Tens of thousands of people, young and old, filled the streets of Midtown Manhattan under blazing sunshine on Sunday to demand that world leaders quickly pivot away from fossil fuels dangerously heating the Earth.
Their ire was sharply directed at President Biden, who is expected to arrive in New York Sunday night for several fund-raisers this week and to speak before the United Nations General Assembly session that begins Tuesday.
“Biden, you should be scared of us,” Emma Buretta, 17, a New York City high school student and an organizer with the Fridays for Future movement, shouted at a rally ahead of the march. “If you want our vote, if you don’t want the blood of our generations to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”
The Biden administration has shepherded through the United States’ most ambitious climate law and is working to transition the country to wind, solar and other renewable energy. But it has also continued to approve permits for new oil and gas drilling.
That has enraged many of Mr. Biden’s traditional supporters, as well as politicians on the left flank of the Democratic Party, who want him to declare a climate emergency and block any new fossil fuel production.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, drew loud applause at the end of the march when she described climate action as “an electoral and a popular force that cannot be ignored. This is the biggest issue of our time.”
The turnout in New York surprised organizers, and followed a weekend of climate protests demonstrations in Germany, England, Senegal, South Korea, India and elsewhere. They are the largest such protests since before the Covid-19 pandemic. And they come on the heels of the hottest summer on record, exacerbated by planetary warming, and amid record profits for oil and gas companies.
In New York, some protesters came in wheelchairs; others pushed strollers. They traveled to the city from around the country and around the world. They were health care workers and antinuclear activists, monks and imams, labor leaders and actors, scientists and drummers. And students, so many students.
There was puppetry and song and thousands of homemade signs and banners. “I want a fossil-free president,” read one placard. One protester brought a small hand-painted Earth in flames. Another carried an elaborate cardboard sculpture of a fish skeleton. Several Jewish men blew a shofar, the ram’s horn used on Rosh Hashana. A group from Boston brought a banner that stretched across the width of a city block, with stripes representing the steady warming of the Earth’s atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age. There was a dance club on the roof of a converted school bus.
“I’m here today because we need to stop the extraction of Mother Earth and the natural resources for greed and for billionaires and corporations across the world,” said Brenna Two Bears, 28, an Indigenous activist whose family in Arizona had felt the impact of…
2023-09-17 15:38:19
Link from www.nytimes.com
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