Tens of thousands of people joined one of the biggest global days of climate change activism yesterday, from Sydney to Berlin, to put pressure on world leaders to unite in fighting global warming at a summit in Paris.
About 20,000 pairs of shoes were laid out in the Place de la Republique in the French capital, from high-heels to boots, to symbolize absent marchers after attacks by Islamic State militants killed 130 people on Nov. 13 and led France to ban a protest that was meant to be at the heart of the global action.
Organizers said the Vatican sent a pair of shoes on behalf of Pope Francis.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
One activist, dressed in white as an angel with large wings, held a sign saying “coal kills.”
More than 2,000 events were being held in cities including Sydney, Berlin, London, Sao Paulo and New York, making it perhaps the biggest day of climate action in history on the eve of the Paris conference which runs from today through Dec. 11.
In Sydney, about 45,000 people are estimated to have marched through the central business district toward the Opera House. Among them Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who tweeted it was the largest climate march ever held in the harbor city.
Protesters held placards reading: “There is no Planet B,” and “Say no to burning national forests for electricity.”
US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are to be among more than 140 leaders attending the start of the summit.
In Hong Kong, two protesters carried styrofoam polar bears holding signs reading “homeless and hungry” and “please help” because of melting Arctic ice.
In Seoul, hundreds of protesters banged drums and danced.
Activists in France scaled back their plans when the government imposed a state of emergency after the Paris attacks and banned the march in Paris on security grounds.
However, hundreds of people formed a kilometres-long human chain in Paris yesterday to protest the “climate state of emergency” along the Boulevard Voltaire in eastern Paris, breaking the chain in front of the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people were massacred in the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks,
“This is a moment for the whole world to join hands,” said Iain Keith, campaign director for Avaaz, one of the organizers.
Alix Mazounie of French Climate Action Network said the activists reckoned a human chain would not violate the state of emergency.
“This is not civil disobedience,” she said.
The chain would break, for instance, wherever it crossed a road to avoid disrupting traffic.
Many environmental activists want a phase-out of fossil fuels and a shift to 100 percent renewable-energy sources by 2050.
Some marches were held on Friday and Saturday, from Melbourne to Edinburgh.
“Don’t be a fossil fool,” one Australian banner said.
In the biggest single march on climate change ever staged, last year organizers estimated 310,000 people took part in New York.
On Saturday, faith groups delivered a series of petitions signed by 1.8 million people urging stronger action, collected on pilgrimages to Paris.
“The time for talking is long over,” said Yeb Sano of the Philippines, who walked 1,500km from Rome.
Additional reporting by AFP
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS