050.