Climate-justice advocates skip the glitzy confabs in favor of street protest Xiye Bastida, a New York–based climate activist from the Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community in Mexico, marches down the Brooklyn Bridge alongside protesters. | Photo by Sara Hashemi While New York City officials, United Nations staff, and corporate executives prepared for the talks and panels that have become emblematic of the annual Climate Week , young climate-justice activists were making other plans. For weeks they’ve been getting ready for grassroots actions around the city—protests and marches to demand bolder action on climate change than what they expect to hear from the official proceedings. They kicked off their week of action last Friday, September 20, as hundreds of protesters left school and work to march from Manhattan’s Foley Square to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to call for an end to the era of fossil fuels. “In our targeting of the pillars of fossil fuels for the strike, we are centering the whole of Climate Week around this idea of equity and justice and ending the era of fossil fuels, because that’s what we need to focus on,” 16-year-old Lena Goings, an organizer with the NYC chapter of Fridays for Future , told Sierra a few days ahead of the march. TAKE ACTION Tell President Biden: Take steps toward abolishing fossil fuels and prioritize an equitable transition to clean energy . The youth organizers believe that Climate Week—which is officially sponsored by the United Nations and the City of New York and runs from September 22 to September 29—does not go far enough to address the causes of the climate crisis, so they want to directly challenge the “pillars of the fossil fuel industry”: fossil fuel funders, polluters, and political leaders. “We need to be focusing on stopping all expansion of fossil fuels […]