Disruptive Climate Protests Under Trump
My recent coverage:
There’s a Reason Oil Well Sales Are Collapsing In California: Cleanup Costs.
Trump-Proofing’ California and Beyond Will Be a Political Minefield
An interview with Alec Connon, co-director of Stop the Money Pipeline.
Photo credit: @jmrozendaal on X
I guess we should give up on capitalism saving us: Wells Fargo just left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, joining JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. Major asset managers have also turned away from climate-focused pledges. This can be blamed on many things, but the upshot is that these institutions may be less vulnerable to grassroots pressure than once thought.
The strategy of campaigning banks to drop fossil fuel investments emerged as a major plank of the climate movement after Standing Rock. One of the earliest organizations doing this work, Stop the Money Pipeline, formed in 2019 on a platform of lobbying Wall Street to abandon coal, oil and natural gas.
The “pipeline” in the group’s name is metaphorical, according to Alec Connon, the organization’s co-director. “Not just stopping an [oil] pipeline here and there, but stopping the money pipeline from Wall Street to the fossil fuel industry,” Connon said.
Up until 2022 this approach arguably yielded success. Six major US banks promised to stop investing in Arctic drilling. They dropped coal. They made promises to do sustainable financing and reach net zero and cut emissions from their oil investments. Connon maintains these were the result of lobbying by Stop the Money Pipeline and its allies.
But there has since been serious backsliding. Banks have committed $6.9 trillion to companies doing business in fossil fuels since 2016, the year the Paris Agreement went into effect, according to Banking on Climate Chaos’ 2024 report.
In response, activists have escalated tactics. This past summer, five thousand people protested outside the headquarters of Citibank in New York over 13 weeks. This Summer of Heat campaign drew attention to billions of dollars the bank has invested in oil and gas production, focusing on Citi because of its perceived vulnerability to pressure. The protesters blocked doors but remained peaceful.
Still, hundreds were detained. Striking photos show cellist John Mark Rozendaal arrested alongside Connon after allegedly violating a restraining order stemming from an assault charge. The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights defenders sent a letter to a US representative, which did not respond, the Guardian reported. The assault charges were eventually dropped.
With political headwinds bearing down on disruptive protests, I spoke with Connon shortly after the election to ask whether protesting fossil fuel investors is still an effective strategy, and how this wing of the climate movement might adapt under a strongman president.
Aarón Cantú: Between 2017 and 2020, banks and fund managers appeared receptive to your message. But then there was a roll back. That means your advocacy may have been more successful during Trump’s first term. How do you think that dynamic will work this time?
Alec Connon: At the end of the day, we all live on the same planet. I think the majority of executives and senior management at banking institutions and insurance companies are well aware of our rapidly deteriorating climate. Many live in New York, where they have breathed in wildfire smoke the last few weeks and seen wildfires in the city in November.
For many years, senior leaders on Wall Street have said this is the government’s problem, it's not for private industry to deal with. And now it’s clear the [federal] government won't do anything in the next four years to advance an energy transition. In fact it will work to undermine it in many cases.
During Trump's first term, when he pulled us out of Paris Agreement, you saw this fairly robust response from huge swathes of American society — thousands of big business and major companies signed onto it as well as many state and local governments. I think a key difference, from 2016 to 2020, is that there's a much broader understanding of climate-related financial risk, and a much broader understanding that a worsening climate is going to have very real impacts on the national and global economy. We see that most clearly with the insurability crisis right now, skyrocketing home insurance for millions of Americans.
Maybe these institutions feel emboldened to pursue immediate short term profits above all else. Or, perhaps reason may prevail.
I can’t say that I'm hopeful about reason prevailing. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a record, and nations are failing to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperatures from rising 1.5 Celsius.
Yeah, listen, you’re right. We’re not going to sit here and cross our fingers hoping that reason will prevail, I don't think that is a winning strategy. At Stop the Money Pipeline, we are focused on the financial sector. We know there are many stakeholders that banks care about. They care about the federal government, they are about regulations, but even with a climate denier in the White House, they care about shareholders, big institutional clients, and they care about everyday customers, their workers, their general reputations. And those are all levers we will work on to try to move banks like Citibank further and faster.
Citibank’s most valuable co-banking credit card is with Costco. And as a company that seems to care about social responsibility, [so] we’ve been running a campaign on Costco for a year. We have tens of thousands of Costco members behind the campaign, calling on Costco to use this leverage as the world’s third largest retailer to start taking into account its banking as part of its own climate plan, in the same way that a major company would regard decarbonizing its supply chain.
There are a lot of big companies but also non-governmental organizations, funders, and investors who really care about taking action on climate. We’re working to get more of those to push on banks, including but not limited to threatening to move their money. In the UK, 77 churches and major religious institutions wrote an open letter to Barclays saying they would move their money if it continues financing fossil fuel expansion. That builds on major civil society groups like Oxfam and Christian Aid doing the same.
We’re already at a stage where people and ecosystems are being dramatically impacted by the climate crisis. It’s never been whether we will stop it or not. It's always been a harm reduction effort. Every fraction of a degree matters.
The other thing that has really changed since 2020 is the economics of renewable energy. The growth of solar is far out pacing estimates by the International Energy Agency.
Can you explain how city and state governments may be prominent targets of your campaigning under Trump?
I think broadly for the climate movement it makes sense to win as much as we can there in the coming years, but more narrowly for Stop Money Pipeline, we have already identified a number of pieces of legislation we will support, and getting our supporters in different states to contact legislators to show up to lobby those bills.
In New York, the Insure Our Communities Act is looking to address the skyrocketing insurance costs New Yorkers are facing, as well as the fact that despite beginning to pull out of areas of the country, insurance companies are still making the climate crisis worse by underwriting and supporting new fossil fuel projects. There's also another to put together social and environmental criteria to guide the state when making decisions about working with banking partners, rewarding banks that have better climate policy. And a third bill related to getting companies to disclose climate and financial risk, similar bills that passed in California last year. There’s also a bill in Connecticut to place a surcharge on insurers making business deals with fossil fuel companies, which would then fund a state climate resilience and adaptation program.
Have there been any immediate outcomes from the Citibank protests? Related to that, any other successes?
Citibank announced it would stop project-level oil and gas financing in the Amazon. Which, over the past few years, had represented about 18% of their Amazonian oil and gas extraction. It’s a small and incremental step in the right direction we were pleased to see. We will be paying close attention once they release their numbers next year whether there was any decrease in its financing of fossil fuels over the course of 2024. And another small win toward the end of summer when Chubb, a big insurer, committed to not insuring the Rio Grande LNG export terminal [in South Texas].
Donald Trump has discussed using the military to crush protests. He also wants to see police less restrained. If the country is moving toward less tolerance for disruptive action, does that affect your strategy?
We are still figuring that out and not ready to share too much about our plans for 2025. But I will share a couple of things. l think that now is a good time to re-read Tim Schnyder’s On Tyranny. The first rule of resisting authoritarianism is to never voluntarily cede policial ground. We obviously want to go into disruptive campaigns with our eyes wide open to the political reality around us. I also think about how important courage is and will be in the coming years. Courage is not the absence of fear but sometimes being afraid, and it's ok to feel afraid and still do the right thing, whether that's resisting corporations barreling us to climate breakdown or resisting mass deportations or other attempts to erode our democracy.
Got a tip or a speaking request? Email aaronmiguelcantu@protonmail.com