Rocking Chairs Against Climate Change?
Big Banks Fund an Increasingly Dystopian Future
Step away from waiting for indictments to drop in New York for a moment. Those are about the past, and we can only hope at this point that justice is served. (Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty to say when it happens)
There’s stuff happening today focused on the future, namely the role banks play in enabling the carbon-dependent economy.
At more than 90 locations around the country, climate activists across the US organized a blockade of bank branches that finance fossil fuels, cutting up their credit cards in protest and holding rallies featuring everything from flash mobs to papier-mache orca whales.
What’s different about these protests is the leadership and involvement of older Americans. In a nod to the advancing age of these baby boomers, rocking chairs were included in the arsenal of protest tactics. People occupying those chairs easily have been marching on the first Earth Day in 1970,
The Guardian reports:
“So far the kids have had to do all of the work and they’ve done an amazing job but it’s not fair to ask 18-year-olds to solve this problem,” said Bill McKibben, the veteran climate campaigner who co-founded the Third Act group last year, which is designated for people aged over 60. The group has gathered momentum, attracting more than 50,000 members and recently holding a test-run protest in New York City, where participants marched under a banner reading “fossils against fossil fuels”.
“Older people have got money and structural power coming out of our ears,” said McKibben, who is 62. “We have to show young people we have their back. I’m going to be dead before the climate crisis is at its absolute worst, but being nearer the exit than the entrance concentrates one’s mind to notions of legacy and we are the first generation to leave the world in a worse place than we found it.
“I understand why people say ‘OK boomer’ – it’s not like we have done an amazing job in protecting the world.”
I haven’t found any reports about IDs being checked to make sure no Greta Thunberg-types infiltrate the protests, but I’m sure if somebody at Fox News thinks it happened, Tucker Carlson and the lot will be talking about it tonight.
Climate consciousness and the drive to respect the planet have become a centerpiece of right wing culture wars, right along with drag queens, honest history, and controlling women’s bodies. The code word for this obstruction is “ESG” (investor environmental, social and governance considerations). Many companies have included claims about their awareness of environmental and social issues in foundational documents to appeal to a diverse range of potential investors. The practice is so widespread (and abused) that many social justice advocates dismiss these claims as “greenwashing.”
Regardless, opportunist politicos have lumped ESGs in with the grab bag of things they believe are keeping America from being great again.
Last week, the governors of 18 Republican-led states, including the Florida governor and presumed presidential contender Ron DeSantis, jointly condemning the “proliferation of ESG throughout America” that is “putting investment decisions in the hands of the woke mob”.
DeSantis has, without evidence, blamed the fall of Silicon Valley Bank on its diversity initiatives “and politics and all kinds of stuff”, leading a concerted Republican effort to paint financial institutions as being in thrall to progressive priorities in the form of ESG. Marlo Oaks, the Republican state treasurer of Utah, said last week that ESG was part of “Satan’s plan”.
Nothing has forced companies to adopt ESGs; they grew out of consumer demand along with growing evidence of extreme weather events as a threat to facilities. Insurance companies for Floridians didn’t need ESGs to raise rates, huge payouts due to water damage drove the decision.
The party of free market economics no longer needs facts to justify its stances. They’ve just become the “anti” party.
Republicans don’t have an exclusive franchise when it comes to political pragmatism driven by the power of Dirty Energy. President Biden’s go ahead for the Willow Project recently will enable the $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from pristine federal land in Alaska.
From the New York Times:
The burning of oil produced by the Willow project would cause 280 million metric tons of carbon emissions, according to a federal analysis. On an annual basis, that would translate into 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution, equal to adding nearly two million cars to the roads each year. The United States, the second-biggest polluter on the planet after China, emits about 5.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.
A key factor was the widespread support Willow enjoyed from lawmakers of both parties, including Mary Peltola, a Democrat and the state’s first Alaska Native elected to Congress; labor unions; and most Indigenous groups in Alaska.
In 2021 the Biden administration defended a Trump-era decision to allow the Willow project to go forward. Last year, it issued a new draft environmental statement that signaled support for Willow and in February, a federal analysis telegraphed that the administration would look for ways to approve a limited version of the project.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, has published a report updating understanding of ways in which the planet is changing.
The 1.5 degree celsius ((2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels )threshold set in the past decade as the marker for danger is set to be passed in the first half of the next decade.
There is one last chance to shift course, according to the report. Industrialized nations would need to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gasses roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s.
From the New York Times:
“It’s not that if we go past 1.5 degrees everything is lost,” said Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. “But there’s clear evidence that 1.5 is better than 1.6, which is better than 1.7, and so on. The point is we need to do everything we can to keep warming as low as possible.”
Scientists say that warming will largely halt once humans stop adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, a concept known as “net zero” emissions. How quickly nations reach net zero will determine how hot the planet ultimately becomes. Under the current policies of national governments, Earth is on pace to heat up by 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius this century, analysts have estimated.
The general public is becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of continuing to put carbon-based pollution into the atmosphere, according to a report from Yale University.
The “alarmed” share of Americans has more than doubled in the past decade, while those unconcerned or unbelieving has fallen below one third of the population.
This explains who the righties are including climate awareness in their cultural war agenda. When something like fossil fuel use becomes increasingly unpopular, they want to change the name of the subject.
So far, lumping ESGs into their “anti-woke” ideological bundles hasn’t proved to be effective. Their only hope of delivering relief to their fossil fuel funders is to hope for the minority of voters under their sway to be more motivated to vote. (That’s why the drag queen issue is at the top of their dance card).
Here in San Diego, activists associated with SanDiego350, Third Act SoCal, Sierra Club, Climate Action Campaign, and others organized a rally and march downtown to tell Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citibank to STOP business as usual, I hope they brought their umbrellas.
It’s one thing to be concerned about climate change, and another to do something about it. San Diego 350 maintains an activist calendar with activities designed to appeal to a broad range of the citizenry. Check it our at: https://sdclimatenetwork.org/calendar/
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Lead image via ZhaoZhou Dai @The Scope