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.
Photo: Reuters
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,” he added.
Oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, Amazon and seabed alongside thermal power plants, coal mines and liquid natural gas plants have received more than US$6.9 trillion from banks since 2016.
Last year, the world’s 60 largest banks committed US$750 billion to fossil fuels, according to a report by non-governmental organizations Rainforest Action Network, Reclaim Finance and others.
Finance is one of the planks underpinning polluting energy alongside government permits and insurance to guarantee the projects.
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 US$396.3 billion on coal, oil and gas,” the report said.
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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver