The iconic skyline was shrouded in fog as we struggled to exit the subway on Sunday morning in New York. Standing at the head of the stairs a blue shirt called for our cooperation, his plaintive tone infused with the sort of accent that movies lead us to expect from NYPD beat cops.
“I need your help here, folks. They’ve closed all the stations up to here, so everyone is going to be coming out this exit. I need you all to help me out and keep moving.”
Paul D'Amato, editor of the International Socialist Review, answers the objections of several left-wing writers who critiqued the People's Climate March.
HUNDREDS OF thousands of people--some estimates ranged above 300,000--gathered in New York City September 21 to protest government inaction on climate change, ahead of a United Nations climate summit held two days later.
Five months after labour and environmental campaigners called on Apple to remove highly toxic chemicals including benzene and n-hexane from its supplier factories in China, the hi-tech multinational has announced it will “explicitly prohibit the use of benzene and n-hexane” at 22 of its final assembly supplier factories employing nearly 500,000 workers.
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible.
The most hopeful, diverse, photogenic, energizing and often hilarious march I've joined in 52 years of activism—and one of the biggest, at 310,000 strong—has delivered a simple message: we can and will rid the planet of fossil fuels and nuclear power, we will do it at the grassroots, it will be demanding and difficult to say the least, but it will have its moments of great fun.
With our lives and planet on the line, our species has responded.
Ostensibly, this march was in part meant to influence policy makers. That just goes with the territory.
An estimated 400,000 people flooded the streets of New York City on Sunday for the historic People's Climate March, billed as the largest demonstration of its kind in history, organized by more than 1,500 organizations including indigenous, faith, labor, environmental justice, social justice, youth, and climate activism groups.
The march was at least four times the size of pre-march estimates, which stood at 100,000.
Just hours after roughly 400,000 packed the streets of New York City for the People's Climate March, a flood of people marched to the city's financial district to target what they say is the root of the climate crisis: capitalism itself.
Demonstrators sporting blue aimed to stage a mass sit-in Monday morning "at the heart of capital"—Wall Street—to call out and demand transformation of "an economic system based on exploiting frontline communities, workers and natural resources."
More than 1,000 Vancouverites filled the CBC Plaza on Sunday, joining hundreds of thousands more around the world as 125 world leaders prepare to converge on New York City Tuesday in an historic UN summit on climate change.
Tens of thousands filled the streets of New York City in what organizers say may be one of the largest climate change rallies ever held in the U.S. (Michael Poland/Twitter)
Rallies are underway or have happened in New York City, London, Berlin, Paris, Rio, Toronto and Seattle. More than 2,000 events were registered in more than 130 countries.
At exactly 1pm on Sunday, the streets of New York City are going to fill with the sound of clanging pots, marching bands, church bells and whatever other kinds of noisemakers that participants of the People’s Climate March decide to bring along.
It’s being called the “climate alarm”, and the general idea is that a whole lot of people are going to make the very loud point that climate change is a true emergency for humanity, the kind of threat that should cause us to stop what we are doing and get out of harm’s way.
A local district attorney in Massachusetts surprised parties on all sides on Monday after he sided with two climate justice activists who employed a "necessity defense" to justify their use of a small lobster boat to block the path of an enormous coal freighter trying to dock at the Brayton Point Power Station in the town of Somerset last year.
“I do believe they’re right, that we’re at a crisis point with climate change.” —Bristol County DA Sam Sutter
