I will be going to this March on one of the three Sierra Club buses traveling to NYC leaving Saturday. UN chief will join massive People’s Climate March to seek solutions to global warming Organizers expect more than 100,000 people will parade through Midtown streets for the protest on Sunday. In a surprise move, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon suggested he’d join the protestors. The march precedes a UN climate change summit of 120 world leaders on Tuesday. The protest will precede a UN climate change summit of 120 world leaders on Tuesday. Nearly two years after Hurricane Sandy’s devastation made the age of extreme weather impossible for New Yorkers to ignore, our city is about to host the largest mass protest around global warming in history. Organizers predict more than 100,000 people will parade down Midtown streets Sunday for the People’s Climate March. It’s scheduled just before United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convenes a climate change summit of 120 world leaders Tuesday as part of the UN General Assembly meeting. But given all those heads of state coming to town, police have restricted the line of march to Manhattan’s West Side, far from the UN headquarters or from hotels housing dignitaries. In a surprise announcement Tuesday, the secretary-general suggested he’d join the protesters in the streets. “I will link arms with those marching for climate action,” Ban said in a statement. “We stand with them on the right side of this key issue for our common future.” He also named actor Leonardo DiCaprio, well-known for his activism around environmental issues, as a UN Messenger of Peace, with a special focus on climate change. Ever since Sandy, there can be no doubt that climate change is real. We need to be in the streets, to make sure the politicians listen to us. The secretary-general’s stance, along with public support for the protest by some of the nation’s biggest energy corporations, is a clear signal that activism around climate change has become mainstream. “People get it now,” said Paul Gallay, director of clean-water group Riverkeeper. “Ever since Sandy, there can be no doubt that climate change is real. We need to be in the streets, to make sure the politicians listen to us.” In cities across the country, hundreds of buses have been chartered for Sunday’s event, while solidarity protests are scheduled in more than 150 countries, says Bill McKibben, a national organizer of the event and director of the environmental group 350.org. The huge but low-key march will be followed Monday by smaller civil disobedience protests targeting Wall Street. People walk along the water in a park in Brooklyn that saw severe flooding during Hurricane Sandy on March 31.People walk along the water in a park in Brooklyn that saw severe flooding during Hurricane Sandy on March 31.PreviousNextNEW YORK, NY - MARCH 31: People walk along the water in a park in Brooklyn that saw severe flooding during Hurricane Sandy on March 31, 2014 in New York City. A new report released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that summarizes climate science, gave a dire picture of the earths slow warming due to greenhouse gases and other human based behaviors. The report warned that countries and cities located along the coastline face a particular danger as the oceans continue to rise resulting in large scale flooding and erosion. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) And this time, it’s not just college kids or largely middle-class environmental groups involved. Up in Washington Heights, Luis Santana, an office building janitor for 26 years, has been heading a team of fellow union members from Local 32BJ who distributed march leaflets outside neighborhood train stations for weeks. In Staten Island, Beryl Furman of the North Shore Waterfront Conservancy has seen a big response by minority and low-income residents who face constant flooding problems from the nearby Kill Van Kull tidal basin. “We’ve already seen people becoming climate change refugees along the South Shore after Sandy,” Furman said. “We can’t deal with the whole idea of starting over again every time that we get hit with another northeaster or hurricane.” Meanwhile, 1199/SEIU, the health care workers union, expects to mobilize several thousand members on Sunday. “We have members from places like Guyana and the Philippines who know what climate change means in their countries,” union vice president Estela Vazquez said. The union had members in a nursing home in the Rockaways and at NYU and Bellevue hospitals who were out of work for weeks after Sandy flooded their institutions. “Something’s got to be done now to stop things from getting worse,” Vazquez said.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 04:38:34 +0000
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