When Ricky Gonzalez began organizing pro-Palestine protests in New York City this year, he didn’t expect that work would eventually lead him to the glass doors of Citigroup’s headquarters.
It was a breezy July morning when the 29-year-old activist, along with about 20 others, rushed to block the building’s entrance. Gonzalez wore a red muscle tee that read, “ARMS EMBARGO NOW.” With a white and black kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, he sat on the concrete in front of the Citigroup entrance. His arms were locked into black PVC pipes painted with bold white words: “NO GENOCIDE FUNDING.”
“Hey, Citi! Get off it! Put planet over profit,” the group chanted, delaying Citigroup employees from entering their offices for about a half hour.
The protest was the work of a nascent coalition of activists targeting Citigroup, Inc., a multinational investment bank, over two seemingly disparate issues: the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East and global climate change.
The campaign — dubbed Summer of Heat and led by groups like Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change — includes demands that Citigroup stop funding fossil fuel companies, rapidly increase funding for renewable energy, and pay into a reparations fund, such as a U.N. fund aimed at helping poor countries recover from the economic damage of climate change. Activists have also called on Citi to halt its investments in companies that manufacture arms for Israel.
Since June, protesters have led more than a dozen actions — including people falling to the ground to symbolize deaths from climate change — aimed at drawing attention to the bank’s investments. The New York City Police Department has made some 456 arrests in connection with the protests.
The climate impact of war
The Israel-Hamas war began when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 others hostage. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and displaced millions. More than 300 Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, and tens of thousands of Israeli civilians have also been displaced.
No matter where it takes place, war is itself a large source of planet-warming pollution. Researchers estimate that Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Palestine resulted in the release of at least 281,000 metric tons of carbon pollution in the first 60 days of the war, the result of burning fossil fuels in planes, tanks, and other vehicles, plus pollution from bombs, artillery, and rockets.
“We know that the military-industrial complex — that war — is a huge driver of environmental injustice and the climate crisis. We can’t address the climate crisis without addressing militarism,” said Alec Connon, coalition director of the Stop the Money Pipeline, which is made up of over 200 organizations focused on the institutions funding fossil fuel projects. Connon was among those arrested at the July Citigroup protest.
The war has also been a catalyst for activism for many young people. Some of them got their first introduction to organizing during the recent student-led pro-Palestine encampments and marches across the U.S., including at Yale University, which frequently called for institutions to divest from companies that do business in or with Israel. At the New York protests against Citigroup, activists have also been joined by a group of older organizers, migrants, and people from the Gulf South, a hot spot for fossil fuel expansion, who traveled to the city to join protests.
Gonzalez’s activism began to sprout in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprisings. This year, however, his work blossomed to new heights when he helped organize protests with the Shut It Down for Palestine coalition. Then, he began seeing connections to the wider climate crisis, fossil fuels, and the U.S. relationship with oil-rich nations in the Middle East.
“We are dependent on oil,” he said, “but ultimately, it is a finite resource that has geopolitical consequences.”
Alongside about 150 others, Gonzalez was arrested for the first time in May for blocking traffic on the Manhattan Bridge — but that wouldn’t be the last time he’d walk away from a protest in handcuffs. He was arrested again during a July lockbox action in front of Citigroup headquarters.
Lockbox actions can involve protesters locking their arms into PVC pipes to create a blockade. Lockboxes are considered a dangerous form of direct action because police can injure participants if they aren’t careful with their arms when removing them.
Gonzalez said he saw no other choice but to take that risk.
“This is the hottest summer we’ve had so far,” he said as police escorted him to a van for his arrest. “If you wait until it’s in your own backyard, it will be too late.”
Why Citigroup?
Campaign organizers began to target Citigroup three years ago, said lead organizer Alice Hu, who is the climate campaigner with activist group New York Communities for Change. They decided to turn up the pressure this year as temperatures rose in New York, where the bank is headquartered. Summer isn’t over yet, but the city has already experienced four heat waves.
What began as a climate effort soon expanded in scope.
“It’s been impossible to ignore what’s happened since Oct. 7,” Hu said.
Estimates vary on how much money Citigroup lends to fossil fuel companies. The bank committed $396 billion in loans, debt underwriting, and equity issuances to fossil fuels between 2016 and 2023, according to a report by environmental groups and independent research organization Profundo.
Bloomberg reported that Citigroup’s financing of fossil fuels has declined in recent years but that it is the sixth-largest provider of loans to fossil fuels since the 2015 signing of the Paris Agreement. Though the financial institution has publicly committed to going net-zero by 2050 and has pledged $1 trillion to financing the low-carbon transition, Citi has also acknowledged that nearly half of its energy clients lack plans to move away from oil, gas, and coal.
Citigroup was named in a June 20 United Nations statement that called for an end to arms transfers to Israel. The statement listed numerous companies and financial institutions that invest in arms companies, including Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and BlackRock.
“Failure to prevent or mitigate their business relationships with these arms manufacturers transferring arms to Israel could move from being directly linked to human rights abuses to contributing to them, with repercussions for complicity in potential atrocity crimes,” the statement said.
Citi did not respond to multiple requests for comment, instead pointing Yale Climate Connections to its annual climate report.
Bigger than Citi
Big financial institutions have largely ignored calls to phase out fossil fuels, said Jennie Stephens, a professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Over the years, individual banks have pledged to stop funding specific projects, such as coal or Arctic-based fossil fuel exploration and drilling. These actions, however, have done little to stop money from flowing into the fossil fuel industry at large. Though dollars have decreased in the last few years, the world’s 60 biggest private banks invested $6.9 trillion since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2016.
“It’s really important that these protesters are focusing on finance and banks because it’s a critical part of what’s necessary for the transformative change that is overdue,” Stephens said. “There’s currently a misalignment between climate policy and financial regulation.”
Banks are mandated to make as much money as possible, but that makes it difficult to wean off fossil fuels, which have historically been a source of high profits. To address that conundrum, central banks need to take action to shift how financial institutions operate, Stephens said.
What if they set higher interest rates for lending to polluting industries, for instance?
“You want to be incentivizing things that are good for society and you want to be disincentivizing investments and things that we know are destructive,” she said.
Stephens added that though the issue is systemic, a Citigroup agreement to stop financing fossil fuels would be a strong first step in the right direction. Activists share that hope.
“If we can unlock movement from one U.S. bank in terms of financing fossil fuels, then the others would move like a pack,” Hu said.
So far, the activists have secured one meeting with Citigroup. People who have been directly affected by climate change joined the meeting to share their experiences with executives such as Chief Sustainability Officer Val Smith and Managing Director and Global Head of Environmental and Social Risk Management Eliza Eubank. The Citigroup employees pointed participants to their climate plan, activists recalled. Connon, who was present at the meeting, considered it a “stalemate,” he said.
Regardless of how the bank moves forward or how the Israel-Hamas war resolves, Gonzalez says he’s only getting started.
“We’re climate activists,” he said. “The work doesn’t end at cease fire. Truthfully, there’s always going to be work to be done.”
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