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"Rather than doing something about its role in the climate crisis, Citi is choosing instead to target climate activists with false charges and unwarranted arrests," said cellist John Mark Rozendaal.
Climate campaigners expressed incredulous outrage Thursday following the arrest of a 63-year-old Extinction Rebellion activist who violated a dubious restraining order by playing a cello outside Citibank's New York headquarters during a protest against the bank's funding of fossil fuel projects.
John Mark Rozendaal, a professional cellist and grandfather, performed Bach's "Suites for Cello" before he was arrested in the public plaza outside Citibank's headquarters in Lower Manhattan during a "Summer of Heat on Wall Street" protest against banks' fossil fuel financing. New York Police Department (NYPD) officers also arrested 14 peaceful protesters who encircled Rozendaal.
Last month, a Citibank security guard obtained what Extinction Rebellion said was an unconstitutional restraining order against Rozendaal and another activist, Stop the Money Pipeline director Alec Connon. According to the activists, the security guard claimed he was assaulted after hitting his head on a plastic pipe that demonstrators were using to block an entrance to the bank.
Rozendaal and Connon were warned that any violation of the restraining order could result in criminal contempt charges carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.
"Over the last decade, Citibank has been the world's number one funder of fossil fuel expansion," Rozendaal said Thursday. "Yet rather than doing something about its role in the climate crisis, Citi is choosing instead to target climate activists with false charges and unwarranted arrests."
Thousands of people have rallied to demand an end to fossil fuel financing during two months of ongoing Summer of Heat demonstrations. More than 475 activists—including scientists, faith leaders, elders, students, and parents—have been arrested during the protests.
"It's alarming that Citibank is resorting to scare tactics to intimidate climate activists that are simply trying to get the bank to stop financing the fossil fuel industry that is killing our planet and polluting our communities," Democratic New York City Councilwoman Sandy Nurse said in response to Rozendaal's arrest.
"Citi should stop targeting activists and focus instead on ending its support for fossil fuels," Nurse added.
The Center for International Environmental Law, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit advocacy group, said that "the use of vague restraining orders to keep protesters away from Citi's New York headquarters represents a troubling effort to suppress these lawful demonstrations and mute advocacy for a just and sustainable world."
"Such measures not only threaten democratic freedoms and hinder crucial advocacy against environmental racism, but most importantly undermine efforts to challenge the financial underpinnings of the climate crisis," the group added.
New York Communities for Change climate campaigner Alice Hu said on social media that "it's wild Citi would have NYPD arrest the 63-year-old peaceful protester for *checks notes* playing the cello."
"But, ultimately unsurprising from the top funder of new fossil fuels since 2016," Hu added. "After all, the floods, fires, and famines that Citi funds are the epitome of violence."
Rafael Shimunov, who hosts the "Beyond the Pale" program on left-wing New York radio station WBAI, quipped, "Thank you NYPD and Citibank, our streets are so much safer without this 63-year-old cellist on them."
The Summer of Heat on Wall Street is set to continue next week, as immigration rights groups are planning to lead a "Migrants Grieve and Rage Against Climate Destruction" day of action outside Citibank's headquarters on August 13.
"We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy," one activist said.
Key industry players arriving at London's Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night for the British Insurance Awards were met with a warning: Stop underwriting new oil, gas, and coal projects or face direct action from Extinction Rebellion.
Climate activists greeted the insurers with signs, photographs of extreme U.K. flooding, protest music, performance art, and business cards announcing XR's new "Insure Our Survival" campaign to pressure the industry away from backing fossil fuels.
"This is just the beginning," Insure Our Survival spokesperson Alex Penson said in a statement. "Thousands of XR activists stand ready to focus their nonviolent direct action energy on the insurance firms who are greenlighting the climate crisis by providing fossil fuel crooks with the insurance they need to dig and drill for oil, gas, and coal."
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest,"
The insurance industry has emerged as a target of the climate movement in recent years, as advocates point out that new fossil fuel projects would not be able to move forward without it.
"The insurance industry has a superpower," Penson said. "At a stroke, it could stop the fossil fuel crooks in their tracks and save the lives of billions of people threatened from the worst-case climate scenarios that scientists are saying are increasingly possible."
However, to date the industry has not chosen to use that power. According to the most recent report from the global Insure Our Future campaign, not one of the 30 major insurance firms it analyzed in 2023 had policies in line with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The insurers included in the U.K.-based Lloyd's market were the leading fossil fuel insurers, Insure Our Future found, earning $1.6-2.2 billion in premiums from oil, gas, and coal in 2022.
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest," Penson continued, "struggling to survive in barely habitable countries haunted by crop failures, malnutrition, deadly storms, floods, and heatwaves."
At Wednesday's event, XR activists held up photos taken by photographer Gideon Mendell, showing massive flooding in the U.K. that has been made worse by the climate emergency. They also held up signs reading, "Stop Insuring New Fossil Fuels" and "Insure Our Survival."
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
At the sound of a violin, XR's Oil Slickers—activists draped in black cloth to resemble an oil spill—glided around the insurance luminaries as they approached the hall for the industry's annual awards ceremony.
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
A choir also sang a song to the tune of "Imagine," including the line, "Imagine all insurers, fighting for us all."
"Last night we challenged insurers having a good time and congratulating each other on their good work at the Royal Albert Hall to face up to some uncomfortable truths—that some of their work leads to flooded homes and wrecked lives for their customers facing more and more climate crisis-driven extreme weather events," Penson said.
The activists also distributed business cards to the attendees warning them that, if they continued to back new fossil fuel projects, XR would target them with direct action designed to hurt both their reputations and their bottom line.
Pension said: "We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy to speed a just transition to a low or no-carbon economy."
XR's U.K.-based Insure Our Survival campaign emerged from the global Insure Our Future campaign, and in particular an international week of action it organized in late February and early March, including events in London and around the U.K.
About a month after the protests, Zurich Insurance announced that it would no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects.
Sierra Signorelli, Zurich's chief executive of commercial insurance, said at the time that Zurich took the action in keeping with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
"Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn't required for the transition," Signorelli said. "We think it's the right time to evolve our position."
Insure Our Survival campaigner Lucy Porter said that since the spring, many insurance employees, in both senior and junior positions, had spoken to XR saying they supported a move away from backing climate-polluting projects.
"We intend to work with them to make insurance part of the climate solution, not part of the problem, and we invite other people in the industry to contact us and work with us," Porter said.
Porter continued, "To those who continue to put their profits before a livable planet we say: We will hold you accountable through an escalating campaign of nonviolent direct action across the country."
Nothing organization is perfect, but it seems the two need one another. And from this union, we all would benefit.
The other day I went on Extinction Rebellion's (XR) website and signed myself up. I had been thinking about this for a while. The UK-based organization, known as XR for short, operates with a loosely affiliated, decentralized, global model, and I knew that there is a group in nearby Franklin County, Massachusetts. I am simply attempting to bring my personal commitment in line with my rhetoric. I admire XR, but not without reservations. People familiar with my writing know that I view the issue of climate as an ongoing confrontation between corporate intentions and organized activism. I have repeatedly raised a few points:
1) Without massive resistance and civil disobedience we are politically and environmentally doomed.
2) Resistance is, critically, a matter of building coalitions and attaching the climate movement to other issues: workers' rights and union building, human rights, housing, universal health care, voting rights, and military spending—just to name a few.
3) The climate movement often reflects class imbalance—many have pointed out that XR in particular, and the climate movement in general is too white, too middle class and too immersed in academic rhetoric—thereby cutting off poor and working class participation and passion.
4) Climate activism should be inherently political, anti-capitalist and based on the understanding that the political structures that have pushed us collectively to the brink of apocalypse cannot be redeployed to get us out of danger.
5) The poorest people are a wellspring of potential power that has been reduced—via the brainwashing of media and the immediacy of personal threats to survival—to the status of passive bystanders. Those that inhabit housing waitlists, or live in subsidized housing projects, or occupy Section 8 housing, are both the most vulnerable to climate related events, and an untapped progressive voting block and source for activism. Very poor people are almost never sympathetic to Trumpist fascism. As a long time (now retired) mental health outreach worker, I never heard a good word about Trump from anyone living in subsidized housing, and many of my clients were white.
6) Poor people are disproportionately subjected to climate suffering, whether through catastrophic heat waves, rising food prices, or floods. Where I worked, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, all three housing projects and many poor neighborhoods have been built adjacent to the Green River, which has flooded many times in recent years, and has the potential to cause terrible damage. It must be a goal of the climate movement to pursue rapprochement with those most threatened by climate instability. Poor people should not be patronized or marginalized within the climate community, but be seen as a cornerstone of a coalition.
I mentioned that I had joined XR, but that is not the whole story. The group has been criticized for lack of class and racial diversity, and for hedging on ties to larger political issues. XR has avoided the natural inclination to identify itself with any of the fundamental left wing ideological touchstones—including socialism, degrowth, redistribution of wealth, etc.—and yet leftist ideology permeates XR as an often unacknowledged undercurrent.
The organization has promoted itself as an apolitical organization, founded solely on the common cause of climate, but this self definition fails to address the political issues that have caused the climate apocalypse in the first place: that is, the political power and lobbying influence of corporate rulers, who keep fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and industrial agriculture locked into the eternal status of unregulated juggernauts of societal fate.
For me, XR can therefore only be an incomplete platform for activism. The Poor People's Campaign (which has scheduled "The Mass Poor People's and Low Wage Worker's Assembly and Moral March on Washington D.C. and to the Polls!" for June, 29th) ticks all the boxes. The Poor People's Campaign has issued a 17-point agenda that ties climate issues to the full social justice context that I believe XR ought to add to their well known three demands.
These points are:
The 11th point above—"environmental justice that secures clean air and water" —does not fully delineate and represent the issue of climate. The climate point in the Poor People's Agenda is incomplete in much the same way that XR is incomplete because it does not place the climate crisis within the larger context of social injustice and class inequity.
Perhaps XR and the Poor People's Campaign ought to get married. It may not be a perfect marriage—few are—but, rather, a marriage of convenience. I'd rent a tux and be there enthusiastically in time for the vows.