About 20 representatives from about a dozen organizations gathered at the state Capitol on Monday to commemorate Earth Day and mourn the death of bills they said would have helped Hawaii tackle climate change.

“On behalf of my children and my children’s children who may not be able to see these beautiful islands, I am angry,” said Maggie Odom, a 16-year-old sophomore from Le Jardin Academy and a member of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. “On behalf of all of us, I am angry.”

The press conference, which was set up as a mock funeral, featured prop tombstones inscribed with the names of the dead bills.

Among those bills were HB 1584, which would have appropriated funds to study the impact of a climate tax to curb carbon emissions, and SB 1126, which would have required that the sale or transfer of properties vulnerable to sea-level rise be accompanied by a hazard statement to ensure buyers are aware of those properties’ vulnerabilities.

Other bills would have promoted the building of solar panels on residential homes, while others discouraged burning coal for energy.

“None of the really broad, huge, monumental sea level rise bills or climate change bills have passed this session,” Jodi Malinoski, Sierra Club Hawaii’s policy advocate, said.

Monday’s event also came in the wake of the United Nations’ announcement March 28 that there are only “11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.”

The U.N. cited a 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said it is likely that global warming will increase by 0.5 degrees Celsius between now and as early as 2030.

The U.N.’s timeline played a part in prompting Colin Yost, executive committee chairman of Sierra Club Hawaii, to organize Monday’s event.

“We have a different challenge facing us than we thought we had,” he said. “If we only have 11 years left, that’s an incredibly short amount of time to actually turn things around and reverse the current trends.”

The Sierra Club is following a handful of climate change-related bills that are still alive, such as HB 765, which would require a sea level projection to be included in new and existing plans created in accordance to the Hawaii State Planning Act.

Many of the session’s living bills have to go through conference — where the House and Senate have to agree on a final draft of each bill — before they can get sent to the governor to be signed into law.

Legislators have to agree on the final drafts of all living bills by either Thursday, for bills that do not ask for money, or Friday, for bills that do.

Malinoski said internal politics and a lack of urgency within the Legislature doomed many of the bills.

“A lot of the bills got killed because they didn’t get hearings or there was interpersonal politics between the people who introduced the bill, the people who needed to schedule the bill, and that’s what really happened to a lot of them,” Malinoski said. “And that’s really unfortunate, because this shouldn’t be something political, because, you know, our entire life depends on it.”

But others said that the lack of legislative action has at least motivated the public.

“The great news is, every change that’s ever happened in the United States, no legislature ever did it,” Dave Mulinix, a member of 350 Hawaii, said. “It’s always been the people rising up and saying, ‘Enough.’”

As for the Sierra Club, Yost said the U.N.’s 2030 timeline could prompt it be more active.

“We’re going to start getting more aggressive in our advocacy and more urgent in our education,” he said. “Something has got to change. We have to wake up.”