Climate finance campaigns have been gaining momentum for years, with nationwide street protests, bank branch occupations and civil disobedience actions at bank headquarters becoming social media staples. But the movement is now entering a new phase of finance campaigning. Fossil finance campaigners are engaging directly with companies, working to organize employees, rallying customers to engage with their banks and disrupting banks’ recruitment efforts.
This spring, socially responsible investors with ties to the climate movement filed shareholder resolutions at the six largest U.S. banks — Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — demanding that they stop providing financing for companies expanding fossil fuel operations. Resolutions were also filed at several banks calling for no financing of projects that have not received Free, Prior, and Informed consent from the Indigenous people whose land the projects are being built upon. These resolutions particularly target the financing of pipelines through Indigenous land and watersheds, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL and Line 3.
Shareholder resolutions are non-binding, but they send a clear signal to the banks about how their investors think they should be conducting their business. It’s a new but promising front in the campaign to get financial institutions to walk their own talk on climate.
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