LHS seniors Shrish Premkrishna and Thaarak Sriram have helped spread climate awareness and research throughout the community.
Michael Wittner, Patch Staff
|Updated Tue, Apr 1, 2025 at 5:47 pm PT
LIVERMORE, CA — Shrish Premkrishna first remembers becoming concerned about climate change during the summer of 2020, when the CZU Lightning Complex fires turned the skies an eerie orange for several weeks.
“I remember waking up to those, and it was a crazy, crazy feeling,” he said. “Then I started to spend some time outside, and I started to breathe in all that ash and smoke, and I started to get a headache. Then I looked towards the hills I love to hike on, and I saw them burnt to a crisp. It was almost post-apocalyptic. That was the moment that really struck me - climate change isn’t just affecting distant coastal cities like Miami or San Francisco - it’s affecting our community. My friends, my family. Whatever I could do about it, I should.”
In the four and a half years since those fires, Premskrishna and fellow Livermore High School senior Thaarak Sriram have more than followed through on that pledge. The two students helped draft a Climate Action Resolution that changed the way climate change is taught in Livermore schools, founded the Tri-Valley Youth Climate Action Program, and helped organize the Livermore Youth Climate Summit in 2023. Even though they graduate this spring, the two students left in place a thriving infrastructure that ensures that their community is informed and engaged for years to come on this pressing matter.
They began by helping to organize the Livermore Youth Climate Summit in September 2023, when over 200 people from over 12 different local schools and 20 different organizations set up booths. The summit also featured talks from Livermore Mayor John Marchand, the CEO of StopWaste, and a scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“It was a huge event, we loved it, and I actually said, ‘Why should we stop now?’ after the event ended, and from that moment, we knew that we had raised awareness for climate change in the community, but it was time for us to change that awareness into actual climate action,” said Sriram. A few months later, they founded the Tri-Valley Youth Climate Action Program, which now boasts over 70 members who are creating dozens of projects to mitigate climate change in the community.
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One of TVYCA’s first projects was drafting a Climate Literacy Resolution that ensured comprehensive climate education from grades K-12 at LVJUSD. They used feedback from a student survey, teachers, the LVJUSD Board of Trustees, the LVJUSD superintendent, and an attorney to reimagine climate education in the district. Because the district was in the midst of budget cuts, the resolution proposed a task force comprising teachers, students, and administrators to integrate climate education into existing subjects.
“For example, in math class, when you’re doing a word problem, it could be about carbon emissions. When you’re writing algorithms in computer science class, it could be about how many electric vehicles are sold,” Sriram said.
“It should be ingrained in every single course in every single school, because that’s how important it is,” Premkrishna said, adding how supportive the Livermore community has been of the resolution.
That increased education is put to use at the TVYCAP where students work with mentors from the Quest Science Center on several different projects to combat climate change. Students convene once a month, and discuss the projects their smaller teams have been working on. These include:
TVYCAP members will be sharing the results of all of their projects at the Quest Science Center’s upcoming Tri-Valley Innovation Fair, which will take place Saturday, April 12 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. The fair, which exhibits innovative STEM projects from across the region, will feature an entire building devoted to climate change and the work done by TVYCAP members.
Both Premkrishna and Sriram plan to study environmental engineering and computer science next year, but TVYCAP’s research and activism will continue with roughly 50 students and 20 mentors . “What is the biggest problem we face today? Nothing comes even close to our world and saving it. So our kids should be able to learn that, and talk about it and critically think about it,” Premkrishna said.
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