My Latest: Hey, Jane: 'talk is cheap'
I talked with organizer Alice Hu about the climate justice campaign that has disrupted Citi HQ fifteen times since June. And counting.
Dear friends,
Last week I told you about my experience engaging in a nonviolent civil disobedience protest at Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser’s apartment building in Manhattan, part of the ongoing Summer of Heat campaign targeting the biggest financiers of global fossil-fuel expansion.
Over the weekend, I talked with one of the campaign’s core organizers, Alice Hu, senior climate campaigner at New York Communities for Change, an organization working for labor, housing, and climate justice in working-class communities of color in New York City. We talked about her work there and how it intersects with climate organizing, and we got into some of the specific issues the Summer of Heat campaign is raising, including the international fight against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania. You can read the interview now at The Nation.
I asked Alice what she’d say to Fraser if she could speak to her face to face. Here’s what she said:
To put it plainly, talk is cheap. Put your money where your mouth is—or rather, take your money out of fossil fuels. Because at the end of the day, you can’t continue hiding behind various commitments, fancily worded net-zero pledges, blah blah blah. Citibank is the largest funder of new fossil fuel expansion since 2015. Specifically what that stat refers to is that Citibank, since the signing of the Paris Agreement, has been the bank, worldwide, that has put the most financing into the companies most involved in new coal, oil, and gas expansion. So when that’s the case with your company, talk is cheap. Put your money where your mouth is.
And the bottom line here, in terms of the global carbon budget, is that we actually can’t afford any new fossil fuel expansion. It’s a matter of physical reality—an unavoidable physical fact. Nobody’s going to get around that, no matter where you live.
There’s much more in the interview, so I hope you’ll read it and pass it along. It ends with a beautiful quote from one of the late, great Mike Davis’s last interviews.
-Wen