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The World’s Largest Funder of Fossil Fuel Expansion

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Original article by ALEC CONNON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Environmental activist protest outside CitiBank Headquarters in New York City on April 25, 2023, calling for an end to fossil fuel financing.
 (Photo by Leonardo Munoz / AFP via Getty Images)

Here’s why we will be using our bodies to shut down Citibank’s global headquarters over and over again, this summer.

This summer, along with dozens of others, I’ll be helping to run the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, a campaign of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience against the banks, investors, and insurance companies financing fossil fuel expansion.

As we have written about here already, our plan is simple: using our bodies, we will continually blockade the New York headquarters of the Wall Street giants bankrolling coal, oil, and gas expansion; week after week, we will disrupt the companies disrupting our climate and our planet.

We’re targeting several companies―including the insurance company, Chubb, and the private equity group, KKR―but our number one target will be Citigroup. Here’s why.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, Citi has provided $204.46 billion in financing to the company’s most rapidly developing new coal, oil, and gas fields. Remarkably, Citi has provided more money to those oil and gas companies than even JPMorgan Chase―the bank that climate activists like to call the “Doomsday Bank.”

To be clear, I’m talking here only about the financing Citi has provided for companies developing new oil and gas reserves, not merely investing in infrastructure to keep the oil pumping from existing reserves. When we take into account financing to all fossil fuel companies, Citi has provided a little shy of $400 billion to coal, oil, and gas companies since 2015. But focusing on expansion is important.

Numerous climate experts, from the International Energy Agency to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have made it clear that to stave off the worst of climate catastrophe, there must be no investment in new fossil fuel expansion. But last year alone, Citibank provided $14.6 billion to the companies most rapidly expanding their coal, oil, and gas operations.

Citibank’s financing of fossil fuel expansion not only drives climate chaos, it also results in environmental racism. To give just one example, 70% of the air pollution generated by ExxonMobil is dumped on communities of color, contributing to the higher levels of heart disease, strokes, cancer, and other illnesses that are widely associated with living near oil and gas infrastructure.

Citibank’s top fossil fuel client is ExxonMobil. Yet when asked by Congress if she knew what environmental racism was, Citi CEO Jane Fraser replied: “Only vaguely.”

Not content with merely financing fossil fuels, Citi also works to block climate action both from its own investors and the U.S. government.

CEO Jane Fraser is chair of a group called the Financial Services Forum and a board member of the Bank Policy Institute, groups that have fought tooth and nail to weaken climate-financial regulation advanced by the Biden Administration. Citi also donates to several high-profile politicians who work against action on climate, including Congressman Andy Barr who has led the charge in a series of fossil fuel-backed, right-wing attacks designed to prevent the financial industry from taking action on climate.

For the past three years, Citi has faced a shareholder resolution from investors calling for a report on how the bank ensures that the oil, gas, and mining companies it finances respect Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Yet, in spite of Ms. Fraser’s previous claims in 2020 that Citi was committed to being ”an anti-racist institution,” Citi has fought the resolution each year, urging investors to vote against it, even as they remain one of the world’s largest funders of oil and gas in the Amazon rainforest.

Besides its role in the climate crisis and environmental racism, there are plenty other reasons to be angry at Citibank, too. In the early 20th century, Citi actively lobbied the US government to invade and occupy Haiti, which it promptly did, resulting in decades of bloodshed and misery for Haitians. A century later, Citi did as much as any bank to cause the financial crisis of 2008, which led to nearly 3.8 million Americans losing their homes; no bank received a larger bailout from the government than Citi.

And then there’s the fact that Citi is the foreign bank with the largest presence in Israel and a major financier of weapons manufacturers that are currently providing Israel with fighter jets and missiles being used to massacre Palestinians.

All of this is why Citibank is our number one target this summer.

To kick off the campaign, we will disrupt and shut down Citibank’s headquarters in Manhattan every day, all week long. We start on Monday, June 10th. We hope that you join us.

Original article by ALEC CONNON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

‘Just The Beginning’: 50+ Arrested For Blockading Citigroup Bank Over Climate Crimes ›

Continue ReadingThe World’s Largest Funder of Fossil Fuel Expansion

Shareholder Resolutions Push Big Banks to Phase Out Fossil Fuel Financing

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Original article republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Protest placard reads Greenwash detected

Any climate commitment from a bank that is still financing fossil fuel expansion is greenwashing, pure and simple,” said a Stop the Money Pipeline campaigner.

BRETT WILKINS Jan 24, 2023

Taking aim at Wall Street banks financing the oil, gas, and coal extraction fueling the climate crisis, a coalition of institutional investors on Tuesday announced the filing of climate-related shareholder resolutions in an effort to force “more climate-friendly policies that better align with” the firms’ public commitments to combating the planetary emergency.

In the resolutions, members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and Harrington Investments asked six banks—Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—to enact policies phasing out fossil fuel finance, disclose plans for aligning their financing with their stated near-term emissions reduction goals, and to set absolute end-of-decade emissions reduction targets for their energy sector financing.

Shareholders also filed climate resolutions at four companies—Chubb, Travelers, The Hartford, and Berkshire Hathaway—that insure fossil fuel projects.

“Each of the major banks has publicly committed to aligning its financing with the goals of the Paris agreement to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, a target widely considered imperative to avoid catastrophic climate impacts and financial losses,” ICCR said in a statement. “Scientific consensus shows that new fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with achieving net-zero by 2050, yet these banks continue to invest billions of dollars each year in new fossil fuel development—a fact corroborated by a new Reclaim Finance report released last week.”

As Stop the Money Pipeline—a coalition of over 200 groups seeking to hold “financial backers of climate chaos accountable”—noted:

A slate of resolutions calling for policies to phase out financing for fossil fuel expansion was filed by the same investors at U.S. banks in 2022. They received between 9% and 13% support, which was a significant milestone for these first-of-their-kind proposals. This year’s fossil fuel financing proposals have been updated to encourage banks to finance clients’ low-carbon transition so long as those plans are credible and verified. The previous resolutions were supported by many major institutional investors, including the New York State and New York City Common Retirement Funds.

New in 2023 are the resolutions on absolute emissions reduction targets for energy sector financing filed by the New York City and New York State comptrollers, and the resolutions calling for disclosure of climate transition plans filed by As You Sow. The day before the resolutions were filed, Denmark’s largest bank, Danske, announced a phaseout of corporate financing for companies engaged in new coal, oil and, gas development.

“Any climate commitment from a bank that is still financing fossil fuel expansion is greenwashing, pure and simple,” Arielle Swernoff, U.S. banks campaign manager at Stop the Money Pipeline, said in a statement. “By supporting these resolutions, shareholders can hold banks accountable to their own climate commitments, effectively manage risk, and protect people and the planet.”

Dan Chu, executive director of the Sierra Club Foundation—which led the filing at JPMorgan Chase—lamented that “all major U.S. banks continue to finance billions of dollars for new coal, oil, and gas projects every year. Such financing undermines the banks’ net-zero commitments and exposes investors to material risks.”

“These shareholder resolutions simply ask banks to align their promises with their actions and to adopt policies to phase out the financing of new fossil fuel development,” Chu added.

Referring to a warning from the International Energy Agency, Kate Monahan of Trillium Asset Management—which spearheaded the Bank of America filing—said that “we will not be able to achieve the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C if banks continue to finance new fossil fuel exploration and development.”

“Bank of America has publicly committed to the Paris agreement but continues to finance fossil fuel expansion with no phaseout plan, exposing itself to accusations of greenwashing and reputational damage,” Monahan contended. ” By continuing to fund new fossil fuels, Bank of America and others are taking actions with potentially catastrophic consequences.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Original article republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingShareholder Resolutions Push Big Banks to Phase Out Fossil Fuel Financing

Faith Leaders, Zombies, Moms and Kids Agree: It’s Time for Wall Street to Stop Funding Fossil Fuels

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Activists are not slowing down: it’s clear that Wall Street holds an outsized responsibility for the death, destruction, and chaos caused by the climate crisis.

Reposted from Common Dreams, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Arielle Swernoff November 18, 2022

Over the past few months, activists around the country and the world have laid the blame for climate disasters at Wall Street’s feet. In a wave of escalated actions under the name “Blame Wall Street,” dozens of groups have called out the financial industry for their financing of fossil fuels and complicity in the climate crisis.

Around the country, people took on elevated amounts of risk in order to increase pressure on the dirty banks, insurance companies, and asset managers financing the climate crisis.

Activists pummeled the banks with actions and protests for months. Over 40 groups across the country held over 50 actions and protests.

In New York City, a week of action targeting Citi began with moms and kids birddogging the bank’s chief sustainability officer, Val Smith, over Citi’s continued funding of Russian oil and gas interests. Later that week, activists infiltrated Citi’s Taste of Tennis gala and interrupted the event with a large banner accusing the bank of funding Russia’s war crimes.

Citi, the US’s largest funder of coal, faced additional protests at greenwashing PR events and at branches in Phoenix, Brooklyn, and other locations. Activists interrupted the speech of Citi’s Chief Sustainability Officer at a sustainable banking conference, and protested Citi, Wells Fargo, and Chase leadership at a Women in Banking event.

Chase emerged from its fall PR events similarly beleaguered. Activists crashed the Chase-sponsored US open, passing out fans to sweaty attendees accusing Chase of funding climate chaos. Later in the month, nine different affinity groups created a circus out of the San Francisco Chase Corporate Challenge, with activists taking over every part of the road race, which hundreds of Chase employees participate in, from the course to the finish line to the after party to protesting in kayaks along the route.

As the world’s largest funder of fossil fuels, it’s no surprise that Chase was protested again and again: Leavenworth, Washington; Worcester, Watertown, and Boston, Massachusetts; Madison, Wisconsin; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; Providence, Rhode Island; Silver Spring, Maryland; Sacramento, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and New York City all saw protests at Chase branches or headquarters.

Another major target was asset manager BlackRock, one of the world’s top investors in fossil fuels and climate destruction. BlackRock saw protest after protest at their headquarters, with regular actions from September through November. People sang outside their building, came in costume, held prayer and faith actions, and stormed the headquarters with pitchforks and dumped coal on their escalators. BlackRock is on notice: time to stop financing fossil fuels.

Global climate strike protests also included demands on Wall Street and an end to fossil fuel financing, with activists in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Maryland partnering with youth leaders to demand a safe and livable future. Climate strikers weren’t the youngest activists: in Los Angeles and New York, people protested the greed of the fossil fuel industry alongside their infants and toddlers.

Actions were creative, including art, music, and costumes. In Albany, New York, the red rebel brigade joined a protest outside of TD Bank. In Brooklyn, activists dressed up as Mr. Moneybags and brought bagpipes to branch locations of Citi, Chase, and Bank of America. In Sacramento, Denver, and New Orleans, activists staged Halloween actions, dressing up as endangered species or zombie bankers.

Faith leaders exercised their moral authority in calling on banks and asset managers to stop funding climate disaster. Near Philadelphia, Quaker activists held a prayer vigil outside of the Vanguard HQ, calling on the asset manager to stop financing fossil fuels. In Washington, DC, faith leaders called on the IMF and World Bank to do the same. Faith activists also held protests outside of the Bank of America headquarters in Charlotte, and a Bank of America branch in Springfield, Illinois. Leaders from different faith communities protested multiple times outside of BlackRock’s corporate headquarters in New York City—at one protest, 27 faith leaders were arrested.

Around the country, people took on elevated amounts of risk in order to increase pressure on the dirty banks, insurance companies, and asset managers financing the climate crisis. Dozens of people were arrested this fall—from San Francisco to New York to Pennsylvania to Rhode Island. These activists went to jail in order to show the world the greed of dirty Wall Street actors.

Activists innovated by taking repeated action at financial targets. Instead of one protest, people showed up week after week, increasing the pressure on banks and asset managers. In Phoenix, Arizona, Sacramento, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and Leavenworth, Washington, local actions happened again and again.

People targeted other financial actors, as well. Insurance companies received their fair share of pressure, with actions on Traveller’s, Hartford, and Chubb. One action saw a huge oil derrick parked outside of the home of Chubb CEO, Evan Greenberg. Groups protested the Federal Reserve in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and in Washington, DC, activists protested TIAA’s support for deforestation, there was an action outside of the shareholder meeting of Proctor & Gamble, and a noise protest outside of the homes of the CEOs of the private equity firms KKR and Blackstone. In Sierra Leone, youth activists protested the Central Bank’s support of fossil fuel expansion.

Activists are not slowing down: it’s clear that Wall Street holds an outsized responsibility for the death, destruction, and chaos caused by the climate crisis. With shareholder meetings coming up this spring, banks, insurance companies, asset managers, and pension funds should be ready for increased pressure. Banks are expected to see more shareholder resolutions calling on them to walk the talk on climate than ever before, and the grassroots movement to stop the flow of money to fossil fuels is only growing in energy and momentum. 

On December 14, we are hosting a call to share what’s next in the fight to stop the money pipeline to climate chaos. We hope you will join us.

Reposted from Common Dreams, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Arielle Swernoff

Arielle Swernoff

Arielle Swernoff is an organizer, strategist, and facilitator based in New York City. She is the Stop the Money Pipeline US Banks Campaign Manager.

Continue ReadingFaith Leaders, Zombies, Moms and Kids Agree: It’s Time for Wall Street to Stop Funding Fossil Fuels