Climate Change Makes Protests Harder—Including Climate Change Protests
By Kiley Price
Last Saturday, Laurie Marshall joined hundreds of people in El Paso, Texas, for the city’s “No Kings Day” protests, part of a nationwide series of actions in opposition of what organizers say is authoritarian behavior by the Trump administration.
As protesters flooded the streets, temperatures climbed past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. After four years living in El Paso, Marshall is used to extreme summer heat, but even she hit her limit after about an hour and a half in the blazing sun.
“My face was beet red, and I knew it was time for me to get out of the heat,” Marshall told me. “I’m 75 years old, and I made sure that I had a hat and an umbrella and plenty of water, and it was so hot that there were two people who actually had fainted from the heat and had to be taken to a cooler setting.”
“No Kings Day” participants in other areas of the American Southwest and parts of the Southeast faced similarly sizzling conditions as they held signs and chanted refrains rebuking federal decisions to slash budgets, cut tens of thousands of jobs, roll back environmental protections and raid businesses to arrest immigrant workers.
Protesters around the world are facing rising public health risks as climate change intensifies heat and other extreme weather like flooding or wildfires. It’s getting harder to protest climate change, in fact, without feeling climate change’s effects.
…
Like attendees at any other outdoor event, protesters are at the mercy of Mother Nature. For climate activists, this extreme weather often highlights the very cause they are fighting for.
For example, in 2023, a demonstration by climate protesters at the iconic Burning Man festival was interrupted by intense rainfall that flooded the Nevada desert location, NPR reports. Research shows that rain in the Southwest is becoming more likely with climate change to fall in short, aggressive bursts, which can trigger intense flooding because the ground can’t absorb the inundation fast enough.
“You can’t directly attribute this event to climate change,” Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told NPR. “But we are seeing impacts and extreme weather all over the place now … so folks can make their own decisions about how they’re observing the climate change in front of their very eyes.”
Research suggests that poor weather can negatively affect participation at protests, depending on the severity. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in rainfall during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reduced turnout by around 1 percent. Meanwhile, heatwaves are known to drive up cases of heat stress, increase psychological distress and potentially even exacerbate urban unrest.
In other cases, though, extreme weather can galvanize climate protesters. Last summer, my colleague Keerti Gopal covered a series of nonviolent protests dubbed the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” in Manhattan, which targeted banks and insurance companies for enabling continued fossil fuel expansion. Gopal spoke with New York activist Rachel Rivera on a scorching day in late July about her child’s recent asthma attack, exacerbated by the heat waves that hit New York City over the summer.
Staying Safe: Many protests take place in urban areas, often more vulnerable to poor air quality, flooding and heat than their rural counterparts. That’s largely due to the lack of vegetation in cities, which are instead lined with heat-absorbing asphalt and concrete.
…
