NEW YORK: Environmental campaigners in New York have kept up a campaign of direct action against one of the city’s foremost banking empires, Citi, accusing the group of fueling the climate crisis. Enraged by Citi’s bankrolling of polluting businesses, activists have unleashed a “summer of heat” campaign that includes protests and leafleting, coupled with an online pressure campaign. Every week, dozens of protesters gather at Citigroup’s gleaming headquarters in Lower Manhattan to demand it change its fossil fuel investments policy, following in the footsteps of European campaigners who did the same with eurozone banking giants. Nearly 600 people have been arrested at the New York protests and sit-ins so far.

In June four activist groups — Climate Organizing Hub, New York Communities for Change, Planet Over Profit and Stop the Money Pipeline — created the campaign against Citi, in conjunction with dozens of other groups. “We met with them for years, and you just felt like we were getting nowhere,” said protest organizer Jonathan Westin who vowed to keep up the campaign until Citi changes course.

“We felt like we had to bring it to their doorstep.” Oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, Amazon, and seabed alongside thermal power plants, coal mines and LNG plants have received more than $6.9 trillion from banks since 2016. That was the year the Paris Agreement was signed to strive to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. In 2023, the world’s 60 largest banks committed $750 billion to fossil fuels, according to a report by NGOs Rainforest Action Network, Reclaim Finance and others. US finance giants JP Morgan Chase, Citi and Bank of America lead the pack. “Citi is the second worst funder of dirty energy projects in the world from 2016 to 2023, spending a total of $396.3 billion on coal, oil and gas,” the report claims.

“These are the people that have the power to stop... and make investments in things that are not destroying our planet,” one of the protest organizers, Renata Pumarol, told AFP. Citi insists it is “transparent about our climate-related activities.” “We are supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy through our net zero commitments and our $1 trillion sustainable finance goal,” Citi said.

Last year was the hottest on record globally, while several new temperature records were set in July this year alone. In a letter to the bank’s leaders, more than 750 scientists warned Citi that “climate impacts will be significantly worse if we do not make deep, rapid cuts to heat-trapping emissions, phase out fossil fuels, and pursue a just transition to a clean energy system.”

Extreme heat events like drought, forest fires and floods have hit virtually every corner of the planet, wreaking havoc on healthcare, infrastructure and ecosystems.

The UN has called heat a “new epidemic,” warning that new oil and gas licenses were signing away the future of the planet. Finance is one of the planks underpinning polluting energy alongside government permits and insurance to guarantee the projects.

“Without any one of those pieces, it can’t proceed. And so that’s why we’re going after the financiers,” said campaigner Laurel Sutherlin. Protester Laura Esther Wolfson said the battle against fossil fuel financing would not be “a one-day fight.”

“The civil rights struggle lasted years, what we cannot do is sit back and do nothing,” she said. – AFP