Demand the Big 6 U.S. Banks STOP FOSSIL FUEL EXPANSION FINANCING NOW
Since the Paris Agreement, the Big 6 U.S Banks - aka Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs - have poured over $445 BILLION into the largest oil and gas companies' fossil fuel expansion projects.
Sign the petition, demanding the Big 6 U.S. Banks end their financing of fossil fuel expansion NOW and hold their fossil fuel clients accountable in a just energy transition.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s special report on 1.5°C, we have less than ten years to halve emissions in order to stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis. Given this urgency, it is unacceptable that your banks are continuing to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into fossil fuel companies and their dirty expansion projects, a total of $445 billion in the last 6 years alone.
Your banks are the world’s six biggest bankers of fossil fuels, and we have a set of clear demands for you:
- Immediately end support for expansion of fossil fuels, because potential emissions from oil, gas and coal reserves already in production more than exhaust a 2°C carbon budget, let alone 1.5°C;
- Phase out support for fossil fuels, starting immediately, on a 1.5°C-aligned timeline;
- End support for deforestation, across all forest-risk commodities; and
- Immediately end support for projects and companies that are implicated in environmental injustice and/or abuses of human rights, especially Indigenous rights.
These criteria should be incorporated into the banks’ requirements for their corporate clients; Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs should not provide another dollar to any company that is expanding fossil fuels. Not a dollar more should go to any company that is not committed to a just transition to a 100% renewable economy.
These are necessary steps for aligning the Big 6 U.S Banks with a world in which climate change is limited to 1.5°C and human rights are fully respected.
Judged against this benchmark, all Big 6 U.S Banks’ recent 2030 targets are clearly inadequate. Reduction in carbon intensity is totally incompatible with expansion of fossil fuels and increases in absolute emissions, during the decade when we need to cut absolute emissions in half.
We are now in the decisive decade for the climate, and we need to see meaningful policies NOW.