'Enough, for all, forever': a report from New York's mixed up, anti-capitalist People's Climate March.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Column

THE PEOPLE'S Climate March ambled genially down 6th Avenue in New York City on a Sunday afternoon in September. The slogan was "To Change Everything, We Need Everyone." Not everyone showed up, but the march did attract between 300,000 and 400,000 participants, making it by far the largest climate change mobilization in history. Prominent marchers included former Vice President Al Gore, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), along with such leading environmentalists as Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, and Leonardo DiCaprio. The marchers were hoping to pressure the United Nations Climate Summit into promising to adopt stringent measures to prevent catastrophic manmade global warming.

They sorted themselves into various affinity groups: faith-based organizations, scientists, students, labor unions, old folks, organic food enthusiasts, renewable energy proponents, indigenous peoples, and so forth. Wandering through the throngs prior to kickoff, it was apparent that every progressive cause can and does find a home in the climate change movement. The demonstrators' chief demand was "climate justice," which broadly entails redistributing wealth from the countries and industries that have benefited from the consumption of fossil fuels.

"System change, not climate change," was the ubiquitous slogan, and the system that they think needs changing is markets and private property. I overhead one marcher explaining to another, "We must have a better capitalism, better than the malignant corporate system we have now."

Among the chief capitalist villains: Monsanto. The assembled marchers fervently damned the crop biotechnology company despite the fact that modern high yield biotech crops cut CO2 emissions by 13 million tons in 2012--the equivalent of taking 11.8 million cars off the road for one year. By making it possible to grow more calories on less land, biotech crops helped conserve 123 million hectares from 1996 to 2012. Many of the protesters oddly believe that eating locally grown organic crops--which require more labor and land to produce less food--will somehow help stop global warming. Vegans are right that eating less meat would mean that more land could be returned to forests that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On the other hand, researchers estimate that lab-grown meat could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 96 percent relative to farmed...