AAround the world we are witnessing the effects of global warming: last week airport runways melted in the UK, wildfires scorched large swathes of Europe and more than 100 million Americans suffocated in dangerously high temperatures. Already this year, prolonged heat waves and drought in many breadbaskets around the world have exacerbated a global food shortage that has pushed the number of people living with food insecurity from 440 million to 1.6 billion.

Many are responsible for the climate crisis and its extreme weather impacts. Fossil fuel company executives bear the greatest responsibility. More than anything else, it’s their grand deception — their burying of climate science, funding climate denial, and spending billions to kill climate politics — that has kept us from moving away from a climate-fueled economy. coal, oil and gas. Compromised politicians, including the entire Republican Party and Democratic coal baron Joe Manchin, also deserve special condemnation.

In the cast of climate villains, however, another character rises to claim a special place in the limelight: Wall Street.

On December 12, 2015, virtually every nation in the world adopted the Paris Agreement. “Today, the American people can be proud because this historic agreement is a tribute to American leadership,” enthused President Obama. But there were problems from the start. The most obvious was that the agreement was voluntary; it lacked a legally binding commitment to reduce emissions. Another major problem was that no one on Wall Street was paying attention.

Since the Paris Agreement, the six largest US banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – have provided $1.4 billion in financing to the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, since that day announced in the French capital, the four largest global backers of fossil fuel expansion are all US banks. So much for “American leadership”.

It’s not like Wall Street hadn’t been warned. Environmental group Rainforest Action Network began campaigning for Bank of America to end coal funding in 2010. In 2016, Indigenous-led protests demanding the banks end their funding of the Dakota Access pipeline closed bank branches across the country. Cities including Seattle and San Francisco have pledged to cut ties with banks funding the pipeline.

More recently, the outcry has spread from activists to customers and investors. This year, more than 38,000 customers have joined a campaign urging their bank to end fossil fuel financing. Thousands more have pledged to sever ties with their bank altogether if there is no progress soon. At JPMorgan Chase’s 2020 general meeting, 49.6% of investors voted in favor of aligning the bank with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

In response to this pressure, US banks issued a series of climate pledges, pledging to reach net zero by 2050 and reduce emissions by 2030. But the hard truth remains: Wall Street funding coal, oil and gas was higher in 2021 than it was in 2016, a year after the adoption of the Paris agreement. Last year alone, U.S. banks provided $64 billion in financing to the companies that have most rapidly expanded their coal, oil and gas businesses – not to mention that such development will lead to a level of climate change that will make today’s extreme heat feel like a breeze. day in the park.

It would be bad enough if Wall Street were just funding fossil fuel expansion, but it is far from the case.

When investors filed a shareholder resolution at Citi this year calling on the bank to take the actions the International Energy Agency has agreed are necessary to give us even a 50% chance of limiting global warming at 1.5C, Citi CEO Jane Fraser vehemently opposed the resolution and misinterpreted it as an attempt to “shut down the fossil fuel economy overnight” .

After Putin launched his war on Ukraine, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joined the CEOs of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips in directly lobbying President Biden to increase domestic fossil fuel production. A month later, Dimon used his influential annual letter to shareholders to lobby further on behalf of his oil and gas clients. “We also need immediate approval for additional oil and gas pipeline leases,” he wrote, despite the fact that newly approved oil and gas projects won’t come online for years and won’t be released. will not help solve the current energy crisis.

As we navigate these early days of the climate crisis, we must bear in mind that our banks are deeply guilty of climate breakdown and are often using our money to make matters worse. And once we realize that, the real question is: what are we going to do about it?

• Alec Connon is co-director of the Stop the Money Pipeline Coalition, a network of more than 200 organizations working to get US-based financial institutions to align their business models with the goals of the Paris Agreement.