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march to end fossil fuels
Let Us Be the Parable of the Movement
More than a novel, this international public awareness campaign tells the story of how people can rise up and demand change to power our planet in a way that puts human survival before profit.
Oct 22, 2023
The apocalypse is not coming. The future is coming, and we don’t yet know what the future holds. Because the future isn’t set yet. It depends on the decisions human beings make right now.
These days, we are seeing more extreme weather events around the world, as the climate crisis escalates. While every individual weather event is a surprise, the overall pattern has long been predicted. Both by our scientists and by our artists. One such artist, Octavia Butler, wrote of a world torn by racism, misogyny, and climate disaster in her 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower.
Lauren Olumina, the protagonist, leads a band of characters to a safe haven on a ravaged planet. Butler had intended to create a Parable series, where the final book focused on climate solutions. Reportedly, she was frustrated in her various attempts to finish the series, because she was unable to envision climate solutions. I find this unsurprising because part of climate disinformation has included obscuring both the problem and all solutions that significantly disrupt the profitability of the fossil fuel industries. Perhaps because she lacked access to this crucial information, Butler never finished the project in her lifetime.
Climate Week was a glimpse of the power that this movement can hold as we move forward.
But a lot has changed since she passed away in 2006. There is a growing climate movement with powerful Black and Indigenous leadership. We have a clear vision of the solutions needed to solve the climate crisis. What we lack is the political will among elected officials and corporate leaders to make the large-scale changes necessary to ensure a livable planet.
And that is where our movements come in. At the Black Hive, we have developed a Black Climate Mandate that lays out the changes needed so that all Black people worldwide can thrive. Ultimately, we believe that our movement for climate justice can be Octavia Butler’s final book—Parable of the Movement. More than a novel, this international public awareness campaign tells the story of how people can rise up and demand change, can build the power to pressure political and industry leaders to divest from fossil fuels and to power our planet in a way that puts human survival before profit. And we don’t just wait for those in power to change—as we build our movement to demand change, we also build structures, networks, and resources for food and energy independence, community care and mutual aid, and climate resiliency.
Meanwhile, in order to ensure a livable future, we need to phase out fossil fuels and other dirty-energy industries, starting with an end to all direct and indirect subsidies and policy incentives these industries receive. As those industries end, we need a just transition for workers—making sure fossil fuel corporations provide retraining and transitioning them to new green jobs, and making sure that they can continue to make a living and support their families as we shift our economy.
We need to prioritize the needs and leadership of those most impacted by the crisis, particularly Indigenous communities. Their local ecological knowledge, lived experiences, and thought leadership are essential to tackling the climate crisis. This includes climate reparations for all frontline communities and workers who are harmed first and worst by both the climate crisis and the polluting industries driving the crisis.
Climate justice is part of a bigger vision of justice. Climate problems and solutions are deeply interconnected with all the other current planetary crises: war, poverty, pollution, forced migration, police and prison violence, and other forms of harm that happen when societies put profit over human safety and survival. All these harms need to be recognized and addressed in all climate policies and climate action strategies.
Recently, the Black Hive participated in New York Climate Week, and over 100,000 people took to the streets. This was an important demonstration to the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit that the people demand change. Our leaders need to listen, and the movement will keep building the pressure until they do.
In Parable of the Sower, the characters find their safe haven. But as the climate crisis escalates, there is no place that can be guaranteed as safe. Now is the time to fight for a bigger picture of justice and safety—one that is worldwide and where no one is left behind. It’s a tall order, and will require a mass movement. Climate Week was a glimpse of the power that this movement can hold as we move forward. Let us aspire to be a Parable of the Movement, Octavia Butler’s final book, the biggest battle in human history, in which—if enough people fight—we can win.
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How Bloomberg Got It Wrong on the March to End Fossil Fuels
Failing to clearly spell out the connection between protesters’ actions and the existential threats behind them leads to the framing of their demonstrations as merely symbolic at best and hysterical at worst. This blindspot, makes quality reporting impossible.
Oct 03, 2023
Tens of thousands of climate protesters gathered in Midtown Manhattan on September 17, kicking off Climate Week as President Joe Biden arrived in New York to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. These protests—some of the biggest since before Covid—had a pointed message, largely directed at Biden himself: End fossil fuels.
The Biden administration has passed historic climate legislation through the Inflation Reduction Act, which seeks to create clean energy jobs, increase investments in renewables and build infrastructure to support resilience in communities most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
At the same time, however, oil and gas production are still expanding. This year, the US exported a record amount of petroleum, and was also the biggest liquefied natural gas exporter in the world. The Biden administration also greenlit the ConocoPhillips Willow Project, a new oil drilling venture in Alaska (Vox, 9/8/23).
Meanwhile, the scientific consensus is straightforward—and bleak. We are at imminent risk of surpassing the internationally agreed-upon threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2023 report warned that global emissions need to be cut by almost half by 2030 if we are to meet this goal. The planet’s current 1.1°C increase has already led to more frequent and deadly severe weather across the globe.
The urgency with which we need to bring down emissions is clear. Still, news media muddy the waters, encouraging public apathy by focusing on protesters’ tactics at the expense of their demands.
Bloomberg missing the point
Previewing the demonstrations, Bloomberg’s “The Big Climate March Returns in an Era of Soup-Throwing Protests” (9/16/23) spent more time analyzing the psychology behind different forms of demonstration than the dire consequences if protesters’ demands are not met.The piece compared traditional climate marches to more disruptive, but still nonviolent direct action tactics utilized by groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Blockade Australia in recent years. Across the world, demonstrators have taken to blocking roads and airport runways, overrunning billionaire-frequented Hamptons destinations, deflating SUV tires, gluing themselves to various surfaces—including the US Open tennis court—and, yes, throwing tomato soup on (glass-protected) Van Gogh paintings.
The piece outlines why many activists feel they need to engage in more extreme demonstrations to gain more attention—by citing a problem it is complicit in:
The rise of disruptive protests is, in part, a reaction to the feeling among some activists that traditional mass actions aren’t effective. Marches—even quite large ones—don’t always get widespread media coverage, limiting their usefulness in garnering attention.
The piece demonstrates just how to perpetuate that problem, offering only one paragraph on protesters’ demands, in the form of a quote from local youth activist Bree Campbell:
“We’re marching to make clear to President Biden that we expect him to uphold his campaign promise for him to be the climate president that we elected,” says Campbell. Those taking part want him “to stop approving fossil fuel projects and leases, phase out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters, and to declare a climate emergency so that he could halt crude oil exports and investments in fossil fuel projects abroad.”
Beyond this statement, there is no acknowledgement of the reality that these demands are not only urgent, but in line with scientific consensus and the UN’s Paris Agreement. Instead, Bloomberg moves on to questioning mass protest marches’ ability to change policy, relying on the expertise of cognitive psychologist Colin Davis, a protest researcher at Britain’s University of Bristol.
“We had 2 million people on the streets [in the UK in 2003], protesting against the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “Obviously, it happened anyway, despite the people coming out against it.”
Davis cited a similar dilemma with Brexit.
The piece would have benefited from some introspection: News media played a crucial role both in disseminating government lies about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that ratcheted up support of the war, and in framing Brexit as a popular anti-establishment rebellion (FAIR.org, 3/22/23, 10/15/21).
Bloomberg spent considerable time analyzing and pathologizing climate activists’ strategies by comparing their movement to the ostensible efficacy of others—including Black militant movements of the 1960s. Yet it spent almost no time explaining the life-threatening conditions that caused activists to develop these strategies in the first place.
Crucial connections
After this pre-event article lamented that large-scale marches often don’t receive enough media coverage, a follow-up piece offered only a short recap, which also did not elaborate on why and how quickly we need to tamp down our fossil fuel use (Bloomberg, 9/17/23).
Despite its point that traditional marches usually garner less media attention, Bloomberg also failed to spell out this crucial connection during a more “disruptive” protest. When the Just Stop Oil protesters threw soup at Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers painting in 2022, the outlet (10/14/22) covered the demonstration in detail, being sure to specify the brand of tomato soup thrown at the painting, and where and when Van Gogh painted it. Yet it did not acknowledge the existence of a climate crisis, or fossil fuels’ central role in it.
Failing to clearly spell out the connection between protesters’ actions and the existential threats behind them leads to the framing of their demonstrations as merely symbolic at best and hysterical at worst. In reality, these protesters’ demand to end fossil fuels is concrete and in line with scientific consensus.
If the media avoid making these clear connections, it won’t matter what tactics protesters use.
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Biden and Wall Street: End Fossil Fuels or Expect Resistance
Now is the time to keep building momentum and bringing a lot more pressure to bear, because we’ve hardly won yet.
Oct 02, 2023
The rain was pouring down hard, but that didn’t seem to deter the big protest crowd gathered outside the Federal Reserve building. Amid the typical Monday morning bustle of Wall Street, we chanted for the Fed to stop fossil fuel financing as cops arrested row after row of protesters blocking the building’s entrances during what ultimately became the largest climate-focused civil disobedience ever in New York City.
We were coming off the 75,000-person March to End Fossil Fuels the previous day: a protest that shattered our attendance expectations as organizers, uplifted our spirits, and landed on the front page of The New York Times the next day. Earlier that week, hundreds of activists and groups like Climate Defenders, Oil & Gas Action Network, Stop the Money Pipeline, and my own, New York Communities for Change, had disrupted two of the largest fossil fuel financiers in the world, shutting down Citi’s global headquarters for a whole morning and halting traffic in front of BlackRock’s global HQ. With Planet Over Profit, a youth-led group I co-founded, we forced the Museum of Modern Art to close for an afternoon because of its ties to dirty fossil fuel investor KKR. And the morning after shutting down the Fed, another dirty financier, Bank of America, found its New York office the site of another act of civil disobedience.
Others reflecting on these protests have noted how this September felt like a potential turning point. The U.S. climate movement enjoyed the biggest revival of street protest since the pandemic. With the march, unlike previous climate mass mobilizations, we were laser focused on calling out a specific decision-maker (President Joe Biden), making it impossible for him to ignore the broad-based, diverse support for our laser-focused specific demand (ending fossil fuels). And when it came to Wall Street, with thousands of white-collar Citi employees unable to get into work for hours, for example, we made it clear that if Citi’s bottom line included profiting off fossil fuels, then that bottom line would not go undisrupted.
If we’re to have any chance of ending fossil fuels, and transitioning to a more just system, we need sustained, committed resistance against these fossil fuel-loving powers that be.
We sent a statement of intent to both Biden and Wall Street: End fossil fuels, or expect resistance. Now it’s time to keep building on that momentum, and bring a lot more pressure to bear, because we’ve hardly won yet.
Politicians continue to approve new fossil fuel permits, and financiers continue to move more fossil fuel financing. It’s not for lack of awareness: These are well-informed elites who know well the scientific consensus that we have already maxed out our carbon budget with existing projects and that our carbon accounts cannot afford any more fossil fuel expansion. Nor do the actual financials necessitate fossil fuels: Power from renewables is now cheaper to produce than power from fossil fuels in many places, and besides, we simply cannot enjoy stable, functional global economies on a planet beset by endless storms and fires, widespread drought and famine, and hundreds of millions crossing borders to flee unlivable conditions.
The simple reason the fossil fuel industry and its enablers won’t change course on their own is because the status quo is working splendidly for them right now. Oil majors have been reporting record-breaking profits, and generally speaking, elites have continued to consolidate their wealth and power within a global political economy still powered largely by fossil fuels. (For instance, in 2015, the richest 1% in the world owned as much as the remaining 99% combined; those state of affairs have only worsened during a pandemic during which those at the top gained trillions in wealth while ordinary people suffered.)
Plus, these planet-wrecking elites, as Andreas Malm writes, “do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stalks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink.” The climate crisis may be coming for the whole world over at some point—but those at the very top do not currently face many serious consequences, and many of them may assume that they never really will in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, there are fossil fuel lobbies to please, and fossil fuel profits to reap.
So: We’re up against immensely powerful fossil fuel executives and some of the most powerful financiers and politicians in the world. All of them are highly incentivized to maintain the status quo of enabling mass death. If we’re to have any chance of ending fossil fuels, and transitioning to a more just system, we need sustained, committed resistance against these fossil fuel-loving powers that be.
If you are a bank like Citi that continually pours billions into fossil fuels each year: You should not expect to be able to operate and greenwash without having your bottom line impacted and the lives of your business elite constantly disrupted. Your CEOs and execs should expect to be challenged at public events, your offices’ operations should be continually disturbed, your brand and client deals should be scrutinized and protested. If you are Biden, who approves climate bomb after climate bomb, you and your administration should assume there will be disruptions at your public appearances and lagging enthusiasm from your base to turn out to the polls next fall.
What hangs in the balance, after all, is everything we know and love. We want to enjoy safe, stable societies; we want to breathe clean air, drink clean water; we want to live rich, dignified lives uninterrupted by profound climate upheaval. And we won’t be able to do that for much longer on this planet if we don’t force a move away from fossil fuels with serious, sustained pressure.
We don’t live in a world yet in which fossil fuel-loving politicians and capitalists face constant, sustained pressure, direct action, and disruption of business-as-usual. So let’s keep rolling up our sleeves. Let’s keep organizing more people. And let’s keep escalating with more hard-hitting protest to force an end to fossil fuels. If they don’t at the moment have enough incentive to give up their profits to save our lives—well, then let’s create some incentive for them.
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