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. A few lawmakers from the party’s progressive wing were scheduled to speak Sunday afternoon at a rally at the end of the march.
The strong turnout in New York surprised organizers, and followed a weekend of similar 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 wildfires exacerbated by drought and heat.
Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who is now an outspoken climate campaigner, blasted the estimated $7 trillion in subsidies that the International Monetary Fund says governments worldwide spent last year on oil and gas drilling. “We are subsidizing what is destroying us,” she said.
The protests indicate a shift in message and tone from climate advocates, who have grown increasingly frustrated at the continued expansion of fossil fuel projects alongside promises by oil and gas companies to use emerging and often costly technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the air and bury it underground.
According to scientific models as well as projections by the International Energy Agency, nations must stop new oil, gas and coal projects if the world is to stay within relatively safe levels of atmospheric warming.
The large, peaceful protests around the world this weekend were mostly led by young people.
“Rather than taking meaningful climate action, the government is supporting the fossil fuel industry to prioritize corporate interests and groups of power,” said Borim Kim, who helped organize the event in Samcheok, South Korea, where protesters chanted “Let’s end fossil fuels” as they marched along a road next to coal trucks and stood in front of the city’s newest coal-fired power plant.
While Sunday’s march was billed as a nonviolent demonstration, climate protests are becoming more confrontational. Activists have thrown pies at glass-covered paintings, disrupted a U.S. Open tennis match and glued themselves to oil company buildings.
Civil disobedience actions are planned for Monday in Lower Manhattan.
Activists are especially angry that this year’s U.N. climate negotiations are set to take place in the United Arab Emirates, a leading oil-producing state, and will be overseen by Sultan al-Jaber, head of the Emirati state-owned oil giant, ADNOC.
Protest organizers used Sunday’s event to send a sharp message to President Biden as he begins his push for re-election: Do more if you want our votes.
Rafael Chavez, 37, came from Newark with a group called Nuevo Labor that represents immigrant workers, many from Mexico and Central America, who are especially vulnerable to climate impacts. “Our people are collapsing, you know, they work in construction, in agriculture and even those working in warehouses,” she said. “They all feel the heat.”
“They are people who work outside, and the temperature and climate can make them sick,” Ms. Chavez said. “It taxes their bodies.”
The president “is in a unique position to be a leader to end the fossil fuel movement globally,” said Daphne Frias, 25, a climate activist. “It’s time for the United States but particularly the Global North to really step up and say that we are taking responsibility to the way that we have harmed and polluted.”
Virginia Page Fortna, a political science professor at Columbia University, was gentle on Mr. Biden. “He’s done a huge amount, which is awesome,” she said. “But of course there’s always more to do. It’d be great if he would declare a climate emergency.”
Amid the anger, there was also a festive atmosphere among some protesters.
Michelle Joni, 38, of Brooklyn brought what she called a “dance hub” for the march — a converted school bus decked out with Barbie heads, stickers, a couch and a dance floor on the roof. “It’s like we bring joy and we dance and we create connection,” she said. “And that’s the fuel for ending fossil fuels.”
Liset Cruz, Wesley Parnell and Cam Baker contributed reporting.
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