NEW YORKER ARTICLE
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-t…>
by Bill McKibben
Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns
[image: McKibben-ClimateFinance2.jpg]
I'm skilled at eluding the fetal crouch of despair—because I’ve been
working on climate change for thirty years, I’ve learned to parcel out my
angst, to keep my distress under control. But, in the past few months, I’ve
more often found myself awake at night with true fear-for-your-kids
anguish. This spring, we set another high mark for carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere: four hundred and fifteen parts per million, higher than it has
been in many millions of years. The summer began with the hottest June ever
recorded, and then July became the hottest month ever recorded. The United
Kingdom, France, and Germany, which have some of the world’s oldest weather
records, all hit new high temperatures, and then the heat moved north,
until most of Greenland was melting and immense Siberian wildfires were
sending great clouds of carbon skyward. At the beginning of September,
Hurricane Dorian stalled above the Bahamas
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/03/dorians-horrific-eyewall-…>,
where it unleashed what one meteorologist called “the longest siege of
violent, destructive weather ever observed” on our planet. The scientific
warnings of three decades ago are the deadly heat advisories and
flash-flood alerts of the present, and, as for the future, we have hard
deadlines. Last fall, the world’s climate scientists said that, if we are
to meet the goals we set in the 2015 Paris climate accord—which would still
raise the mercury fifty per cent higher than it has already climbed—we’ll
essentially need to cut our use of fossil fuels in half by 2030 and
eliminate them altogether by mid-century. In a world of Trumps and Putins
and Bolsonaros and the fossil-fuel companies that back them, that seems
nearly impossible. It’s not *technologically* impossible: in the past
decade, the world’s engineers have dropped the price of solar and wind
power by ninety and seventy per cent, respectively. But we’re moving far
too slowly to exploit the opening for rapid change that this feat of
engineering offers. Hence the 2 *A.M.* dread.
There’s good news, too: as the crisis grows more obvious, far more people
are joining in the fight. In the year since the scientists imposed that
deadline, we’ve seen the rise of the Green New Deal
<https://www.newyorker.com/tag/green-new-deal>, the cheeky exploits of
Extinction Rebellion, and the global spread of the school strikes started
by the Swedish teen-ager Greta Thunberg
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-uncanny-power-of-greta-thu…>.
It seems that there are finally enough people to make an impact. The
question is, what levers can we pull that might possibly create change
within the time that we need it to happen?
Some of us have begun to change our own lives, pledging to fly less and to
eat lower on the food chain. But, whatever our intentions, we’re each of us
currently locked into burning a fair amount of fossil fuel: if there’s no
train that goes to your destination, you can’t take it. Others—actually,
often the same people—are working to elect greener candidates, lobbying to
pass legislation, litigating cases headed for the Supreme Court, or going
to jail to block the construction of pipelines.
These are all important efforts, but we need to do more, for the simple
reason that they may not pay off fast enough. Climate change is a timed
test, one of the first that our civilization has faced, and with each
scientific report the window narrows. By contrast, cultural change—what we
eat, how we live—often comes generationally. Political change usually
involves slow compromise, and that’s in a working system, not a
dysfunctional gridlock such as the one we now have in Washington. And,
since we face a planetary crisis, cultural and political change would have
to happen in every other major country, too.
But *what if there were an additional lever to pull, one that could work
both quickly and globally? One possibility relies on the idea that
political leaders are not the only powerful actors on the planet—that those
who hold most of the money also have enormous power, and that their power
could be exercised in a matter of months or even hours, not years or
decades. I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of carbon into the
atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to coal and oil and gas.*
Following the money isn’t a new idea. Seven years ago, 350.org (the climate
campaign that I co-founded, a decade ago, and still serve as a senior
adviser) helped launch a global movement to persuade the managers of
college endowments, pension funds, and other large pots of money to sell
their stock in fossil-fuel companies. It has become the largest such
campaign in history: funds worth more than eleven trillion dollars have
divested some or all of their fossil-fuel holdings. And it has been
effective: when Peabody Energy, the largest American coal company, filed
for bankruptcy, in 2016, it cited divestment as one of the pressures
weighing on its business, and, this year, Shell called divestment a
“material adverse effect” on its performance. The divestment campaign has
brought home the starkest fact of the global-warming era: that the industry
has in its reserves five times as much carbon as the scientific consensus
thinks we can safely burn. The pressure has helped cost the industry much
of its social license; one religious institution after another has divested
from oil and gas, and Pope Francis has summoned industry executives to the
Vatican to tell them that they must leave carbon underground. But this,
too, seems to be happening in too-slow motion. The fossil-fuel industry may
be going down, but it’s going down fighting. Which makes sense, because
it’s the fossil-fuel industry—it really only knows how to do one thing.
*So now consider extending the logic of the divestment fight one ring out,
from the fossil-fuel companies to the financial system that supports them.
Consider a bank like, say, JPMorgan Chase, which is America’s largest bank
and the world’s most valuable by market capitalization.* In the three years
since the end of the Paris climate talks, Chase has reportedly committed a
hundred and ninety-six billion dollars in financing for the fossil-fuel
industry, much of it to fund extreme new ventures: ultra-deep-sea drilling,
Arctic oil extraction, and so on. In each of those years, ExxonMobil, by
contrast, spent less than three billion dollars on exploration, research,
and development. A hundred and ninety-six billion dollars is larger than
the *market value* of BP; it dwarfs that of the coal companies or the
frackers. By this measure, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is an
oil, coal, and gas baron almost without peer.
But here’s the thing: fossil-fuel financing accounts for only about seven
per cent of Chase’s lending and underwriting. The bank lends to everyone
else, too—to people who build bowling alleys and beach houses and
breweries. And, if the world were to switch decisively to solar and wind
power, Chase would lend to renewable-energy companies, too. Indeed, it
already does, though on a much smaller scale. (A spokesperson for Chase
said that the bank has committed to facilitate two hundred billion dollars
in “clean” financing by 2025, but did not specify where the money will go.
The bank also pointed out that it has installed 2,570 solar panels at
branches in California and New Jersey.) The same is true of the
asset-management and insurance industries: without them, the fossil-fuel
companies would almost literally run out of gas, but BlackRock and Chubb
could survive without their business. It’s possible to imagine these
industries, given that the world is now in existential danger, quickly
jettisoning their fossil-fuel business. It’s not *easy* to
imagine—capitalism is not noted for surrendering sources of revenue. But,
then, the Arctic ice sheet is not noted for melting.
The last minutes of a football game are different from the rest; if you are
far enough behind, you dispense with caution. Since gaining a few yards
cannot help you, you resort to more desperate, lower-percentage plays. You
heave the ball and you hope, and, every once in a while, you win. So a
small group of activists has begun probing the financial industry, looking
for chances to toss the kind of Hail Mary pass that could yet win this
game. The odds are definitely long, but just talking with these groups has
begun to lift my despair.
Banking
Around the turn of the century, a California-based environmental group
called *Rainforest Action Network (RAN) was trying to figure out how to
slow down the deforestation of the Amazon. It found that Citigroup, then
the largest bank on earth, was lending to many of the projects that cut
down trees for pastureland, and so it ran a campaign that featured
celebrities cutting up their Citi credit cards. Eventually, Citigroup
joined with other banks to set up the Equator Principles, which the
participants call a “risk management framework” designed to limit the most
devastating lending.*
At some point in the campaign, *RAN* started paying twenty-four thousand
dollars annually to rent a Bloomberg terminal, the financial-information
monitor that sits on any broker’s desk, allowing her to track stock prices,
bond issues, and deals of every type. “Our Bloomberg rep is always
flabbergasted when he visits us,” Alison Kirsch, a climate-and-energy
researcher with *RAN*, told me. “Essentially, we use it backwards.” The
terminal will spit out the current league tables, which rank loan volume:
showing, for example, which banks are lending the most money to railroad
builders or to copper miners—or to fossil-fuel companies. “The banks all
want to be at the top of those tables,” Kirsch said. “It’s how they keep
score.” But *RAN* turns the tables upside down. Every year, after six
months of detailed analysis, it publishes a thick report called “Banking on
Climate Change,” which ranks the financial giants according to how much
damage they’re doing.
This year’s edition, the tenth, shows Chase in the lead, as usual, followed
by Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America. Two Japanese banks and the
British giant Barclays are also among the top ten, but it’s mostly a North
American club—three Canadian banks round out the list. And the trend is
remarkable: in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate
accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels,
the banks’ lending to the industry has increased every year, and much of
the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development. In the
lead-up to the Paris talks, a team of scientists published a big paper in
*Nature* that listed the planet’s most catastrophic deposits of
hydrocarbons, the ones that should be left in the ground at all costs. It
included Arctic oil and the tar-sands sludge found in northern Alberta;
Chase has aggressively funded the extraction of both. According to *RAN*,
the bank’s largest single energy-sector client is TC Energy (until recently
known as Transcanada), which is trying to build the Keystone XL pipeline,
which would stretch from the tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico—a project that
President Obama rejected and that the *NASA* scientist James Hansen said
would be the start of a “game over” scenario for the climate. (Chase would
not comment.) *Jason Opeña Disterhoft, RAN’s senior campaigner, told me,
“It’s a climate moment. We’re in a process, as a society, of naming the
actors most responsible for driving the climate crisis, and banks are
absolutely on that list. And Chase—they’re No. 1 with a bullet, right at
the top of the list of who should be held accountable.”*
So what would happen if, tomorrow, Chase announced that it was going to
phase out lending to the fossil-fuel industry—probably first by restricting
loans for particular projects, and then by ending general corporate lending
and banning the underwriting of new debt and equity for fossil-fuel
companies? “Wells Fargo and Citi would follow within days,” according to
Tim Buckley, a former managing director at Citi, who now serves as the
director of energy-finance studies for Australasia at the Institute for
Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (I.E.E.F.A.), a Cleveland-based
nonprofit research group. In fact, “they’d look to go one step further, so
as to pretend they weren’t really sheep. And this would have global
ramifications—the music would stop, very suddenly.” Wall Street, Buckley
said, “can be very deaf to warnings for years, but the financial-market
lemmings will suddenly act in unison” once the biggest players send a
signal. Everyone knows that the fossil-fuel era will come to an end sooner
or later; a giant bank pulling back would send an unmistakable signal that
it will be sooner. The biggest oil companies might still be able to
self-finance their continuing operations, but “the pure-play frackers will
find finance impossible,” Buckley said. “Coal-dependent rail carriers and
port owners and coal-mine contracting firms will all be hit.”
Done badly, this halt could wreak chaos: the governor of the Bank of
England, Mark Carney, warned four years ago that the “stranded assets”—the
coal, gas, and oil that need to be left underground—amount to a
twenty-trillion-dollar “carbon bubble” that far exceeds the housing bubble
that sparked the 2008 financial conflagration. Carney has been diligently
trying to deflate the bubble ever since, in hopes of avoiding another
crisis. That’s why it might make sense for Chase and the others to first
announce that they were ending loans for the *expansion* of the fossil-fuel
industry, while continuing to extend credit for ongoing operations. “If
Chase does what we’re asking for and other banks follow,” Alison Kirsch
said, “the impacts of that social signal would be significant immediately,
while the economic impacts from transitioning off of fossil fuels would
happen over time.”
And it must be said that, even if bursting this bubble did short-term
damage to the economy, that damage would pale next to the kind of wreckage
forecast for the planet if the fossil-fuel industry continues on its
current path for another decade. Even in economic terms, twenty trillion
dollars is paltry compared with the sums that experts now think unabated
global warming would consume. At the moment, the planet is on track to warm
more than three degrees Celsius by century’s end, which one recent study
found would do five hundred and fifty-one trillion dollars in damage.
That’s more money than currently exists on the planet.
Is there any chance that Chase might halt its fossil-fuel lending? Perhaps
not. The bank grew into a global giant under the leadership of David
Rockefeller, the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, who established the
country’s original oil fortune, by founding the Standard Oil Company, one
of whose successor companies is ExxonMobil. For many years, the Chase
board’s lead director has been Lee Raymond, who served as the C.E.O. of
Exxon during the years when it was working hardest to cast doubt on the
reality of global warming. (In 1997, Raymond gave an infamous speech, in
Beijing, in which he claimed that the planet was probably cooling, and
that, in any event, it was “highly unlikely that the temperature in the
middle of the next century will be affected whether policies are enacted
now or twenty years from now.”) However, in 2016, the Rockefeller Family
Fund announced that it would divest from fossil fuels, singling out Exxon’s
conduct as being “morally reprehensible” and adding that “we must keep most
of the already discovered reserves in the ground if there is any hope for
human and natural ecosystems to survive and thrive in the decades ahead.”
The director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, Lee Wasserman, says that *it’s
time to take on the reputations of the bankers, in much the same way that
the Sackler family
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empi…>
has increasingly been shunned for its role in the opioid crisis. “When the
neighborhood tavern serves up several rounds to an already drunken patron,
and the inebriated person rams into a minivan loaded with Little Leaguers,
it’s not only a tragedy—the bar may be sued out of business, and the
bartender could face jail time,” he said. “How much morally worse is it to
enable the expansion of a deadly fossil-fuel industry, whose business model
is certain to cause the death and suffering of millions of people and the
loss of much of the earth’s diversity? Big, sophisticated banks such as
Chase and Wells Fargo understand climate science and know that our current
path is leading towards climate catastrophe. Yet their machine of finance
cranks along.”*
Some activists have begun to envision a campaign to pressure the banks.
Chase’s retail business is a huge part of its enterprise, as is the case
with Citi, Wells Fargo, and the others. “One of the major risk factors
going forward for these guys is generational,” Disterhoft said. “You have a
rising generation of consumers and potential employees that cares a lot
about climate, and they’re going to be choosing who they do business with
factoring that into account.” In 2017, when Twitter-based activists accused
Uber of exploiting Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, rather than protesting
it, it took just hours for downloads of the Lyft app to surge, for the
first time, past those of the Uber app. Switching banks is harder, but,
given the volume of credit-card solicitations that show up in the average
mailbox every year, probably not much.
A few of the big European banks have begun taking steps away from fossil
fuels already. In June, the French giant Crédit Agricole announced a change
that Disterhoft calls the “gold standard to date”: the bank said that it
would no longer do business with companies that are expanding their coal
operations, and that, by 2021, its coal-business clients in the developed
world would have to produce a plan for getting out of the business by 2030;
its clients in China by 2040; and its clients everywhere else by 2050.
BankTrack, an N.G.O. headquartered in the Netherlands, called the
announcement a “welcome first step,” and, indeed, the restrictions have
clearly begun to bite. In late June, an Indonesian power-company executive
said, “European banks have said they don’t want to finance coal projects
for a while. Japanese followed and now Singapore. About eighty-five per
cent of the market now don’t want to finance coal-power plants.” He added,
“Coal-power-plant financing is very challenging.” According to the
I.E.E.F.A.’s Buckley, Crédit Agricole’s move helps explain why, for
instance, Vietnam, which was supposed to be a key market for new coal-fired
power plants, instead grew its “solar base tenfold in the twelve months to
June, 2019.” At this point, the coal business is already on its heels, so
campaigners are increasingly focussed on gas and oil, but C.A.’s move shows
that big, quick shifts are possible.
Asset Management
Every year, Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, writes a letter to the
C.E.O.s of the companies in which his company invests. This year, his
letter was about capitalism with a “purpose.” Along with making a profit,
he counselled, the C.E.O.s should be running their businesses to help
“address pressing social and economic issues.” Given that the rapid heating
of the planet would seem to meet that criteria, some have suggested that
Fink should look at his own operation; BlackRock is the world’s largest
investor in coal companies, coal-fired utilities, oil and gas companies,
and companies driving deforestation. No one else is trying as diligently to
make money off the destruction of the planet.
And no one else has as powerful a remedy at hand. Most of the money that
pension funds and endowments and individuals invest at BlackRock goes into
passive funds, which track a stock-market index, rather than trying to beat
the averages. BlackRock, in essence, just buys the market. If the firm
simply decided to exclude fossil-fuel stocks from its main funds—or if it
even just decided to underweight the stocks—it would send a message like no
other. (According to the I.E.E.F.A., it would also produce better returns
for its clients. A study
<http://ieefa.org/ieefa-report-blackrocks-fossil-fuel-investments-wipe-us90-…>
that the group published in early August notes that BlackRock investors
lost ninety billion dollars over the past decade by staying heavily
invested in fossil fuels, even as that sector dramatically underperformed
compared to the rest of the market.)
The firm couldn’t make this change it overnight. Casey Harrell, a senior
campaigner at the Australia-based Sunrise Project—a nonprofit that
coördinates a campaign called BlackRock’s Big Problem, which aims to
pressure the firm to change its investing strategy—concedes that BlackRock
simply holds too much stock: nine per cent of BP, seven per cent of Exxon.
“If they had to sell it all at once, they’d get a bad price, and that would
open them to legal exposure. But five years is absolutely doable,” Harrell
told me. Tom Sanzillo, the finance director at the I.E.E.F.A., told me that
he made just that suggestion at this year’s BlackRock shareholders’
meeting, in Manhattan. Sanzillo is not a rain-forest activist or a typical
climate campaigner; he is a rumpled sixty-four-year-old veteran of the
finance industry, who once served as the acting comptroller in charge of
New York State’s two-hundred-billion-dollar pension fund. Here’s his
account of what would happen if BlackRock decided to take an aggressive
stand and announce that it would slowly start to exclude fossil-fuel stocks
from the basket of equities in its biggest funds: “The stock market would
react by driving oil- and gas-stock prices down for both private companies
and those state-owned enterprises on the stock market to new
lows—institutional investors would understand that continued investment in
the fossil-fuel sector meant more volatility, lower returns, and negative
future outlook.”
The sell-off in fossil-fuel stocks would be only half the story, though,
Sanzillo says. Money would instead pour into renewable energy, and, since
solar and wind power will be increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels, that
shift would, in turn, “prompt substantial gains economy-wide, with
manufacturing and other energy-intensive stock prices increasing.” The
public-finance desks at every major bank in the world would issue
economic-outlook alerts for every country whose economy depends on
producing fossil fuels. Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela,
Australia, and Canada would risk seeing their bonds downgraded. But
four-fifths of the world’s population lives in nations that currently pay
to import fossil fuels, and their economies would benefit, as ample
financing would allow them to transition relatively quickly to low-cost
solar and wind power. It wouldn’t just be a market signal, Sanzillo said;
it would be a “glaring red rocket,” a signal that the “fossil-fuel industry
has the wind in its face and been kicked in the ass.” How large would that
signal be? The assets under BlackRock’s management are worth nearly seven
trillion dollars, making it, by some measures, the third-largest economy on
earth, after the United States and China, and ahead of Japan.
If the damage to BlackRock’s core business from fossil-fuel divestment
would be manageable—how many people are going to go out of their way to
demand some climate destruction in their passive index funds, after
all?—why isn’t the company already moving (and Vanguard and Fidelity and
State Street with it)? BlackRock grew to its mammoth size in the years
after the financial crisis, in part because it wasn’t designated by the
government as a “systematically important financial institution,” and so it
was spared some of the regulation that big investment houses loathe. That,
obviously, could change. And Harrell referred me to a 2017 report from
50/50 Climate, an N.G.O. now called Climate Majority, which noted that, as
of 2015, BlackRock handled the pension and other welfare funds for BP,
Exxon, and Chevron, earning millions of dollars in fees. “You can imagine
the impact on that business if BlackRock started marketing fossil-free
funds as the default option,” he said.
BlackRock’s corporate-communications department would not confirm if the
company handles those pension funds. But a spokesperson pointed out that
customers, if they so choose, can already buy “no-carbon, low-carbon, and
energy-transition investments,” which currently make up forty-four billion
dollars, less than one per cent of BlackRock’s business. Company
representatives also offer a wonderfully circular defense: a spokesperson
said that BlackRock holds investments only in funds that “our clients
choose to invest in.” He added, “Our obligation as an asset manager and a
fiduciary is to manage our clients’ assets consistent with their investment
priorities.” So the customers buy the product; BlackRock is just the
middleman. Which is true, but there’s no reason that BlackRock couldn’t
construct its own index, and market it in such a way as to make a
fossil-free fund the default option for investors. It’s as if the firm were
saying, The buffet at our restaurant has always included arsenic. It’s part
of what makes it a buffet. But wouldn’t it be a nicer restaurant if you
actually had to go out of your way to order the arsenic?
That’s what Amundi, one of Europe’s largest asset-management funds, has
decided to do. Earlier this year, it committed to phasing out coal stocks
from its passive index (along with investments in chemical and biological
weapons and cluster bombs). As climate concerns grow, the pressure for
American companies to do likewise, and to extend the ban to oil and gas,
will also mount. In January, for instance, the Yes Men satire collective
released a hoax version of Fink’s annual letter to C.E.O.s, the day before
the real one was due to be released. “Within 5 years, more than 90% of our
1000+ investment products will be converted to screen out non-Paris
compliant companies such as coal, oil, and gas, which we see as declining
and endangered,” the fake letter said. What’s interesting was how
believable the idea was—even the *Financial Times* tweeted out the “news.”
And why not? If you think about it for a moment—just as a person, not as a
cynical and knowing sophisticate—why *would* anyone invest in companies
that can’t even meet the modest commitments we made at Paris?
Insurance
In some ways, the insurance industry resembles the banks and the asset
managers: it controls a huge pool of money and routinely invests enormous
sums in the fossil-fuel industry. Consider, though, two interesting traits
that set insurance apart.
The first is, it knows better. Insurance companies are the part of our
economy that we ask to understand risk, the ones with the data to really
see what is happening as the climate changes, and for decades they’ve been
churning out high-quality research establishing just how bad the crisis
really is. “Insurers were among the first to sound the alarm,” Elana
Sulakshana, a *RAN* campaigner who helps coördinate the Insure Our Future
campaign for a consortium made up mostly of small environmental groups,
told me. “As far back as the nineteen-seventies, they saw it as a risk.” In
2005, for instance, Swiss Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company,
sponsored a study at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, at
Harvard Medical School. The report predicted that, as storms and flooding
became more common, they would “overwhelm the adaptive capacities of even
developed nations” and large areas and sectors would “become uninsurable;
major investments collapse; and markets crash.” As a result of cascading
climate catastrophes, the day would come when “parts of developed nations
would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods.” In
April, Evan Greenberg, the C.E.O. of Chubb, the world’s largest publicly
traded property and casualty insurer, said in his annual statement to
shareholders that, thanks to climate change, the weather had become “almost
Biblical” and that “given the long-term threat and the short-term nature of
politics, the failure of policy makers to address climate change, including
these issues and the costs of living in or near high-risk areas, is an
existential threat.” To its credit, Chubb soon took a step that no other
big U.S. insurer has managed, and announced that it was restricting
insurance and investments in coal companies. But it still invests heavily
in oil and gas, and so does virtually every other major insurance company.
The second thing that makes insurance companies unique is that they don’t
just provide money; they provide insurance. If you want to build a
tar-sands pipeline or a coal-fired power plant or a liquefied-natural-gas
export terminal, you need to get an insurance company to underwrite the
plan. Otherwise, no one in his right mind would invest in it. “You can’t
even survey a pipeline route without some kind of insurance,” said Ross
Hammond, a senior strategist with the Sunrise Project, which began looking
at the insurance industry in 2016, while fighting plans for an Australian
coal mine. “If you have a crew in the field, they need to be covered,
Hammond said. “They break their ankle, they’re going to sue somebody.”
*The insurance industry, in other words, has become the perfect embodiment
of the axiom, attributed to Lenin, that “the last capitalist we hang shall
be the one who sold us the rope.”* (In fact, for a price, it would protect
you against the risk that the rope might break.) James Maguire, before he
joined a renewable-energy investment and advisory firm, spent the past
quarter century as an insurance broker, much of that time in Hong Kong,
where he led teams arranging reinsurance for vast fossil-fuel power plants.
There’s no way they can be built without insurers, he explained: “You want
to build a power plant in Vietnam? We’d get a lead insurer in Vietnam, and
then arrange the reinsurance behind it. You could have twenty different
companies involved.” And if a bunch of those companies, in essence, were to
go on strike, refusing to underwrite new fossil-fuel projects? “Things
would absolutely slow,” he said. “A project is typically not bankable until
it is insurable.” Just as Exxon might be able to survive without bank
financing, and might be able to buy back its shares if BlackRock put them
on the market, it and a few other giant companies might be able to
self-insure their ventures. But “it would absolutely create a more
challenging financial process,” Maguire said. Insurance is so ingrained in
our economy that it could work the same trick from many different
angles—Mark Campanale, who directs the London think tank Carbon Tracker
Initiative, says that just limiting the standard indemnity policies that
cover a company’s officers and directors, to exclude coverage for those who
don’t take climate change seriously, would be a big step. Insurance implies
caution—but, in a rapidly deteriorating world, our only chance may be bold
action. “There was five feet of hail in Guadalajara ten days ago,” Maguire
said, when we spoke in July. “No company had a model that predicted that.”
Alec Connon is a soft-spoken Scotsman in his early thirties, who left home
to shear sheep in New Zealand, and then went to Canada, to plant trees,
before settling down in Seattle, where he has become a stalwart of the
climate movement in the Pacific Northwest. (He is a leader of the local
affiliate of 350.org.) He’s fought the construction of natural-gas
terminals and has sat on railroad tracks to block oil trains. In 2016, he
joined a flotilla of “kayaktivists” who blockaded a giant oil rig that
Shell hoped would open the Arctic to oil drilling—a fight that ended in
victory for the activists, late that year, when Shell announced it was
withdrawing from the region.
Since the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline erupted, at the Standing
Rock Reservation, in 2016, Connon has been focussed on the role of the
banks that underwrite such projects. Working closely with indigenous-led
groups, such as Mazaska Talks (Lakota for “Money Talks”), he helped launch
one of the first campaigns to encourage consumers and communities to switch
banks. Seattle—with plenty of money and plenty of environmentalists—has
been a natural testing ground for such efforts. Two years ago, the groups
organized their first civil disobedience, shutting down thirteen Chase
branches for the better part of a day, with everything from pray-ins to
picnics with live music. Last December, they laid a giant inflatable
pipeline through the lobby of Chase’s Northwest headquarters and staged a
black-clad human “oil spill”; in May, ten roaming “affinity groups” shut
down each of the forty-four Chase branches in the city for a few hours.
“We worried at first that it might be a cognitive leap for people,” Connon
said. “That it wouldn’t be as clear to people as going directly at the
fossil-fuel companies. But that’s not been my experience on the ground.
It’s pretty clear. You can tell the story in one sentence: they’re funding
the fossil-fuel industry, which is wrecking the planet.” In fact, he says,
it’s easier to take on the whole issue than small parts of it: “We’ve found
it much easier to talk about fossil fuels in general, not coal or
particular projects.” Could the idea scale? “Every town has a bank,” he
pointed out, not to mention an insurance agent and a stockbroker. “If you
could protest at forty-four Chase branches, you could do it at all five
thousand across the country.
It’s all but impossible for most of us to stop using fossil fuels
immediately, especially since, in many places, the fossil-fuel and utility
industries have made it difficult and expensive to install solar panels on
your roof. But *it’s both simple and powerful to switch your bank account:
local credit unions and small-town banks are unlikely to be invested in
fossil fuels, and Beneficial State Bank and Amalgamated Bank bring
fossil-free services to the West and East Coasts, respectively, while
Aspiration Bank offers them online. (And they’re all connected to A.T.M.s.)*
This all could, in fact, become one of the final great campaigns of the
climate movement—a way to focus the concerted power of any person, city,
and institution with a bank account, a retirement fund, or an insurance
policy on the handful of institutions that could actually change the game.
We are indeed in a climate moment—people’s fear is turning into anger, and
that anger could turn fast and hard on the financiers. If it did, it
wouldn’t end the climate crisis: we still have to pass the laws that would
actually cut the emissions, and build out the wind farms and solar panels.
Financial institutions can help with that work, but their main usefulness
lies in helping to break the power of the fossil-fuel companies.
Most of the N.G.O.s already at work taking on the banks and insurers, which
include many indigenous-led and grassroots groups, are small; often they’ve
had no choice but to focus their efforts on trying to block particular
projects. (The vast Adani coal mine planned for eastern Australia has been
a particular test, and at this point most of the world’s major banks and
insurers have publicly announced that they’ll steer clear of involvement.)
Imagine, instead, this financial fight becoming a fulcrum of the
environmental-justice battle.
Even if that happened, victory is far from guaranteed. Persuading giant
financial firms to give up even small parts of their business would be
close to unprecedented. And inertia is a powerful force—there are whole
teams of people in each of these firms who have spent years learning the
fossil-fuel industry inside and out, so that they can lend, trade, and
underwrite efficiently and profitably. Those people would have to learn
about solar power, or electric cars. That would be hard, in the same way
that it’s hard for coal miners to retrain to become solar-panel installers.
But we’re all going to have to change—that’s the point. Farmers around the
world are leaving their land because the sea is rising; droughts are
already creating refugees by the millions. On the spectrum of shifts that
the climate crisis will require, bankers and investors and insurers have it
easy. A manageably small part of their business needs to disappear, to be
replaced by what comes next. No one should actually be a master of the
universe. But, *for the moment, the financial giants are the masters of our
planet. Perhaps we can make them put that power to use. Fast.*
-
Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the
grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished
Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His latest
book is “Falter:
Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250178266/?tag=thneyo0f-20>”
William V. DePaulo, Esq.
860 Court Street North, Suite 300
Lewisburg, WV 24901
Tel 304-342-5588
Fax 866-850-1501
william.depaulo(a)gmail.com