Big Banks Are Helping Big Oil Kill the Planet

To say climate scientists are being ignored is an understatement. The planet is sliding past 1.5 degrees Celsius of heating. Heat waves and crop failures are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and rainforests are passing tipping points. For half a century, scientists have issued increasingly urgent warnings to stop burning fossil fuels. But even as climate chaos unfolds as predicted, or even faster than predicted, fossil fuel profiteers are doubling down.

Carbon dioxide is still accumulating in the atmosphere at a roughly exponential rate, with 2022-2024 being the largest two-year increase on record. If world leaders and fossil fuel executives continue to recklessly increase fossil fuel production, human civilization will—at some point—collapse. Billions of lives, all of humanity’s fondest hopes and dreams for the future, and most of life on Earth is at risk.

Climate scientists have testified before Congress, written thousands of papers and reports, and spoken in the bluntest language we know. We’re now even getting arrested for civil disobedience in record numbers. But last year, fossil fuel corporations invested more than $500 billion to develop new reserves. And financing from banks was the key to this irresponsible growth.

Since the Paris Agreement in 2016, the world’s 60 largest banks have provided almost $7 trillion of financing to the fossil fuel industry. That’s a lot of money running directly counter to breezy “net-zero” promises by these mega-banks. In a similar way that airlines disingenuously push biofuels and carbon offsets, banks dangle vague language like “transition to sustainable business models” and false solutions like carbon capture to distract, deflect, and keep the money pipeline flowing. Increasingly, they aren’t even bothering with greenwashing.

We have arrived at a dystopian moment. The Supreme Court‘s Citizens United ruling handed corporations nearly unlimited power to influence politics, equating money with speech and corporations with people. Billionaires have largely taken over the mainstream media. The New York Times creates and runs infomercials for fossil fuel corporations. Governments everywhere are ramping up punishments to silence climate activists. Fossil fuel executives testifying in front of Congress brazenly refuse to stop funding climate disinformation and tell packed rooms that the world “should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

The corporate executive class and the politicians in their pay have made it clear they won’t voluntarily give up wealth or power for the sake of stopping irreversible global heating. But we can’t allow a small number of humans to steal our future and threaten life on Earth.

We need more lawsuits taking on fossil fuel corporations and the governments that fail to regulate them. We need more protest and more civil disobedience. With billions of human lives and a mass extinction at stake, I believe we even need more non-violent fossil fuel sabotage. We need more and spicier activism, and huge numbers of activists taking risks and filling every conceivable role.

I have been arrested for protesting at a JPMorgan Chase branch and for blockading a private jet terminal with the group Scientist Rebellion. I have confronted the man who signed off on the Willow Project on the streets with the group Climate Defiance. And I will be supporting a sustained campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience that kicks off this week in New York City, involving more than 95 climate and racial justice groups.

The Summer of Heat on Wall Street will primarily target Citigroup. In response to the first day of protests, Citi released a statement claiming they are “supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy.” However, this is the sort of bald-faced corporate lie that could cost us our planet: Citi is, the single biggestworst financierfunder of fossil fuel expansion since the Paris Agreementfrom 2016 to 2023, and, along with JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, one of the top three financiers of fossil fuels in the world. Our demand is for Citigroup to simply stop financing oil, coal, and gas projects, and to finance solutions such as renewable energy instead.

There’s a good chance we can win: In the past, activists have successfully pressured Barclays and HSBC to divest from fossil fuels, and Citi’s new CEO, Jane Fraser, says she cares about climate change. Today, I will help hand-deliver a letter to her from more than 750 scientists, urging her to stop financing new fossil fuel projects, for the sake of us all.

At its essence, civil disobedience is a form of communication. This is something that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood when he argued from his Birmingham jail cell that the whole purpose of civil disobedience is to bring injustices to the surface of society where they can be confronted and addressed. Now, more than ever, we need to bring the climate emergency to the surface of society, where it can be confronted and addressed.

I invite you to join us, at any level of risk tolerance. In my experience, and in the experience of many other climate activists I know, civil disobedience ishas been a very effective way to create social change. And a big change is happening: a transition from a profit-above-life, colonial-extractivist, genocidal mindset, to a loving, sharing, interconnected mindset. It feels deeply meaningful—even joyful—to be a part of this movement and to stand on the right side of history. I invite you to join us, any way you can.

Dr. Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at NASA studying future extreme heat impacts on human health and ecosystems, speaking on his own behalf. He is also a climate activist and the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.