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A new climate campaign is testing whether relentless civil disobedience can stop Citi from backing the fossil fuel industry.

By Alice Hu, Waging Nonviolence

With millions being displaced by wildfires and floods, famine spreading and entire countries getting submerged, the fossil fuel industry is driving us off the cliff and must be stopped. One strategy the climate movement can take to turn the tide is pressuring economic elites to remove their backing for Big Oil. This is the main focus of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, a sustained campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience against financiers like Citigroup, which has poured more money into fossil fuel expansion than any other bank in the world since 2016.

Since June 10, the campaign has organized multiple disruptive civil disobedience actions every single week. Convened by Climate Defenders, Planet Over Profit, Stop the Money Pipeline and New York Communities for Change (where I am the senior climate campaigner), and endorsed by over 115 partner groups, the protests have been attended by over 4,000 people, and more than 600 have been arrested. Actions have included sit-ins at the biggest banks and insurance companies backing fossil fuel projects, interruptions of Wall Street executives’ public appearances and visits to those executives’ homes. But most of all, they have consisted of numerous blockades of the entrances to the global headquarters of Citi, preventing employees from entering work multiple times a week.

summer of heat protest signs

Nonviolent disruption — and lots of it over the course of a much longer period than a one-off action or short series of protests — is the name of the game for Summer of Heat. We take inspiration from the long history of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience, such as the Birmingham campaign, Standing Rock and less centrally coordinated uprisings like Occupy Wall Street. But Summer of Heat is the first time that campaigners have sought to apply sustained, disruptive pressure on one specific U.S. bank (Citi) with clear demands around ending fossil fuel financing. At the same time, we are targeting other financiers — specifically insurers like AIG and Chubb — and hoping to provide a meaningful boost to other campaigns working to move these companies away from fossil fuels.

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