NEW YORK: Environmental activists in New York continued their direct action campaign against one of the city’s leading banking empires, Citi, accusing the group of fueling the climate crisis.
Enraged by Citi’s bankrolling of polluting businesses, activists have launched a “summer of heat” campaign that includes protests and flyers alongside an online pressure campaign.
Every week, dozens of protesters gather at Citigroup’s glitzy Lower Manhattan headquarters to demand a change in its fossil fuel investment policy, following in the footsteps of European activists who did the same to the eurozone banking giants.
Nearly 600 people have been arrested at protests in New York so far.
In June, four activist groups—Climate Organizing Hub, New York Communities for Change, Planet Over Profit, and Stop the Money Pipeline—formed a campaign against Citi in collaboration with dozens of other groups.
“We’ve been meeting with them for years and you just felt like we weren’t going to get anywhere,” said protest organizer Jonathan Westin, who vowed to continue the campaign until Citi changed course.
“We felt we had to bring it to their doorstep.”
Oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, Amazon and the seabed, along with thermal power plants, coal mines and natural gas liquefaction facilities, have raised more than $6.9 trillion from banks since 2016.
That was the year the Paris Agreement was signed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
According to a report by the NGOs Rainforest Action Network, Reclaim Finance and others, in 2023 the world’s 60 largest banks devoted $750 billion to fossil fuels.
US financial giants JP Morgan Chase, Citi and Bank of America lead the pack. “Citi is the second worst provider of dirty energy projects in the world between 2016 and 2023, spending a total of $396.3 billion on coal, oil and gas,” the report claims.
