“We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told a cheering crowd on Sunday. Some 75,000 were gathered from the New York March to End Fossil Fuels on Sunday, where Ocasio-Cortez urged on, “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”
As world leaders are in New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly and the Climate Ambition Summit, protesters hit the streets. Members of Extinction Rebellion, a climate group dedicated to disruptive civil disobedience, staged demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art to highlight a board member’s links to fossil fuel projects. Nearly 150 activists were arrested for blockading the Federal Reserve in New York to call for financial institutions to stop funding companies that extract coal and oil and gas. Protesters also camped outside of Bank of America to criticize the $280 billion in loans it has given to oil companies since 2016.
These demonstrations are the biggest climate protests in years. But they are also bolder, more singular in focus, and have narrowed their attack on the fossil fuel industry in particular. Fossil fuels — and the companies that have profited mightily from extracting them — have long been the central villains in the climate crisis, but over the past decade or so, the movement’s message has been more diffuse. Consider the 2014 People’s Climate March, which didn’t focus specifically on ending fossil fuels but rather on broad global action and spreading awareness of global warming’s potentially devastating impacts. Today’s activists are angry. They want to name and shame.
“Many people don’t actually connect the dots between fossil fuels and the climate emergency,” Jean Su, a co-organizer of the climate march and energy justice attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The purpose of the march was to make that message crystal clear.”
In the spirit of making the movement’s aims…
Read the full article here