Climate march draws large crowd despite sweltering heat
Temperature tied record-high for date in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON — On a sweltering April day, tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled in Washington on Saturday for the latest installment of the regular protests that punctuate the Trump era. This large-scale climate march marked President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, which have already seen multiple rollbacks of environmental protections and Obama climate policies.
The Peoples Climate March, which originated with a massive demonstration in New York in September 2014, picked a symbolically striking day for its 2017 event. The temperature reached 91 degrees at District of Columbia’s National Airport at 2:59 p.m., tying a heat record for April 29 in the district set in 1974 — which only amplified the movement’s message.
On the eve of the march, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was beginning an overhaul of its website, which included taking down a long-standing site devoted to the science of climate change, which the agency said was “under review.”
“Hang on EPA, the midterms are coming. 2018,” read one sign carried by Kathy Sommer of Stony Brook, N.Y., as the protest assembled on the Mall Saturday morning.
“There is no Planet B,” read another sign by Eva Gunther of Washington, D.C., displaying one of the most popular and oft repeated messages of the event (and of last week’s March for Science).
President Trump was in Pennsylvania for a rally on Saturday and did not tweet any immediate reaction.
Many of the signs at Saturday’s climate march were dark and ominous, warning of climate catastrophe, dying oceans, crop destruction and planet degradation. But the mood of the marchers was anything but somber. It was a racially diverse crowd with marchers of all ages. There were chants, of course: “Shame, shame, shame!” “Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Pruitt has got to go!”
But none more ubiquitous than, “The oceans are rising and so are we!”
The climate event differs from last week’s March for Science in its focus and also its participants — only 1 out of 8 contingents of Saturday’s protest featured scientific researchers. The rest included labor activists, indigenous people already facing effects from climate change, and children and young people who will live with the effects of climate change longest as the Earth continues to warm.
The motivation for the climate march is clear: The Trump administration already has moved to roll back former president Barack Obama’s signature climate initiative, the Clean Power Plan, and Trump and his team have taken many other actions to weaken environmental protections of air and water, and to enable fossil fuel exploitation on public lands and waters.
It was a big contrast with the original People’s Climate March in 2014. That event was aimed at rallying support for climate change action and preceded by about a year the Paris climate agreement. This year’s event was more focused on resisting rollbacks of climate efforts.
Just before 3 p.m., temperatures at National Airport hit 91 degrees, but the heat index was even higher at 95.
Shortly before 4 p.m., the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency issued a hyperthermia alert, citing a heat index of 96 degrees.
D.C. Fire and EMS received more than 50 calls for medical assistance at the march, with the “great majority” being heat-related, said Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for the D.C. Fire and EMS department. Four people were transported to local hospitals, though Maggiolo said he did not know their condition.
In the middle of Lafayette Square, where the tired and sunburned masses of demonstrators huddled under the shade of trees to picnic and relax, a man with a bullhorn reminded them to take all their trash with them, to leave the place cleaner than they had found it. He needn’t have bothered. The recycling cans already were filling up. Many protesters had brought extra plastic bags, to cart away any extra trash.
“I’ll be fine in my lifetime. But what they experience and what their children experience could be catastrophic,” said Hamid Doumbia, 39, who had come downtown from Rockville, Md., with his two children, 4-year-old Jasmine and 8-year-old Noah. They made T-shirts for the march. “I wanted them to understand … I wanted to show them that it’s not just us, that a lot of people care about the world.”
Organizers told the National Park Service that they expected 50,000 to 100,000 attendees. By late afternoon, they were claiming to have greatly exceeded that and reached 200,000. More than 375 satellite marches were held around the United States and even more around the world, from Manila to Amsterdam.
In addition to tying an all-time heat record for April 29, this month also is the warmest April on record for the District.