The Streets and the Elites
A Story of Climate Week 2014
by Brad Johnson
Every day, New York City contains contrasting multitudes, passing each other on the street. Like electrons surrounding an atomic nucleus, they occupy the same space without interaction. Did this happen during New York City’s climate week?
During the week of September 21st to 27th, 2014, New York City was a hub for global attention on the climate crisis. For the past six years, the week of the UN General Assembly meeting has been branded Climate Week NYC; this year lived up to that reputation. On the streets on Sunday was the biggest march ever for climate action; on Tuesday, United Nations Secretary General hosted Barack Obama and other heads of state for a climate summit. Throughout the week were dozens of events on climate policy, politics, and protest — but it’s unclear how much the insiders and outsiders heard each other.
A gray and muggy morning met the hundreds of thousands of People’s Climate March participants filing in from the streets along Central Park West.
At the march’s head at Columbus Circle was a temporary stage and press area, where politicians, organizers, and activists milled. Sporting a green silk tie, Senator Chuck Schumer chatted with billionaire-turned-activist Tom Steyer about building efficiency. The diminutive powerhouse Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, expressed confidence that the upcoming summit would find world leaders and business interests working together for a solution. Van Jones, the black climate activist turned out of the White House by Glenn Beck, was swarmed by camera-wielding crews. All the while, 350.org staffers tried to shuttle journalists to different activists, lining up interviews with everyone from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (who, unlike Schumer, was in a casual blue shirt) to nurses from Queens to environmental justice organizers from Peru.
I asked Schumer about New York City’s real carbon footprint, the investments made in the global fossil-fuel industry by Wall Street. The banks — who provide the lion’s share of his political contributions — aren’t going to take independent action to decarbonize, he said.
“The leadership has to come from the people.”
The march itself stretched for miles.
There were six major contingents, each composed of multiple, self-organized blocs like cyclists, grandparents, and college students. The contingents told the story of how the march’s organizers — a collaborative of international groups including 350.org and Avaaz.org and community organizations such UPROSE and El Puente — were trying to build a stronger climate movement. The march began with people most vulnerable to fossil-fueled global warming — “frontline” communities and youth — under a banner reading “Frontlines of Crisis: Forefront of Change.”
In most stories on global warming, indigenous and frontline communities, such as migrants, farmworkers, and survivors of climate disasters, are victims who at best deserve recompense. Similarly, youth are generally portrayed as the passive victims of the decisions made by today’s powerful. (As President Obama told Georgetown University students in 2013, “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”) The People’s Climate March asserted that by being on the “frontlines of crisis,” the people most personally impacted by the cost of global warming have the greatest ability to lead us in another direction.
In my experience as a climate advocate, I’ve found this to be truer than what most might expect. For example, Bangladeshis are almost exclusively portrayed as some of the greatest victims of global warming, as their entire country is under threat from rising seas. Yet they — unlike the Western world — also have a society of over 100 million people that is resilient to the storms and floods that sweep over the nation every monsoon season. While Americans must work to protect Bangladesh from a polluted climate, we also desperately need to learn from Bangladeshis how to survive.
We talk about how wonderful it would be to get to ask a time traveler about what it’s like to live in the future. When it comes to global warming, frontline communities are already living in everyone else’s future.
Following these frontline activists from New York City, from New Orleans, from indigenous communities across the Americas, were dozens of student groups, a massive labor presence, and thousands of environmental activists. Celebrities and millionaires melted into the crowd, in common purpose with the other parents marching with their children. Climate disasters and extreme extractive techniques are increasingly reaching everyone’s doorstep, tearing apart working-class communities, and exacerbating existing systems of inequality. The participants, whether they identified as labor activists or housing activists, health care or immigration activists, had clear stories to tell about why the destruction of our climate threatened their fight for justice.
A bloc of climate scientists, who pushed along a blackboard at the tail end of the long march, gathered in the morning at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. The museum has carbon financier David Koch, the richest man in New York and a global-warming denier who opposed Sandy relief, on its board. Koch’s palatial apartment on Park Avenue was separated from the marchers by the verdant greenery of Central Park.
With a friend wielding an iPad, I ran alongside marchers for hours, interviewing them live for people watching on the Internet. I met people from the Upper East Side, Gowanus, Far Rockaway; from Australia, Poland, South Africa, Ecuador; from Brockton, Trenton, Nashville, Oakland. I talked to Jersey-shore Teamsters who cleaned up demolished homes after Sandy, and Pennsylvania preachers fighting for fossil-fuel divestment. We only ended the webcast at 5:30 pm, when the last marchers reached the corner of 42nd and 11th Avenue. Although the front of the march began at 11:30 am, six hours before, those in the rear only started moving hours later. That’s just what happens when you have several hundred thousand people on the street, calling for climate action.
Sandwiched between the march and the UN summit, Monday was a day of numerous antithetical events for the insiders and outsiders.
- The Climate Justice Summit’s session at the Church Center for the UN opened with a panel of environmental justice activists decrying the “false promise” of carbon trading; in the afternoon, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements and International Emissions Trading Association hosted top officials from the World Bank, EDF, Barclays, Statoil, Shell, Alstom, GDF Suez, Sweden and the UK at the Harvard Club of New York to discuss the “increasing support for carbon pricing” and the globalization of carbon markets.
- The Climate Justice Summit’s program at the New School included a free panel on the perils of industrial “climate-smart agriculture”; the CEO of Monsanto explained at a private Clinton Global Initiative dinner how his corporation has the answers to climate-changed food.
- Thousands of protesters swarmed around Wall Street’s iconic bull in the Occupy-style #FloodWallStreet direct action to “stop capitalism”; meanwhile, at the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC, CEOs and billionaires went on stage with John Kerry, former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, international bankers, and venture capitalists to celebrate a “shared vision of a low-carbon economy.”
As a journalist, I was torn on where to spend my time on Monday. I had requested and received credentials for the insider events listed above (except for the closed-press Monsanto dinner, of course).
I decided to head down to the Wall Street action instead, quite frankly, because it was a stunningly beautiful fall day and protests are a hell of a lot more fun to attend than carbon-trading symposia. Moreover, many friends from the climate movement who had participated in and helped to organize the People’s Climate March on Sunday — including Oil Change International’s David Turnbull, Energy Action Coalition’s Maura Cowley, and 350.org’s Matt Leonard — had decided to participate in the #FloodWallStreet protest and risk arrest.
The New York Police Department did an excellent job of supporting the #FloodWallStreet protest, albeit unintentionally.
As the call to action requested of all participants, the police wore blue. Furthermore, their forces — from mounted police and motorcycle units to riot police and tactical command units — severely restricted access to several city blocks surrounding the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway for the entire day. Businessmen huffed at street corners as police turned them away from their offices and meetings.
The protest itself was street theater of felicitous juxtapositions— giant “carbon bubble” balloons bouncing past police arrayed to protect the Charging Bull sculpture, the golden calf symbolic of financiers’ idolatrous worship of the market; indigenous anti-extraction activists clambering up the walls of 26 Broadway, the building that originally housed John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil; a phalanx of gasoline-powered NYPD vans, motorcycles, and scooters parked in front of Chase Bank, one of the biggest global investors in fossil fuels.
At 5 pm the official organizers of #FloodWallStreet — to the degree that there were any — “called it,” deciding to leave as dusk neared, after a very long day of civil disobedience. “We’re ending before we dwindle and get popped by the cops,” one told me. Identifiable by their professionally printed “#FloodWallStreet: Stop Capitalism. End The Climate Crisis” blue t-shirts, they quietly disappeared to the Blarney Stone pub a few blocks away. The vast majority of the crowd in the street did not care, continuing to chant, sing, and dance while tossing blue powder into the air and on each other in festive protest before the evening news crews.
The crowds remained strong two hours later as the police made their final move. A mass of over 100 protesters sat in front of Wall Street as night fell, ignoring police demands to disperse. One by one, they were hauled to their feet, cuffed with plastic ties, and walked to a police van. The onlookers, most of them fellow protesters, recorded and cheered each arrestee. The last people to be arrested were four people in wheelchairs, one of whom was on a respirator. They had participated in the march the day before, wielding the sign “Crips for Climate Justice.”
I was not able to witness the Monsanto dinner.
The contrasts continued on Tuesday, with a band of a few dozen protesters pushed by NYPD a block south of the Clinton Global Initiative telling a handful of reporters about the costs of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s support for fracking, as over a hundred reporters huddled in the basement of the Sheraton (with escorts for bathroom breaks) to catch a glimpse of the world leaders attending CGI.
The Clinton Global Initiative, built this year around appearances by Hillary Clinton with a cameo by President Barack Obama, is the apotheosis of insider power.
Pulling from Bill Clinton’s rolodex of friends and associates, the world’s elite gathered at the Sheraton New York Hotel to discuss how to address the world’s problems with corporate assistance. Heads of state, Fortune 500 CEOs (IKEA, Monsanto, General Motors, Alibaba, Cisco, Western Union), news anchors (Fareed Zakaria, Becky Quick, Charlie Rose) and superstars (Matt Damon, Jason Mraz, Leonardo DiCaprio) convened to make commitments on poverty, violence, and climate change. Bearing the weight of political expectations, Hillary Clinton took the stage with the presidents of IBM and the World Bank, billionaire Melinda Gates, Katie Couric, and Cindy McCain.
I emerged from the well-secured basement to see the protesters outside, even though that meant I would miss watching President Obama’s CGI remarks on the closed-circuit television in the media room.
Every sidewalk for blocks around the center was lined with interlocking metal barricades. The main contingent of fracking protesters were strongly encouraged by large men in suits with lapel pins to move south, two blocks south of the hotel, and out of sight of any CGI attendees who lingered in front.
Three protesters — a pair of young anarchists from Minnesota and one older woman — marched in front of the Sheraton lobby with signs that read “Arm Polar Bears,” “Save the Earth: End Capitalism” and “No War With Syria.” When the scheduled arrival of the president’s motorcade neared, New York City police closed the barricades completely, trapping everyone in those blocks, including passersby, in the temporary cages. A crowd built up, both of CGI attendees waiting to return inside through the metal-detector station, and of New Yorkers anxiously trying to get to their offices.
The time we spent trapped in the police cage offered me the opportunity to start up conversation with some CGI attendees. I talked with Aimée Christensen, a warm-hearted international sustainability consultant for corporations, foundations, and the United Nations, whom I met at a Carbon War Room event during the 2010 climate negotiations in Cancun. I broke off our conversation about our participation in the march inspiring us again for action when I saw the protesters being escorted out.
It was possible to tell that Obama was actually on his way, because the three protesters were being threatened with immediate arrest if they did not leave the block. They left peacefully, shouting against war and pollution. As I followed the cops and protesters toward the barricades, taking photos with my smartphone, one woman waiting in the security line encouraged me to record the interaction, while a man in a navy suit agitatedly told me that it was wrong to record the police.
“I’m press,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I be recording this?”
“It’s wrong! It’s not right, what you’re doing,” he replied, clearly upset, but unable to provide a rational explanation for his anger.
Upon reflection, my best guess is that he was disturbed by the implicit threat to the idea that the police can always be trusted to do the right thing. It is only because of the possibility that our armed protectors might do wrong that we need to monitor their acts. But if we can’t trust the police, then who can we trust? Might the anti-war, the anti-fracking protesters be right? What about the young men and women protesting the police in Ferguson, or the throngs of anti-capitalists who staged the Wall Street sit-in?
Another waiting CGI attendee I chatted with was Greg Dalton, a long-time foreign correspondent and business journalist who was inspired by a 2007 trip to the Arctic to found Climate One, an interview series at San Francisco’s elite Commonwealth Club about global warming. Like Aimée, he had participated in the march on Sunday before a week of high-level events. We pondered whether the protests outside were relevant to the power players inside.
I asked Dalton whether he himself, as a journalist and father, as someone who dines with billionaires and CEOs, identifies as an insider or outsider.
“I rub elbows with the elites, but my heart is in the streets,” he replied.
Inside, Obama did not talk about the climate or fracking. After some jokes about traffic, Obama spoke about the importance of protecting citizens’ freedoms of “peaceful assembly and association and expression.”
“When people are free to speak their minds and hold their leaders accountable,” Obama said, “governments are more responsive and more effective.”
After the presidential motorcade left, the police opened the barricades, releasing the crowds held captive on the sidewalk during Obama’s speech. I walked two blocks south and found the anti-fracking rally there. Martha Cameron, a white-haired fracktivist from Brooklyn, carried a sign with the text:
Drill it!
Drone it!
Frack it!
Bomb it!
Obama’s All-of-the-Above Policy
For years, President Obama has followed what he calls an “all-of-the-above” approach for climate and energy — expanding both renewable and fossil-fuel production.
“All-of-the-above doesn’t work,” Cameron said, noting we need to get down to zero greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible, which can’t happen while oil, gas, and coal extraction is increasing. It’s basic math which Obama and the world of elite policy advisers seem unable to grasp.
To her, Obama’s real “all-of-the-above” policy works out as “war abroad, war at home, and war on the planet.”
I asked Gasland documentarian Josh Fox why he and other opponents of fracking were protesting the Clinton Global Initiative on the day Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were appearing.
“Fracking is now Obama’s legacy, not Dick Cheney’s,” Fox said.
Although Cheney’s Halliburton was an inventor of hydrofracturing technology, he explained, it is under Obama’s watch that the fracking boom has reached new heights, with Hillary Clinton playing a key role. “As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exported fracking to thirty countries.”
We talked about whether fracking could become a major issue in the 2016 presidential race. Fox explained that the anti-fracking movement is a weird coalition of anti-pollution liberals and property-rights conservatives, crossing party lines to oppose the robber barons of the 21st century.
“The battleground states are becoming fracking battleground states,” Fox argued, pointing to Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “If Hillary doesn’t get wise to what’s happening, she won’t win.”
The next morning, Hillary Clinton introduced Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to the CGI stage as a personal friend. Sachs envisions a fracking “revolution.”
At the end of the day, did the streets influence the elites?
#FloodWallStreet was a success by many metrics, especially in building ties between the radical and incremental wings of the climate movement; it was a beautiful day of environmental-group staffers and New York city councillors sitting down to block traffic on Broadway with hard-core anti-capitalist Occupy activists, discussing a vision of a world safe from extractive capitalism. It is no small thing that leaders of well-funded climate groups participating in an explicitly anti-capitalist protest.
However, as an act of civil disobedience, its power was limited. Most of the climate staffers melted away before the arrests began. Although the protest garnered local media attention, provided amusement for tourists, and inconvenienced some bankers, it took place far from the insider Climate Week action miles north in midtown. This meant that elite actors did not have to grapple with the challenges raised when people put their bodies and freedom at risk in acts of protest; the insiders did not have to choose whether to join the protesters, nor did they directly feel the moral pressure of the protesters’ chants and disruptions.
The People’s Climate March had two stated goals: to be the biggest climate action in the world and the most diverse in U.S. history. It succeeded tremendously on both fronts. The size and spectacle gained media attention (including a strong review by The Daily Show that also ridiculed Republican climate deniers) and was discussed by insiders for the rest of the week. The march acted to inspire and press the policy elite. And even to strike some fear into the opposition — one evening that week, I passed a clutch of suit-and-tie natural-gas-industry bros, jitterily laughing about the “Frack is Wack” signs they had seen.
Just as important, the march helped to redefine what a climate activist looks like. Culturally and structurally, “environmentalists” in the United States have been a particular subgroup, sharing signifiers of race, wealth, and lifestyle. Although the communities who face the worst air and water pollution in the United States are mostly rural or urban, poor, black, and Hispanic, the nation’s powerful environmental organizations have a predominantly affluent, white, suburban membership. The deliberate effort by the march organizers to not only bring in people of color, radical activists, and labor leaders, but to cede much of the responsibility and limelight to them paid off. In particular, having the frontline communities lead the march was a crucial step toward growing a new climate movement.
A key lesson of the week for me was that although there are very few people who have access to the insider game, the streets are open to everyone — including the elite. Leonardo DiCaprio anonymously joined the climate march before heading to the CGI gala and the United Nations stage; and he wasn’t the only one. While the struggle continues to shatter the glass ceilings that keep the power-elite pale, male, and stale, the elites are being welcomed to join the dispossessed, the radical, the young — to become part of the movement.
The potential tragedy of the climate movement is that building a diverse, powerful, and organized coalition takes precious time. Like atomic nuclei, institutions of power are held together by incredibly strong forces. The reason for hope is that if those forces are overcome, we can rapidly unlock almost unimaginable stores of energy to power a new world.
