Protesters demanding action on climate change
“Fight for Our Future” rallies held across nation
Environmental activists, distraught by the government’s slow pace of action on climate change, amassed in front of the White House on Saturday afternoon, calling on President Joe Biden and Congress to swiftly pass a climate bill that has been stalled in the Senate since December.
The White House demonstration was one of dozens of “Fight for Our Future” rallies held across the country to press the government to cut the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet, capping a week of events timed to coincide with Earth Day.
“We’re here because in North Carolina we keep getting hit by hurricanes back to back, and we ain’t got nothing fixed,” said Willett Simpkins, 68, a retired nursing home maintenance director from Wallace, N.C. “And it’s getting worse every year. It’s time for them to stop talking about it and do something about it.”
The event, which drew several hundred people under the pale green trees in Lafayette Park, was emceed by Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, a nonpartisan group that tries to engage young voters.
Many in the crowd work for environmental organizations, but sprinkled among them were voters who wanted Biden to know that failure to enact climate legislation could cost him their vote.
Biden, who came into office promising urgent action on what he called the existential threat of climate change, has seen his ambitious plans pass the House but get watered down and stuck in the Senate because of unified opposition from Republicans as well as Sen. Joe Manchin, D -W.Va., a powerful swing vote.
Spiking gas prices because of the war in Ukraine have led Biden to take steps that are anathema to climate activists. He released a record amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and pleaded with oil and gas companies to step up drilling. In keeping with an order from a federal judge, Biden said he would open more public lands to drilling, despite a campaign promise to stop new oil and gas extraction.
The events come at a moment when scientists say the window is rapidly narrowing for nations to avoid tipping the planet into an irreversible future of more deadly storms, wildfires, floods, drought, food scarcity and mass migration.
Biden has pledged to cut greenhouse gases in half by 2050, a goal that is in line with what scientists say is needed from the United States to avert such catastrophes.
But if Democrats, who hold a razor-thin majority in Congress, do not enact major climate legislation within the next few months, many analysts say the window to meet that goal will slam shut. Republicans are favored to win control of at least one chamber of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections, and their steadfast opposition to climate action would likely doom the prospects for new legislation anytime soon.
Scientists have been declaring with increasing urgency that nations need to act now to avert a harrowing future. A major scientific report released earlier this month concluded that countries must immediately and drastically pivot away from the fossil fuels that have underpinned major economies for more than a century.