Category: Extinction Rebellion
Time to make the rich pay for climate change
Image: Scientist Rebellion / Twitter Philippa Nuttall
The richest 10% of citizens are responsible for 50% of global carbon emissions. Taxing private jets would be a good place to start – and raise money for cleaner alternatives.
e tend to say ‘we are all in the same boat’, but frankly we are not. We are all in the same ocean, but not in the same boat.” EU Climate Change Commissioner Frans Timmermans was thinking of vulnerable, low-income countries when he made this remark, but the thrust of his quote also holds true for the division between the richest and the less well off in all countries. While the poorest everywhere are trying to stay afloat, battered by a storm of high energy and food prices and falling real wages for many, the richest continue to hop around in their private jets.
Yes, we must all change our behaviour and drastically reduce our emissions, but in 2023 let’s stop pretending we are all in this together. We need policies that force the very rich to pay for the outsized amount of pollution they cause.
Kevin Anderson, professor at the University of Manchester’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, and economist Ann Pettifor have been making this case for years. “The green movement has lost its way by making us feel we are all equally responsible for the [climate] crisis,” Pettifor said when I interviewed her in 2021. Both have called for emission reduction efforts to be focused on the world’s wealthiest 10% of individuals, who are responsible for 50% of global carbon emissions – and especially the top 1%. The super rich contribute close to 17% of global emissions.
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Extinction Rebellion calls out HSBC’s Greenwash at AGM in Birmingham
At 10:30am this morning, around fifty protesters descended on HSBC’s annual general meeting at the Eastside Rooms in Birmingham to call out the bank’s shameful climate policies. It comes as the bank announces soaring quarterly profits of $12.9 billion.
Members of Extinction Rebellion Midlands and Money Rebellion arrived with a bath of greenwash, while a group of ‘dirty scrubbers’ dressed in pinafores and headscarves offered to clean up the bank’s soiled image in return for cash.
Inside the conference centre protesters brought the AGM to a standstill as they unfurled banners, sang songs, the dirty scrubbers reappeared with dramatic skits, and people repeatedly called out HSBC’s broken promises over its climate pledges, accusing them of ‘climate genocide’ and ‘lies’. Security eventually removed protesters after 45 minutes of disruption.
HSBC has invested $145bn in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the bank’s climate pledges have been tarnished by a series of damaging exposes.
In December, HSBC made a surprise announcement that it was updating its energy policy and would stop new investment in oil and gas fields in an apparent change of policy. However, it’s climate pledges to date have been revealed as mere greenwash. in January, it was revealed that HSBC had given energy giant RWE a secret $340m loan as bulldozed a village to expand a coal mine in Germany, just three months after the bank had pledged to stop financing new coal. Last October, investigators showed that HSBC’s $1 trillion investment in ‘sustainable financing’ and ‘green bonds’ was being used by fossil fuel companies to bankroll mines, pipelines, and oil rigs.[4]
Questions have also been raised about the bank’s pledge to stop direct funding of fossil fuel projects, while continuing to indirectly fund fossil fuel companies like Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil and Shell. The bank is also financially supporting ConocoPhillips, the company behind the controversial Alaskan oil drilling Willow project. Despite its various pledges HSBC invested a total of $11.074b in fossil fuels last year.
Andrew Taylor from Money Rebellion said: “HSBC continues to fund new devastating coal,oil and gas projects. These projects destroy the health and livelihoods of communities who live near them, and are fuelling climate chaos. We will use every tool in the box to stop HSBC and other banks from pursuing this deadly business plan – from disrupting their AGMs to building the biggest bank boycott in history.”
