Some big wins, and some big campaigns launching!
The next phase of the climate fight is going to center on the big banks that fund the fossil fuel industry. It’s going to be big, loud, and important—and there are signs this week that it’s already starting to be effective.
Climate activists have been taking on the banks for a long time, of course. In the midst of the Dakota Access Pipeline battle, centered on Standing Rock, indigenous activists like Rachel Heaton and Matt Remle launched Mazaska Talks—Mazaska is “money” in Lakota, and they helped battle banks like Wells-Fargo that were funding DAPL and other projects. And of course they drew on work that went back much farther—15 years ago or more indigenous activists in Canada, like Melina Laboucan-Massimo or Clayton Thomas-Muller were traveling to Europe to try and talk banks out of financing the Mordor-scale destruction of the Alberta landscape. Efforts at a broader push have continued since—Stop the Money Pipeline became an effective coalition of groups pushing on the big banks (and asset managers and insurance companies), and there have been many other diverse efforts.
But the pandemic got in the way of mass protests and civil disobedience; and the banks tried to buy some time with the formation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero at the climate talks in Scotland a little more than a year ago. That GFANZ effort has turned into a greenwashing debacle, however—as Bloomberg reported last week, two of its key members, Citibank and Bank of America, “have done more to support the expansion of fossil-fuel companies than any other lenders.” Those two, along with Chase and Wells-Fargo, are the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
And so efforts are mounting to hold them accountable—the demand, across civil society, is that they cease funding the expansion of the fossil fuel enterprise. This is hardly a radical demand; it concedes that we’ll be using oil and gas for some years to come (thanks to three-decade denial campaign by the fossil fuel industry) and asks only that it stop expanding: no new pipelines, no more searching for new oil and gas fields. Again, this is not a radical demand: it’s what climate scientists have said must happen. The International Energy Agency (a group of oil importers formed by Henry Kissinger in reaction to the 1970s oil shocks) said in 2021 that expansion would have to cease that year if we were to have any hope of reaching our climate targets. And yet the banks have just gone on lending.
So this morning the Make My Money Matter campaign in the UK launched a high-profile drive to get Brits to move their money out of the “high street banks” that lend to the fossil fuel industry. They’ve got Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and other celebs out in front; it got big coverage this morning in the Times of London and elsewhere.
And tonight campaigners in the American Stop Dirty Banks campaign unveil a map of the protests already planned outside banks for March 21 (32123 for the palindromically inclined). The effort’s being coordinated by Third Act, but it includes a huge variety of environmental justice groups large and small, from Greenfaith and Elders Climate Action to the mighty Sierra Club. Indeed, the Club’s new executive director Ben Jealous, who formerly headed the NAACP, provided a forceful reminder on tonight’s call that these were the same banks who enforced seregation’s ‘redlining’ policies in the last century.
“We’ve got to be sure that the banks get the message that the people of this country are increasingly outraged that these big banks were willing to magnify the power of Big Oil and Big Gas,” he said—citing Desmond Tutu’s anti-apartheid campaigns, which leveraged protest against American banking giants as another precedent.
Just to whet your appetite:
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