Anne Barnard

“Drowned in attic,” read one sign in the shape of a cardboard gravestone that was lying next to a protester playing dead; another read, “Couldn’t Outrun Wildfire.”

The demonstrators, led by the protest group Extinction Rebellion, were kicking off five days of civil disobedience planned across the city, the country and the rest of the world.

By disrupting several landmarks in the heart of New York’s financial district and by blocking traffic on Broadway, the group hoped to start building up its relatively small American movement with the kind of street muscle and influence it has quickly amassed in its birthplace, the United Kingdom.

About 90 people were arrested Monday, according to the New York Police Department.

Founded less than a year ago, Extinction Rebellion, which has thousands of members around the world, has shut down swaths of London and other cities, recruited followers across Europe and beyond and pushed climate higher on the political agenda.

It stands out among environmental groups by disrupting “business as usual” with mass protests that mix doomsday mourning with sometimes-joyful street theater. The demonstrations demand governments “tell the truth” about the severity and immediacy of climate change, and ask them to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, years earlier than any official target.

Now, the group’s American members — at least 200 protested Monday — are importing those tactics to a country where climate-change denial is more common.

Organizers and onlookers were unsure if the group’s tactics — demonstrators getting arrested, shutting down traffic — could work in the United States. But they agreed that with climate becoming more prominent on the political agenda here, it was worth a try.

“The political situation is so different, with people not even agreeing that there is a climate crisis,” said Jack Baldwin, a news media liaison for the group.

Organizers say New York — with its liberal population, vulnerability to sea-level rise, growing youth climate movement, and ambitious new city and state climate legislation — is a good place to accelerate the group’s push into the United States.

And Wall Street, a center of the global financial system that the group blames for the continued use of fossil fuels, was a good first target.

But to succeed in the United States, said Russell Gray, an organizer with Extinction Rebellion, the group will have to improve on its efforts to form coalitions with poor communities of color, which have been disproportionately affected by environmental problems.

“For people who are just trying to live their lives, freaking out about climate change and wondering what they can do about it, Extinction Rebellion provides a theory of change: using mass protests against corporate power to force systemic change,” said Gray. “If it works, it can solve those other problems too,” he said, like issues of education, health care and inequality that may seem more pressing to many Americans.

Most passersby seemed unbothered and largely supportive of the protest Monday, although one shouted, “Get a job!”

“The cost of these profits is the blood their money is soaked in,” a man with a bullhorn called out at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the imposing columned facade of the New York Stock Exchange overlooks one of the country’s oldest streets. Moments earlier, protesters had held a “die-in” under the famous “Charging Bull” statue, dousing it with fake blood.

Another speaker blamed “Wall Street oligarchs” for the warming seas that have likely intensified hurricanes in places like Puerto Rico and the Bahamas.

A man in a fuchsia paisley tie and pinstriped suit pronounced the protest “nonsense,” adding, “Human activity has nothing to do with the sun heating the Earth!” and then calling the demonstrators “shills” for “whoever’s paying for it.” (Though Extinction Rebellion recently received a $350,000 pledge from millionaire philanthropists via the Climate Emergency Fund, organizers say most of its support comes from small individual donations.)

Trading was not disrupted — most is done online nowadays — but at least one financial company commented on the protests: UBS issued a statement promoting “sustainable investments” like electric cars.

The crowd consisted of people of all ages and styles: a “grim reaper” in a white skeleton mask and cloak; a gray-haired woman in a gauze-and-feather fascinator and a pearl necktie; a group calling itself the Red Brigades, whose members wore red costumes with white face paint.

Danica Novgorodoff, a mother of two and a graphic novelist from Brooklyn working on a children’s book about climate change, marched with her 7-week-old daughter, Ada, in a stroller.

“I want to make sure there’s still a livable world for them to live in,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Climate Change Protests: With Fake Blood, Extinction Rebellion Hits N.Y.

NEW YORK — Tourists and workers on Wall Street on Monday were met by a jarring spectacle: protesters, some lying in pools of fake blood outside the New York Stock Exchange, some dancing and others chanting, all to call attention to people killed by climate-related disease and disaster.

The chaos came not from a “superstorm,” but an intense, short thundershower.

A day later, on Tuesday, officials and residents across the region sounded an alarm: If summer weather swings create this level of havoc, they said, the New York area is not ready for the sharper extremes that climate change will bring — let alone the next hurricane.

“Every data point suggests that climate change is moving a lot quicker than city government,” Scott M. Stringer, the city’s comptroller, said in an interview. “We did not have a superstorm last night. We had rainfall, and people were literally swimming on Carroll Street,” he added, referring to flooding in Brooklyn. “If that is not a clarion call for focus, then I don’t know what is.”

Some New Yorkers on Monday took matters into their own hands. On the flooded Long Island Expressway, Daphnee Youree, 50, waded out of her car in Crocs and pulled debris from a clogged grate with a traffic cone, draining the pool.

After Hurricane Sandy, which devastated swathes of New York City and coastal New Jersey in 2012, the federal government allocated $14.7 billion to help the city rebuild and make its infrastructure more resilient — measures that included building sea barriers, hardening subway stations and flood-proofing boilers and wiring in homes. But only 54% of the allocated money has been spent, Stringer’s office reported last May.

Climate scientists warn that as Earth heats, the region can expect more frequent heavy rainstorms, 100-degree temperatures, high-tide flooding and intense storms, which could inundate Lower Manhattan, wipe out coastal neighborhoods and overwhelm infrastructure.

Those threats have spawned resiliency plans and proposals priced at billions of dollars that are far from being implemented; while they are hashed out, stopgap measures, like walls of sandbags and concrete, are being used to protect areas such as Wall Street and Red Hook.

Climate change drove the passage last month of an ambitious New York state law that requires nothing short of reshaping the economy to eliminate carbon emissions.

But even as urgent action is needed to address those grandiose challenges for the coming decades, the double whammy of climate change and aging infrastructure is hitting now. Just 10 days ago, a burning 13,000-volt cable touched off another power failure, on Manhattan’s West Side.

And floods that are smaller but far more frequent than the catastrophic ones brought on by Sandy are already overwhelming sewers, sluicing pollution into waterways and damaging neighborhoods, said Costa Constantinides, the chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection.

“It shows that we have a long way to go as a city,” he said of Monday’s floods and the weekend blackouts that resulted from heavy air-conditioner use, which he said would only get worse as temperatures rise.

“We’re going to see not just the big floods, not just storm surge, but flooding a little bit more in communities every time there’s rain,” he said. “We need to come up with a five-borough resiliency plan — it’s not just lower Manhattan, but every corner of New York City.”

The council last year required that the city map vulnerable areas and make plans to address flooding there. Experts have asked Congress to do the same for the whole country.

Innovative measures are being called for, like building green roofs and porous surfaces; taxing properties that generate excess runoff; or issuing special bonds to finance green infrastructure. But at the same time, officials say, old-school infrastructure maintenance and sewer improvements can make a difference immediately.

In Constantinides’s district, in Astoria, Shore Boulevard had flooded knee-deep in recent storms because its drainage outlet, which led directly into the adjacent East River, was blocked by sand and stones. After a recent cleaning, the area had only minor flooding Monday.

But in other areas, officials struggle to pinpoint fixes. The lack of quick answers on the cause of flooding Monday on Beard Street in low-lying Red Hook “bodes poorly for our preparedness,” said the local City Council member, Carlos Menchaca.

More than 2 inches of rain had fallen in Central Park by 8 a.m. Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. More than 3 inches of precipitation were measured in parts of Queens, Staten Island, Long Island and New Jersey.

Winds, and in some cases, hail, left more than 300,000 customers without power in New Jersey. More than 88,000 were still without service Tuesday afternoon.

In New York, as heat turned to downpour Monday evening, some commuters wrapped plastic bags around their shoes to protect their feet before fording newly formed rivers. Others simply shrugged and waded into water.

“It was crazy,” said Youree, the driver who was brought to a standstill on the Long Island Expressway. “I’d never seen anything like that on the LIE.”

Drivers waited to see if the water would clear.

“Everybody was just standing around,” she said Tuesday. “So, I decided to just do it.”

She left her 11-year-old son and her cat in the car.

As she worked to clear the mud and wood, ultimately removing three grates, she said people cheered her on. A video of her digging away the muck was posted on Twitter, where she was applauded by the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, as a “Great New Yorker.”

Youree laughed off the praise: “I just wanted to get home,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/nyregion/ny-nj-flooding.html" id="d75ab54f-7e92-3a7b-ad5b-699c567328cd">The New York Times</a>.

Latest Plagues in Region: Floods and New Blackouts

A car rocked like flotsam in thigh-deep water in Brooklyn. A cascade ran down subway stairs in Harlem while a nonchalant commuter checked her phone. The rain knocked out power for some 200,000 New Jersey customers, a day after a heat wave caused tens of thousands to suffer blackouts in New York City.

But for a growing global network of activists seeking to change the way the world talks about climate, the city’s sweeping resolution in late June declaring a “climate emergency” is a major victory.

Saying that the heating climate is a crisis of imminent danger, they argue that getting people and governments to describe it in far more urgent language is the only way to produce the level of global mobilization required to stop it.

New York is now the largest city on earth to pass such a measure, calling last week for “an immediate emergency mobilization to restore a safe climate.” It joined London, Sydney and a total of 722 localities in 15 countries, according to The Climate Mobilization, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group pushing the declarations.

And on Wednesday, Los Angeles’ City Council went further. It passed a measure that will formalize its own emergency declaration, calling climate change one of the most important issues facing the city. It also established a Climate Emergency Mobilization Department and laid out steps to make city agencies and the public take newly vigorous and coordinated action against planet-warming emissions.

Margaret Klein Salaman, a founder of the Climate Mobilization, an environmental advocacy group, said emergency declarations build political pressure to take stronger actions, like New York’s recent sweeping state and city laws to curb emissions.

“Because what are elected leaders supposed to do if not protect us from emergencies?” she said.

Do these words even mean anything?

By themselves, emergency declarations have no more force than other political proclamations. And just as no individual country can stop climate change within its borders, cities’ and states’ toolboxes are limited without the support of federal law and international agreements.

That hasn’t stopped states and smaller jurisdictions. New York City recently mandated that the owners of its largest buildings slash their emissions impact, and new legislation requires New York State to eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas output by 2050.

But questions remain about whether even these measures — with far more teeth than a council declaration — will achieve their goals.

Government agencies need to “start making things happen — and fast,” including acting against the interests of real estate, energy and other lobbies that traditionally wield political clout, said Pete Sikora, climate justice director for New York Communities for Change. His group supported the state and city laws but contends they do not go far enough.

Declarations have increased as public alarm has grown

The first local climate emergency was declared in Darebin, Australia, in 2016. The following year, Hoboken, New Jersey, became the first American city to follow suit. Groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, which calls for nonviolent civil disobedience to spur climate action, have made the declarations a centerpiece of their campaigns.

The movement has grown with extreme climate events that have been impossible to ignore: wildfires, storms and droughts, plus heat waves that set record temperatures in Europe last week and made June the world’s hottest month on record.

Last fall, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that keeping global warming at the minimum level to avert catastrophe would, as New York’s resolution put it, “require an unprecedented transformation of every sector of the global economy over the next 12 years.”

Six in ten Americans are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the share of those choosing “alarmed” more than doubled from 2013 to 2018.

Young advocates drive the push to use words like ‘crisis’

“Climate change sounds gradual,” said Olivia Sommers, 19, one of dozens of climate activists in an overflow crowd at a City Council hearing on the measure, part of the public pressure that swayed the body to approve the resolution sooner than planned. “But to me it doesn’t feel like ‘change’. It feels like a crisis.”

Jilly Edgar, 20, a New York University student and member of the Sunrise Movement, which advocates for Green New Deal policies, said she struggled to think of the future. That should be a time, she said, when “the world is becoming my own, and moving forward in it” toward “marriage, graduate degrees, children.”

“But actually,” she said, “the world is dying. There’s just, like, a cutoff point. That does a lot to destroy the idealism of young people that usually pushes them to act.”

The ‘fear of fear' is an obstacle to action, activists say

“The idea that ‘you can’t scare people, fear paralyzes people,’ has been a guiding principle of the gradualist climate movement for decades, and it’s horribly wrong and misguided,” said Klein Salaman, 33, who trained as a clinical psychologist.

“The basic tenet of therapy is that facing hard truths is how you create transformative change,” she said. “You cannot skip the step of facing reality. It’s only when we have a national consensus that we are all personally in danger, when we feel enough fear, that we are willing to make drastic changes. Fear is literally how we translate perception of danger into action.”

The mobilization to fight World War II, she said, is the closest parallel in recent history to the scale and urgency of effort needed, she said: “Pull every lever, have all hands on deck, spend without limit to save as much life as possible.”

The young activists at City Hall said they had all been through a phase of “climate despair,” but that what gave them hope was, as Edgar put it, “deciding to push for change, and urge people with power to make that same decision.”

News media, too, are being pushed to use urgent language

Sommers, a Middlebury College student, was one of 70 people arrested outside The New York Times last month in a protest calling for the newspaper to use the phrases “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” rather than “climate change.”

The Guardian recently announced that it would adopt those terms. A Times spokeswoman said the paper devotes more resources to covering climate than any national publication.

“We should call it an emergency because that’s what it is,” Sommers said. “Tell the truth.”

Why New York City declared a 'climate emergency'

New York City, the world capital of ambition, has never been shy about grandiose declarations. The City Council has passed or proposed resolutions demanding world peace, banning a racist slur and condemning all manner of federal policies where city government has no actual say.

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Anne Barnard

Articles written by the author

Climate Change Protests: With Fake Blood, Extinction Rebellion Hits N.Y.

Latest Plagues in Region: Floods and New Blackouts

Why New York City declared a 'climate emergency'