The past two years, 2017 and 2018, brought the U.S. two major youth-led movements. The first was borne out of the March for Our Lives, which saw hundreds of thousands rallying for gun violence prevention in D.C. and across the country. The second was the Sunrise Movement. 

The who's who of America's conservative movement gather each year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside of D.C.

This year was no exception. You could get a selfie with former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. Or on the ballroom main stage, you could catch a speech by the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Wayne LaPierre and this year, even President Donald Trump.

And in a small, lightly attended side room, the who’s who of climate science deniers converged at a Heartland Institute panel, where they, predictably, used former Vice President Al Gore as a punching bag, gushed over Trump’s environmental protection rollbacks, and alleged that the scientific consensus on climate change is a lie.

The 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual rally of conservative officials and political activists, was set to be a big one — the first time a first-year sitting president would have attended since Ronald Reagan. While President Trump canceled late in 2016, enthusiasm for the president still filled its halls, and so did a number of his White House, Cabinet, and transition team members — including at least one previously unannounced member of the EPA transition team. 

Joining the CPAC lineup was the usual cast of climate science deniers who branded climate change as “fake news,” scientists and environmental advocates as “some of the worst people in the world,” and polluted rivers catching fire in the pre-EPA era as “the price of industrialization.” 

On May 14, thousands of people around the world joined together for marches, rallies and civil disobedience against dirty energy. While their specific causes may have ranged from stopping pipelines to preventing crude oil “bomb trains,” the unifying idea was to ‘break free’ from fossil fuels.

According to organizers, 2,000 people attended the Break Free Albany rally that featured speeches from different groups, such as Iris Marie Bloom of Protecting Our Waters.

As one of the final speakers at the rally she spoke about the Pilgrim Pipeline but in general the cause for the action, “We are all here to protect our climate, because the oil bomb trains are bad for climate, Bakken oil extraction is bad for climate… From the beginning — the cradle, the Bakken Shale, the tar sands — to the grave, Philadelphia refineries, other refineries, and the end use… we got to stop it all!”

48 hours before the People’s Climate March, DeSmogBlog ventured out to Brooklyn to see the preparation for what would become the largest climate march in history. (Check out some photos from the march itself.)

Artists from the around the country were quickly finishing their work in anticipation of march day — a day they've been waiting months for — all of them building floats, flying birds, an iceberg and painting banners… lots of banners.

We were able to interview a few of the artists and brought back a lot of photos of their work.

All this activity happened in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Two spaces, just a block away from each other, created a tremendous amount of the art for the People’s Climate March on September 21st.

At one of the larger spaces in Brooklyn an artist paints a 20-foot circular banner calling for climate justice.

More than 400,000 people took to the streets to have their voices heard at the People's Climate March yesterday in New York City. The record-breaking crowd took up 27 blocks in total, from West 86th street to Columbus Circle.

Photographer Zach Roberts was there to document the biggest climate change march in history for DeSmogBlog. Here are some of his best shots.