Many activists at today’s event wore shirts with President Obama’s quote committing to take action on climate change: “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” While President Obama’s activism arm, Organizing for Action, has called out climate deniers, the president has not committed to any course to actually address climate change, nor has he rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, the approval of which would dramatically undermine any climate agenda the president may set.

“I never thought I’d be back in Chicago to risk arrest in order to get President Obama to do the right thing on climate change,” said Elijah Zarlin, formerly a Senior National Email Writer on President Obama’s 2008 campaign. “But the fact is, President Obama hasn’t made good on the commitment he made to his staff and supporters to fight climate change. If the president wants our help to push his agenda forward in the second term, Keystone XL is a make or break moment.”

“As a grandfather and avid supporter of President Obama, I respect his words offered in response to the climate crisis but we are out of time for just words,” said Reverend Terrence Gallagher, an Obama donor risking arrest at today’s sit-in. “I am risking arrest if that is what is necessary to move him to the action of denying the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The future well-being of our kids deserves no less of a response.”

“Delivering Virginia for the President in 2012 was a huge honor. I put in 14 and 16 hour days because I, like most of my generation, believe in the president and I believe he’ll do the right thing on climate and reject the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Andrew Nazdin, formerly Virginia’s Deputy Training Director for OFA in 2012. “But until he does, we’ll be putting our bodies on the line and not volunteering to forward his agenda.”

“People are ready for their government to take urgent action on the climate and they are willing to risk arrest to get it,” said Amanda Starbuck, Energy and Finance Program Director at Rainforest Action Network. “Today’s sit-in marks the start of what tens of thousands will be prepared to do if the president doesn’t stop the Keystone XL pipeline, and begin defending our country from climate change.”

The location of today’s sit-in is notable not just because it is President Obama’s hometown, and the location of his activism arm Organizing for Action, but because the State Department is the agency currently engaged in finalizing the review of Keystone XL, a process that has been wrought with conflict of interest and insufficient science.

More than 62,000 people have signed the group’s Pledge of Resistance to risk arrest in peaceful, dignified civil disobedience if President Obama’s administration issues a draft National Interest Determination recommending approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Today’s action is the first of a number of civil disobedience actions the groups are planning throughout the summer to demonstrate to the president that they are serious in their pledge, and that it is politically unfeasible for him to approve Keystone XL.

Read the Pledge of Resistance here: http://act.credoaction.com/sign/kxl_pledge

Check out the photos from today’s action in Chicago here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nokxl/

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Throughout the summer, Rainforest Action Network, CREDO, and the Other 98% will be leading nationwide trainings in dignified, nonviolent civil disobedience. These trainings will support the more than 60,000 people eager to take action to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Our trainers will be traveling across the country and stopping in 25 cities throughout July, including Chicago, Houston, Tampa, and Boston. It will take hundreds of activist leaders to plan, lead and train others – so they can participate in local civil disobedience actions, in their hometowns.

As a result of these trainings, all participants will be ready to organize unified demonstrations to push President Obama to reject the Keystone Pipeline, once and for all.

We are training people from all walks of life, who are bound by one common thread — they recognize that climate change is not a distant concept, but a pressing threat to our health and our country.

To give you a picture of the kinds of people who have signed up for trainings this summer, we are talking about everyday people. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, people of faith, people who worked for the President, all willing to put their bodies on the line to push their President to stand on the right side of history — and reject the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline.

This pledge has shown us that people are ready for their government to take bold and ambitious action to address climate change, and they are willing to take bold action to get it.

Will you join all of us this summer? To take the Pledge of Resistance, please click here.

The Pledge is a commitment made by more than 60,000 people to engage in civil disobedience and risk arrest if President Obama’s administration issues a draft approval of Keystone XL. It is a huge and complex undertaking but we believe preparing for mass civil disobedience is a necessary next step in our movement.

Since we launched the pledge, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide broke 400 ppm for the first time in millions of years and in human history – a somber milestone that greatly underscores the need to stop KXL and do everything in our power to prevent the tar sands carbon bomb from being detonated. And, the President learned about your pledge, when news of it was personally conveyed, face to face, to the President by CREDO’s president and CEO.

No one really knows when the draft decision on whether the Keystone XL pipeline is “in the national interest” will come. At first, conventional wisdom said it would come in the fall. Then President Obama said he could make the decision as early as this summer. And now the State Department is saying it could be many months more before the Environmental Impact Statement is finalized – which will trigger the 90-day process to issue the draft National Interest Determination (NID), which, if it recommends approval of Keystone XL, would trigger our pledge to resist.

We have two goals over the coming months: To create enough pressure on President Obama through demonstrating our commitment and our numbers that he has no choice but to reject Keystone XL. And to build out our organizing capacity across the country such that, should the draft NID recommend approval of Keystone XL, we are ready to deploy acts of peaceful, dignified civil disobedience.

So today, we have a two big announcements:

Local action leader trainings in July: The heart of the Pledge of Resistance will be hundreds of volunteer-led, grassroots civil disobedience actions ready to be deployed at strategic targets around the country. It will take hundreds of activist leaders across the country to plan, lead and train others to participate in local civil disobedience actions. In order to train these local action leaders, we will run regional weekend trainings in 16 cities nationwide throughout July.

Serving as a local action leader will be a significant commitment of time – but if you are interested in being trained to lead a civil disobedience action near you, click here to let us know you are interested, and we will let you know when a training is happening near you and how you can sign up.

First action in Chicago: To show that we are serious in our pledge, we will plan sit-in actions throughout the summer – one or two a month – in key targets around the country. These actions are intended as a demonstration of our commitment, and a small-scale “coming attraction” for the feature film we hope we’ll never have to watch: tens of thousands of people getting arrested in the event of a draft NID recommending approval of Keystone XL.

The first action will be a sit-in on Monday, June 17th, in President Obama’s home town of Chicago. Participants will be risking arrest, and will be required to attend an action training the day before, on Sunday, June 16th. While this action is open to anyone, we think it will be especially powerful to see Obama supporters, volunteers, donors and even staff taking this stand. We recommend that only people from the Chicago area sign up, as your participation could result in a legal process requiring you to be in Chicago a number of times in the coming months. Click here to RSVP for the Chicago action.

The next phase of this campaign is going to make this pledge even bigger. Stay tuned for more updates coming soon. Thanks for everything you are doing to stop Keystone XL.

Earlier this month, we traveled from our universities in New England down to Charlotte, NC to attend Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting with Rainforest Action Network. At the end of the school year, the trip meant skipping exams and ignoring final paper deadlines that would come back to bite us later–but we knew it was worth it. The meeting gave us the opportunity to look straight into the eyes of a person who has the power to cripple the coal industry: Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan–and ask him to help us.

In his opening remarks at the meeting, Moynihan prided himself on the Bank’s $50 billion commitment to the environment. Later on that morning, however, we witnessed Mr. Moynihan dodge question after question regarding the Bank’s role as the number one lender to the coal industry.

Frontline community members spoke up with devastating stories about the cancers their community had struggled with in the shadow of coal-fired power plants, the threats to their homes and drinking water posed by new strip mines and coal export terminals. Religious leaders reminded Moynihan of his moral conscience and his responsibility to other inhabitants of this earth. Many speakers pointed out the contradiction between Bank of America’s environmental commitment and its coal financing policies. Other shareholders at the meeting heard our voices, and began mentioning climate change within their own questions about other topics such as the Bank’s foreclosure practices, executive pay, or campaign contribution disclosures. Mr. Moynihan was clearly uncomfortable when faced with the people directly impacted by his Bank’s support of the coal industry, but he dismissed most of their questions.

At the end of the meeting, it was our turn to speak. We could tell that, by this point, Mr. Moynihan had heard enough about climate change. We brought a message with us, however, that he had not heard:

“Students are tremendously concerned about climate change, and we do NOT want to work for companies like Bank of America if they are funding our destruction. We and students at 80 other colleges and universities have pledged to disrupt your recruitment sessions on our campuses until you commit to phasing out your loans to the coal industry.”

Finally, we had caught Bank of America’s attention. The moment we announced the pledges, Board members spun around in their chairs to stare at us. They heard how our generation will not stand in silence as the massive burden of climate change continues to fall on our backs. They heard how we are mobilizing to fight back, running fossil fuel divestment campaigns on hundreds of campuses across the country. They heard that we are standing in solidarity with the frontline communities whose homes and lives have already been threatened by the coal industry, and that we will be standing in Bank of America’s way if they come to our campuses next fall to recruit new employees whose work would continue aggravating the climate crisis.

Mr. Moynihan responded quickly to our questions. “We have already successfully recruited at your school,” he said, and repeated his talking point about the Bank’s $50 billion commitment to the environment. We had already seen, though, that the Board was visibly disconcerted by the pledge.

We know that we have found a pressure point, and we are prepared to leverage our power over the Bank next fall. We call on other students across the country to join us by signing the pledge and making it clear to Bank of America that, if they expect us to join their workforce and to provide them with business in the future, they need to do a better job of addressing our generation’s concerns about climate change and the human rights abuses perpetuated by the coal industry.

As I stood eye-to-eye with Bank of America (BofA) CEO, Brian Moynihan, a large stop-watch projected onto the wall of the conference room started to count down. I had two minutes before my microphone cut off and I needed to choose my words wisely.

Once a year BofA, like every publicly-held corporation, invites shareholders to meet with the CEO, along with the Board of Directors and the Senior Executive team. It’s our opportunity to raise questions about the bank’s performance and practice.

Rainforest Action Network, along with many of our friends and allies, has been calling on BofA to take some serious action on the climate. Together we’ve petitioned, written emails, placed phone calls, written letters, marched in the streets, visited bank branches and offices and used many creative strategies to get this message on the bank’s radar.

And now I had the ear of the top guy, for exactly 120 seconds.

At the beginning of the meeting, Brian made a speech listing off the bank’s proudest achievements. He included BofA’s environmental commitment. This is something we both like, I think it’s important for the bank to have a commitment to clean energy and energy efficiency and BofA has a good team working to meet their targets.

But here’s the problem, and this is what I told Brian: While BofA fanfares its commitment to leadership on climate change, at the same time it is the leading funder of the coal industry, the single largest source of U.S. climate emissions. This means that BofA is underwriting the very same climate pollution that it is trying to tackle.

The sad truth is that it is not possible for a bank to be both #1 in addressing climate change and #1 in financing the fossil fuel sector. These two goals are incompatible.

And so I asked:

“Which will you choose to prioritize? Will you choose to finance a transition to clean energy and a safe future for future generations, or will you choose the coal industry and a future of climate catastrophe?”

It looked as if Brian was listening, but I don’t think he really heard me, because he didn’t answer my question. Instead he replied by telling me some details about their environmental commitment and then asked Global technology and Operations Executive Cathy Bessant to explain the specifics of their clean energy financing.

If Brian didn’t really hear me, then perhaps he heard the words spoken by others in the room.

Person after person got up to the mic to speak about the many problems associated with the bank’s financing of the coal industry.

Ashish talked about Coal India and how their mines are destroying forests, critical tiger habitat and the health of Indian communities. Bonnie, Jim, Les, Eddie and Carly talked about Peabody and Arch Coals’ plans to transport 150 million tons of coal per year through their communities in Washington and Oregon for sale on the international export market. Lorelei, Kathy and Stephanie spoke about the daily horror experienced by Appalachians who live next to mountaintop removal coal mines. Sarah shared her experiences of living next to North Carolina’s Riverbend Coal plant, that has poisoned her community’s lake and inflicted serious illnesses on her family.

Barbara and June testified about the wide range of serious health impacts associated with coal and climate, delivering a petition to Brian from thousands of medical professionals and concerned citizens.

Faith leaders Reverend Nancy Allison and Rabbi Jonathan Frierich spoke to the moral imperative to take courageous action for the climate, as did Rabbi Margie Klein, who then sang an Appalachian spiritual to emphasize this point.

Was Brian listening now? I think he was; we dominated the meeting, causing him at one point to quip, “Is there anybody here who has a question that isn’t about climate change?”

Among the final speakers were students David, Meiron, Maria and Ali, who all asked Brian to consider the world he is leaving for future generations. “At the moment you are part of the problem”, said David, “Please can you be part of the solution?”

Todd Zimmer of RAN introduced the panel by noting that the audience included community members from Charlotte as well as student leaders of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement from Western Washington, Brown, Harvard, and Davidson. Todd remarked that although Bank of America has stated its intention to be a leader on climate and clean energy, its track record as the number one funder of the coal industry is in direct conflict with this ambition. The bank’s lending and financing decisions involving the coal industry that are made at the bank’s headquarters in Uptown Charlotte impose immense costs for communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The first guest speaker, Ashish Fernandes of Greenpeace spoke about the dangers of India’s coal industry to rural communities, the environment, and to investors exposed to risky energy infrastructure in the country. Contrary to the myth that a coal boom in India is inevitable due to the country’s energy needs, most new coal plants and mines face huge community opposition across India. In the last three years alone, courts have sent back at least four different power plants to drawing board. India produces 65 percent of its electricity from coal, and produces 90% of its coal from open pit mines, which endanger over a million hectares of forest, and threaten the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in the country’s coal belt. Fortunately, wind is now cheaper than new coal plants in India and solar will reach grid parity with coal in under four years. However, the enduring influence of India’s coal lobby risks locking the country into coal dependence.

Next, Barbara Gottlieb, the director of health and advocacy for Physicians for Social Responsibility spoke to the global impacts of climate change on health. She began by highlighting that climate change is no longer a theoretical problem: It is happening now, and it is happening to us. Furthermore, she emphasized that climate change is not just an environmental issue. The British medical journal The Lancet called climate change “the health challenge of the 21^st Century.” Barbara noted that climate change is associated with more frequent and more intense storms, extreme heat waves, and drought, all of which pose acute risks to human health. She concluded by stressing that there is a way forward for Bank of America and the financial sector: Shifting their financing to clean, renewable energy.

Next, Bonnie McKinley from Portland, Oregon spoke to her experiences working with Power Past Coal and Rising Tide North America to fight plans to export coal from Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin through ports on the Pacific Northwest. Currently, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, Kinder Morgan, and other companies have introduced plans to build export infrastructure to ship Powder River Basin coal to be burned in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia. These proposed coal export terminals would bring up to 70 coal trains per day (each up to a mile-and-a-half long) through residential neighborhoods, leaving a trail of heavy metal-laden coal dust and putting communities at risk for derailments. Bonnie concluded on a hopeful note, remarking that a proposed railway for coal exports would never be built because, in the words of activist Vanessa Braided Hair, “Arch Coal understands money. What Arch Coal doesn’t understand is community. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand the Cheyenne people whose ancestors fought and died for the land that they are proposing to destroy. They don’t understand the fierceness with which the people, both Indian and non-Indian, in southeastern Montana love the land.” Bonnie also had a message for her baby boomer peers, urging them to take action to protect their communities and the climate: “Please get out and work for our special planet.”

Finally, Kathy Selvage from Wise County, West Virgina spoke about her decade-long experience fighting the impacts of mountaintop removal mining in her community and throughout Appalachia. She began by calling for the bank to “return to the integrity I knew decades ago” as an employee of a predecessor bank, Wise County National. Kathy spoke of her mother, who “would go outside and read the bible on front porch, then raise eyes to ponder what she had just read. When she raised her eyes, she saw a beautiful mountain across from her.” But after Glen Morgan Properties destroyed the mountain as part of one of their mountaintop removal mines, when her mother raised her eyes, “she saw the devastation of god’s creation.” The devastation wrought by the coal company that destroyed her community inspired Kathy to become active in the fight against mountaintop removal.

Kathy concluded by urging the audience to think about the interconnections between climate change, mountaintop removal, and other environmental issues. Faced with growing evidence of environmental threats hurting our communities and the environment, she reminded us that “we can no longer afford to stand still like we’re not a part of this planet.”

They are demanding an end to the havoc that Bank of America and the coal industry have wreaked on our lives. These brave people include Barbara Gottlieb from Physicians for Social Responsibility, who researches how coal causes respiratory diseases; Lorelei Scarbro, who comes from a family of coal miners and had mountains blown up in her West Virginian backyard for tiny seams of coal; and Ashish Fernandes from India—where coal was a false promise for a poor country to get rich but instead destroyed the health of thousands of innocent people.

Today, we need your help to deliver an additional blow to Bank of America: to call in and demand that it is time to stop funding King Coal. With hundreds—even thousands—of us calling in, this will disrupt operations on the day of the bank’s biggest public facing event all year.

** We’ve updated the phone number below, after Bank of America disconnected the first one.  Keep up the pressure! **

Will you help us prove to Bank of America that these people are not alone? Call the office of Bank of America CEO, Brian Moynihan. Here’s his number: (866) 826 – 8989

Leading up to today, shareholders and bank executives have felt the crescendo of our grassroots organizing in Charlotte. We have disseminated the message that Bank of America is the leading funder of coal and so clearly doesn’t care about its impact on climate change with several creative tactics. We’ve greeted bank shareholders the minute they landed at the Charlotte airport, plastered ads all over downtown Charlotte and the perimeter of the bank’s headquarters, flyered every hotel door where shareholders are staying; and, today—our activists are accompanied by a 20×12 ft mobile billboard parked outside of the shareholder meeting as they march in.

Bank of America knows we’re here. Let them know you’re here, as well.

Since today is such a ripe opportunity because of this public-facing moment, we need to pick up the phone and call. Please take a few minutes today to call Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and let him know that Bank of America needs to stop funding coal. Here’s how:

1. Call (866) 826 – 8989

2. If someone answers the phone, ask to speak to Brian Moynihan (it’s highly unlikely they will put you through). Whether your call is answered by voicemail or a real person, be polite and respectful, but above all make sure you state how seriously you’re taking Bank of America’s decision to keep funding the declining industry of coal.

Here’s a sample call script:

Hello, my name is ____{name}____ and I’m calling today to tell Brian Moynihan that Bank of America cannot be #1 in addressing climate change when it is the #1 funder of coal.

I am deeply disturbed by how this decision is affecting the quality of our lives and future.

I demand that Bank of America stop pumping billions of dollars into the coal industry.

Thank you for your time.

3. After you call, click the button below to report how it went. It’s important we get an accurate count of how many folks made a call, and what Bank of America’s response is.

 

It’s time Bank of America is held accountable as the #1 funder of the U.S. coal industry—the bank is responsible for funding the decimation of purple mountains majesty via mountaintop coal mining (MTR); underwriting coal mines that have caused irreversible black lung to working class miners; and financially supporting contaminated, undrinkable water in once pristine streams. No financial institution should have this much power over our communities and our future.

Trust me, our mighty crew here in Charlotte will feel the amplified power of every phone call you make. Thank you in advance for standing up with us today. Together, we can be heard—because there are more of us than them.

For the past two years, RAN has been calling on the bank to get serious about addressing climate change.This is a bank that declares a “commitment to positive environmental change” proudly on its website and a bank that has fanfared multi-billion dollar climate initiatives. However, the bank is also the leading underwriter of the U.S. coal industry, the single largest source of U.S. climate emissions. This means that bank of America is actually underwriting the climate change that it claims to want to tackle.

The sad truth is that it is not possible for a bank to be both #1 in addressing climate change and #1 in financing the coal sector. These two goals are simply incompatible.

I’ve been terrified about what we’re doing to the climate for at least ten years, but the past 12 months of extreme weather event has underlined the reality of climate change and the urgent need for action. From Superstorm Sandy’s devastation on the eastern seaboard, to the droughts endured by the Midwest and Plains states, and the wildfires that raged across the Rocky Mountains last summer, the planet is sending us a loud and clear message that it’s in distress. These were major headline stories, but the impacts were truly felt everywhere: over the year, more than 69,000 local heat records were set. Even as I type these words, communities in North Charlotte are being evacuated due to flooding from weeks of heavy rain.

I’m joined here in Charlotte by more than 30 friends and allies, each with a personal reason for coming to talk to Bank of America (BofA) about climate change. This morning we held a press conference and I stood with Indian campaigner, Ashish Fernandes. Ashish spoke about the devastating impacts that BofA-funded coal mining companies have on his country’s biodiversity, water supplies and indigenous communities. We stood with Barbara Gottlieb of Physicians for Social Responsibility, who explained the serious health impacts of climate change and burning coal; these include strokes, asthma and malnutrition. We stood with Oregonian Jim Plunkett, who is fighting plans to build five new coal export terminals in the Pacific North West, and we stood with local Charlotte Pastor, Nancy Allison, who spoke to our moral imperative to protect the climate for future generations.

Tomorrow we’ll take our message directly to BofA’s CEO Brian Moynihan, to their Board of Directors and to the bank’s shareholders. We will ask the bank to stop hedging and make a firm choice:

Will the bank continue to fund climate chaos and community devastation, or will the bank fund a clean energy future?

The Church of Stop Shopping returns to New York now, after a week in the Bay Area.  A highlight:  we launched the “Extinction Resurrection” campaign at the front doors and inside the big banks that finance climate disruption. Then, each evening we went indoors to a concert stage–and direct activism spiced up the prayers, songs, and shouts of “Earthalujah!”

In “The Revolt of the Golden Toads” tour, we concentrated our crawling and hopping on JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America–which move billions into coal-fired power plants. We believe that the Golden Toad was forced into extinction 25 years ago by drought conditions in their cloud forest home–destruction that was funded by these banks.

Our impact this week in San Francisco? It is impossible to make Nielsen Ratings from activism. Clearly more and more people know they must now be Earth radicals. Put some URGENCY in the EMERGENCY. Our post-big-daddy-god church, with the wonderful music, tries to activate direct action. In nine Bay Area performance events we had something short of 2000 individuals in our audiences. Our media coverage was good and in our interviews we tried to be guided by the Extinction Resurrection theme, which is surreal and funny–but people get it.  It’s about survival.

We’re not celebrities. Celebrities don’t “Stop Shop.” So we have to land the message manually. During “Toads” we went at it non-stop for 6 days and 6 nights. The upside for the non-celebrity approach is this: it builds communities. (We call people who join our church–the citizens of “Earthalujahville.”  For instance, we were fed, transported, and offered beds by Earthalujahville citizens as we zig-zagged around the Bay.)

Everyone in the Stop Shopping Church experienced Hurricane Sandy–and the super storm created our new songs and put us into the masks of extinct beings. Last November we were left thinking that Earth is destroying consumerism on purpose. Earth is interrupting the sale. Why? Because consumerism keeps us a bunch of little apex predators and that adds up to a horrific Super Devil. Then again, anything that distracts us from this Eco-pocalypse is the Devil and must be cast out.

Extinction Resurrection. The Dark and the Light. Honest assessment of the current environmental movement leaves us feeling dark. But the ecstatic release of a good direct action raises us to the light. Darker and Brighter. Extinction and Resurrection. It’s the up and down and up of Evolution. We felt the darkness when we performed at Oakland City Hall and felt the memory of police violence there during Occupy. But moments later we unloaded some happy toad gospel at the Chase Bank across the street. They closed the bank and locked the doors after our first song. So they had to seal off the hushed high church of the bank. So we sang on the sidewalk and sent happy curses up into the surveillance system. Eventually we’ll be naked animals hopping on Jamie Dimon’s desk. Earthalujah!

We wish to thank RAN for posting these reports. Now the toad hops back to NYC, then over the Atlantic.

To be updated with Rev. Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping tour dates, click here for tour dates.

Photo Credit: Steve Rhodes

As our title indicates, coal has become an extreme investment. Long touted as a cheap and abundant fuel, coal’s environmental and public health costs are becoming increasingly acute: A 2011 Harvard School of Public Health study found that coal mining and combustion in the U.S. imposes between a third to over one half of a trillion dollars in externalized environmental and health costs each year.

Despite mounting evidence of the extreme impacts of the coal industry on the climate and human health, in 2012, US bank financing practices have failed to address the acute risks and impacts of the financing the “worst of the worst” companies in the coal industry. Even as U.S. coal consumption for power generation fell 11 percent in 2012, the top three U.S. financiers of the coal industry (Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase) collectively financed an estimated $9 billion for mountaintop removal mining companies and the most coal-intensive power utilities last year. The report card also finds that the broader banking sector remains deeply exposed to the coal industry, providing $20.8 billion in financing for these companies in 2012.

With few exceptions, bank lending and financing policies for the coal sector for this year’s report card received disappointingly low grades. Although Wells Fargo improved to a “C” for taking steps to improve its mountaintop removal mining lending practices and HSBC North America received a “C-“ for policies covering its lending to coal-fired power, grades for the rest of the U.S. banking sector showed almost no improvement from last year.

The long-term financial outlook for companies involved with coal mining, transportation, and combustion remains highly uncertain. As we note in one of our report’s case studies, Patriot Coal, a coal mining company with major MTR operations filed for bankruptcy last year and agreed to phase out its MTR operations. Of the 12 other MTR companies profiled in the report, only one had an S&P credit rating above ‘junk.’ Last month, investors scrapped a controversial plan to export coal through Coos Bay, Oregon. And on April 16^th, the Texas power company Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU) announced plans to file for bankruptcy due in part to the deteriorating financial picture for the company’s fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Last year, even with the coal industry’s bankruptcies, risky proposals for coal plant upgrades, and coal export terminals, Wall Street doubled down on its exposure to the industry, despite its incredibly uncertain future. Unfortunately, they’re not just gambling with their own money. Bad investments can be written off, but coal’s impacts on human health and the environment are severe, permanent, and irreversible.

Every day this week in marking the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the art collective Liberate Tate is giving a performance dramatizing the trial of BP. It’s entitled ‘All Rise’ and is all taking place at the Tate Modern in London.

It’s not unusual for artists and cultural events to reference contemporary news or disasters. The difference here is that this is a guerrilla performance, completely unsanctioned by Tate or by one of its sponsors: BP.

Each day this week at 3pm UK time (GMT+1), performers using specially constructed cameras will film themselves wandering Tate Modern whilst whispering selected transcripts of the proceedings from the New Orleans courtroom.

The live-streams of the different performers are available to watch online from around the world on the dedicated website  (where an archive allows future viewing).

The BP trial, which started this February, accuses the massive corporation of gross negligence by plaintiffs who did not take part in a separate settlement made by the oil giant last year.

At the trial’s opening, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Underhill said: “Not only was it within BP’s power to prevent the tragedy, it was its responsibility.”

As Paul Brady, one of the performers on Monday April 22, underlined: “It’s not only BP that’s on trial for the devastation it has caused to Gulf Coast communities and ecosystems, it’s also Tate and other cultural institutions that provide BP with the social legitimacy to continue operating with such destructive consequences.”

‘All Rise’ is a performance that brings the BP trial into Tate Modern because BP’s arts sponsorship cannot be separated from the irrevocable damage it does to communities, the environment, and the climate.

For example, BP’s first advertising campaign after the Gulf of Mexico disaster was in the summer of 2011 and used the corporation’s sponsorship of art in a multi-million dollar attempt to rehabilitate its brand. This was very deliberate. The value to BP of the arts establishment that supports the oil company by accepting its sponsorship money is clear: BP uses its involvement in arts and culture to project a “feel good” image of the company.

In doing so, BP buys the leverage it needs to gain acceptance from elites and influential publics to carry on plundering the planet, to proliferate human rights abuses, and to interfere in what should be democratic political processes.

What is so invidious is that public cultural institutions also fall into what BP has captured.

This is why Liberate Tate has vowed, since its founding in January 2010, “to take creative disobedience against Tate until it drops its oil company funding.” And to inspire others to join in doing so as well.

‘All Rise’ follows a performance by Liberate Tate last July when over 100 members of the art collective installed ‘The Gift’ — a 16.5 metre wind turbine blade – in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

On the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2011, Liberate Tate poured oil over a naked man lying in the middle of Tate Britain in a work called ‘Human Cost’.

This week as we whisper extracts from the court transcripts — damning reports, objections, evidence, accountability, and risk throughout the BP sponsored Tate gallery spaces — we insistently ask: How much more environmental, societal, and climate damage does BP need to do for Tate to forego its sponsor? When will Tate put their sponsor on the stand?

The good news is that the public call for Tate to stop its relationship with BP is growing. Thousands of Tate members and visitors have voiced their objection that through its support of sponsor BP, Tate is forcing environmentally and climate-conscious gallery goers into an uncomfortable position of complicity with the oil company, one of the most environment-destroying corporations on the planet.

When our public cultural institutions have a formal relationship with corporations engaged in socially and ecologically destructive activities, exhibitions and galleries become part of the creation of climate chaos through the construction of a social licence to operate for oil companies.

Our practice involves illuminating this process at the culture wellhead through interventions and artworks created in Tate galleries.

We situate our interventions in the growing wave of desire for citizens to reclaim public space: a gallery should be a place to enjoy great art, not a site where an art museum associates visitors in the ecological destruction and criminal acts of its corporate partners.

About the Author

Glen Tarman is an artist, activist and advocacy director based in London. Glen is a founding member of the art collective Liberate Tate.  Liberate Tate explores the role of creative intervention in social change and aims to free art from the grips of the oil industry.

For more information on Liberate Tate, see http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/. Liberate Tate can also be found on Twitter: @liberatetate

A Guest blog-post by Yann Louvel, BankTrack‘s Climate and Energy Campaign Coordinator

This week, Bloomberg published the results of its third annual ranking of the “world’s greenest banks”: Citi was ranked first, followed by Santander and JPMorgan. The study assesses banks based on their lending to clean-energy projects and reduction in their own power consumption and carbon footprints. However, banks’ support for dirty energy, such as fossil fuel and nuclear power, is notably absent from Bloomberg’s methodology. When the value of banks’ finance for fossil fuels so often dwarfs their investments in renewables, Bloomberg’s data does not even tell half of the story.

Measuring the Good, Ignoring the Bad

One question mark over Bloomberg’s ranking is its definition of “clean energy”, and in particular its inclusion of hydropower (including large environmentally and socially destructive dam projects) and biomass/biofuels in this definition.

But the fundamental problem with its approach lies in the complete omission of banks’ investments in fossil fuels and nuclear energy.  While banks’ growing investments in green energy are to be welcomed, it is even more crucial that investments in fossil fuels drop drastically in the coming years if we are to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic global warming. The ratio of green to “brown” investments would provide a meaningful study on the level of “greenness” of a bank, but looking at clean investments alone makes this little more than a PR exercise for the banking sector.

To give a concrete example of this problem, BankTrack, together with urgewald, Groundwork and Earthlife Africa, released the “Bankrolling Climate Change” report in Durban in 2011. The report is an investigation into the coal investments of the world’s leading banks. We looked at the funding of 93 international banks in 71 coal companies between 2005 and 2011 to identify the “top 20 climate killer banks” in the world. The results show a significant overlap between Bloomberg’s “world’s greenest banks” and the top 20 climate killer banks. In fact, seven of Bloomberg’s top ten appear in the “Climate Killer” list.

Citi, which tops Bloomberg’s list, was rated the number two climate killer bank, and JPMorgan, our number one climate killer bank, is Bloomberg’s number three. Citi’s investments in the coal industry grew by 40% between 2005 and 2010 as the bank poured more than €13 billion into the coal industry. Citi’s profile on the BankTrack website links the bank to the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, as well as mountaintop removal coal mining and the controversial Alpha Coal project in Australia, expected to directly and negatively impact the Great Barrier Reef. This makes the “Greenest Bank in the World” tag a little hard to swallow.

Environmental Direct-Impact, Back to Sustainability Pre-History

Another disturbing aspect of Bloomberg’s methodology is that “reductions in air emissions and water use and gains in energy efficiency” account for a full 30 percent of the score. These are banks’ “direct” impacts, e.g. their own use of energy for electricity and office heating. If this approach would have been understandable in the 1990s, it seems extremely dated in 2013, to say the least.

Numerous studies, particularly from NGOs including many from BankTrack members and partners in the past few years, have clearly demonstrated that banks’ primary environmental impacts are result from their core activities – their lending and investments – rather than through their “direct” impacts. While the sustainability debate in the banking sector started ten or twenty years ago with these direct impacts, the trend since then has been towards looking at the issues that matter: the impacts of banks’ finance. Methodologies for measuring these ‘financed emissions’ already exist, and BankTrack has long called on banks to report on these impacts systematically.

Management and reduction of direct impacts should be considered a ‘hygiene factor’ for banks, rather than a core issue. When Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan, which invested more than €16 billion in the coal industry between 2005 and 2011, “revamped its Park Avenue headquarters in New York, where energy-saving lights now dim automatically and a 54,000-gallon basement tank collects rain for flushing toilets and watering plants”, one has to wonder if it is looking down its telescope backwards.

Stop The Greenwashing

By avoiding mention of fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and by giving undue weight to banks’ direct impacts, Bloomberg’s “greenest banks” methodology is fundamentally, and it would seem deliberately, flawed. (BankTrack and partners Rainforest Action Network and urgewald already raised these concerns in a letter to Bloomberg last year).

The results of this study will now be used by the “world’s greenest banks” in their marketing and public relations material – a generous but undeserved gift to banks which are ploughing billions into environmentally destructive projects. This is a shame when there remain plenty of opportunities for Bloomberg, banks, analysts and other stakeholders to examine bank’s investments in fossil fuels, nuclear power, and their financed emissions. BankTrack will continue to denounce such greenwashing exercises in the coming months and years.

This apology consisting of less than 140 characters does not seem to cover the immeasurable scope of how the oil spill has impacted—and will continue to impact—this Arkansas community. Even Exxon’s own Cleanup Operations Progress page on their website has almost two dozen bullet points detailing the devastating range of this disaster.

And it appears Exxon is getting a little defensive. After other environmental organizations and activists jumped in to add their reaction to the mess, Exxon wrote a series of seemingly over-reactive tweets.

The real kicker? They all seem to center around this notion of “telling the truth”:

The list goes on and on. Check it out for yourself at Exxon’s Twitter account: @exxonmobil

We all know the real truth: our people and planet are the ones who are paying for these oil spills, and no amount of PR spin can change this gravely sad, undeniable fact.

Really, the Arkansas oil spill is an enormous wake-up call we cannot ignore—foreshadowing a huge battle in our midst. As pressure ramps up in the Keystone XL debate, we cannot stand silently on the sidelines. Whether it’s getting in on the social media conversation on Facebook or Twitter, educating your friends and family about what these pipelines really mean for America, and/or getting out there in the streets and resisting—we need you to be heard. The short and long-term future depend on it.

And that’s the honest truth. Without the spin machine.

Over the past few months, Bostonians have demonstrated their concern about the impacts coal has on our communities, health, and economy. BofA treats customers poorly, charges higher fees more often, and likes to foreclose on American families while it repeatedly gets bailed out. In turn, it helps big coal companies like Alpha Natural Resources bail out negligent corporations like Massey Energy, which faced bankruptcy in 2011 after the worst U.S. mining disaster since 1970.

BofA gives the coal industry as a whole several billion dollars in financing each year–while championing 10 billion dollars over a 20 year investment period in largely undisclosed “green initiatives.” It continues to fund the mountaintop removal coal mining that destroys communities and ecosystems, the coal-fired power plants making families sick, and the coal export terminal development that would condemn already overburdened communities to another century of dirty energy infrastructure. Nobody is surprised.

In January activists, organizers, researchers, students, and scholars gathered to discuss Banks, Climate Justice and the Green Economy and BofA’s leading role in the extraction, transport, and burning of coal. In February we came together again in greater numbers and featured local musicians, justice activists, financial advisors, and film makers to dig deeper into BofA’s dirty truth: disregard for our clean energy, green jobs, affordable housing, and quality of life needs. Then last Wednesday, a small but mighty delegation delivered a demand letter to the bank that has been circulating all the while.

In a clear show of respect for RAN and our allies, a notable representative of distinct influence in the bank received our delivery, listened to statements from the two asset managers, the rabbi and the philanthropist in our group, and promised to pass the letter on to its intended recipient, CEO Brian Moynihan. Fifty people from a wide range of distinguished backgrounds had signed on to the letter asking BofA to phase out its funding of coal energy and redirect financing into cleaner, greener energy infrastructure. The icing on the cake was walking out to a larger group of justice allies protesting outside, calling the bank out and putting Boston on the NoCoalBofA map with Charlotte and the Bay Area.

Some of the people who signed may be familiar to you already: Noam Chomsky, Sut Jhally, and Bill McKibben. But who knew that we would receive such support from investment firms, 19 in all? All those who backed this letter understand that the true cost of coal comes on the backs of people who live near the plants, near the mines, and near the railroads that deliver toxic dust clouds over school yards. When these industry leaders come together with community activists to urge the bank to shift its financing, we CAN cut the cash that fuels the industry killing communities and infuse the renewable energy market with increased cash flow.

RAN is part of a growing culture of fossil fuel resistance taking shape in Boston, one that complements and connects with existing resistance power bases here. From campus divestment and keystone pipeline action, to faith community summits and the working groups of 350 Massachusetts, people are rising up and teaming up. They’re linking the dominant energy infrastructure to the struggles of low-income communities and communities of color. Add to this the collaborative progress of the Coal Free Mass coalition in coal plant host communities, the creative persistence of national housing justice leaders at City Life/Vida Urbana and very much alive and networked Occupy affinity groups, and you get a sense of the concurrent activity on the ground to kick our dirty energy habit and manifest climate justice.

A friend recently noted we should thank BofA for being the bank everyone loves to hate, uniting too often divergent movements around a common target. It’s a testament to our movement that people apply their unique experience and knowledge to win these shared fights. This is the network that defines the heart—and muscle—of everything we do at RAN. Whether its people protesting on the street, taking an online action, supporting groups we believe in or signing onto a letter, we are ensuring that our chorus does more than preach—it sings.

The Reagan years represented a dangerous time in global history. Along with the nuclear arms race that eventually bankrupted the already faltering Soviet Union and took the world to the edge of nuclear war, the Reagan Administration provided aid and comfort to numerous brutal dictators and right-wing governments from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East to Central America. Ronald Reagan’s secret wars in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador killed hundreds of thousands in a bloody campaign to end or contain communist influence.

Reagan’s legacy tells us that his political skills as the “great communicator” created a popular united front behind his conservative policies in the United States, but history reflects something very different. During the 1980s, a militant mass non-violent movement, known as the Central American Solidarity Movement, emerged to challenge Reagan’s covert wars in Central America. A critical strategy that the movement developed was the “Pledge of Resistance.” The Pledge of Resistance became an organizing tool that brought together a coalition of peace, religious, feminist and anti-nuclear activists and organizations to actively resist Reagan’s Central American policies.

As the Reagan Administration and its political allies began to escalate its not-so-secret wars in Central America, the Pledge of Resistance began escalations of their own. From 1984 into the early 1990s, the Central American Pledge of Resistance organized thousands into civil disobedience actions, both large and small, in protest of possible invasion of Nicaragua, the funding of the contras and support of death squad governments in El Salvador and other parts of Central America.

Now, we are faced with even more dangerous times.

During the 80’s, these madmen waged secret wars and funded death squads to eradicate other political ideologies, but today we are faced with an insane system based on fossil fuel exploitation shifting the composition of the planet itself for short term profit for a small elite minority. The results of oil, gas and coal extraction and combustion are heading the world further and further down the path of catastrophic climate change. Oil companies in Canada are extracting tar sands oil from an area the size of Florida. Coal companies use mountaintop removal coal mining to destroy over 500 Appalachian Mountains, bury thousands of miles of streams and rivers with mining debris and poison countless communities with air and water pollution.

The latest battle has been around the Keystone XL Pipeline which would run oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast. It would flow billions of gallons of oil in what climatologist James Hanson has called “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” Canadian oil giant, TransCanada has lobbied the U.S. government, spending millions on lobbyists and election year donations to grease palms for it’s dirty project. A few weeks ago, the State Department released a long awaited Environmental Impact Statement which said that the Keystone XL Pipeline would have little or no impact on the environment and climate. It turns out that the report was written by a TransCanada subcontractor.

For the past two years, environmental and climate activists have waged hard fought campaigns against the pipeline. In August, 2011 over 1200 were arrested sitting in at the White House demanding Obama reject it. Since July 2012, the Tar Sands Blockade has led actions against the southern leg of the pipeline (approved early last year by Obama) that runs from Cushing, OK to Houston, TX. The rebellious energy of the blockade has led to dozens of arrests, an 85 day tree-sit and a harsh backlash by TransCanada, Texas law enforcement and courts. Last month, tens of thousands marched in Washington D.C. in the largest climate rally in history.

Now a coalition of groups have called for another Pledge of Resistance, this time to the Keystone XL Pipeline. CREDO, Rainforest Action Network, 350.org, Hip Hop Caucus, Oil Change and others have put out the Pledge and have had over 50,000 sign up to resist the pipeline. Big plans and big movements are in the works.

When Reagan’s presidency ended in January 1989, he had failed to overthrow the Nicaraguan government either by U.S. invasion or through contra military action. The Pledge of Resistance held the line against Reagan’s interventions. While he attempted to bring to full bear the force of the U.S. government and military against the people of Central America (and many died as a result), the Pledge contributed to the thwarting of his ultimate goals. But now we’re faced with nothing less than melting permafrost, rising sea levels and extreme weather.

It’s now time to escalate outside the Beltway and even beyond the pipeline route.

Will you take the Pledge?

UPenn students sit-in at Dow Chemical campus recruitment, 1967

I had the great privilege of representing Rainforest Action Network at the student-led Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels Convergence. Hosted by Swarthmore Mountain Justice, students from around the country gathered for conversations about movement culture and strategy. I was thrilled to find myself amidst a dynamic and emergent group that asked all the right questions: what does student autonomy look like? How can students use their privilege to act in solidarity with extraction communities and people on the front lines of climate impacts? How can students create the signifiers of a resistance culture, the songs and images that can sustain a movement for justice over the long term?

Compared with the campus climate activists of the past, the students of the divestment campaign have a certain edge. Currently united by a tactic consciously culled from the anti-apartheid movement of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the campus divestment movement possesses an awareness of movement theory and history, past and present. The orange felt squares pinned to the divestistas’ chests are a riff from the Quebecois student uprisings, and demonstrate an intentionality and commitment to long-haul organizing that should inspire great hope for this movement. Divestment activists are aware that they stand on the shoulders of preceding justice movements, and look to history to inform their tactics.

All this to say, students and their opposition should prepare for escalation. Time and time again, campus-based movements for justice have embraced tactics that evolved from symbolic, polite appeals to the power structure to direct intervention in the same, especially when those structures are found to be unyielding in the face of student power through “legitimate channels” (say, campus-wide student referendums). In the past, appeals to campus based authorities have tended to broaden and extend to direct confrontation with offending industry itself, in the present case, the fossil fuel industry and its abettors. The potential for such an escalatory evolution in the current divestment milieu is good news for the climate justice movement, and bad news for the fossil fuel industry and their allies.

Already, student divestment organizers are realizing that the pernicious influence of the fossil fuel industry in the university extends far beyond the direct holdings of endowments. In fact, the university system serves the fossil fuel industry in a number of direct ways: by providing legitimacy and greenwashing credentials through corporate partnerships, by offering up university land and research capacity for “innovations” in extraction processes, and, perhaps most insidiously, by churning out an educated and corporate-trained labor force to ride the desks and populate the labs of the fossil fuel machine. In their process of uncovering past movement history, the divestment organizers will surely learn how past movements have intervened in this nexus between university and corporation. Let this post present a partial uncovering of campus recruitment interventions, past and present.

Vietnam-Era Recruitment Disruptions

Notre Dame students block Dow Chemical recruitment, 1969

While there are surely antecedents, the first accounts of student-led campus recruitment interventions as a widespread tactic appear in the late 1960s, several years into the evolution of the campus anti-war movement. Across the country, student resistors coordinated sit-ins and shut downs of both military and corporate recruiters, including Dow Chemical, which developed napalm and profited from its deployment in the villages of Vietnam. In February, 1967, 75 Oberlin students sat in to block US Navy recruiters; by May, the Oberlin sit-ins expanded to over 200 students blocking military recruitment. In the fall of that year, students from California to Maine sat in to block Dow Chemical and General Motors recruitment sessions on the grounds that profiting from war is immoral. In many cases, these protests were successful at completely denying military and corporate recruiters from gaining access to students, sometimes on a semi-permanent basis. On some campuses, including University of Pennsylvania, students expanded their activities to opposition in corporate-university partnerships that produced chemical and biological weapons.

Anti-Apartheid Recruitment Disruptions

Twenty years later, a surging student opposition to South African apartheid and CIA interventions in Central America picked up the recruitment intervention tactic. In 1985, 450 University of Colorado-Boulder students were arrested as they disrupted CIA recruitment interviews. In 1986, 250 anti-apartheid divestment organizers at UCLA occupied the University Placement Center, “where corporations hold recruitment meetings.” As the linked dispatch from the antiapartheid student movement demonstrates, this action was part of a widespread and coordinated (yet autonomous) escalation that expanded beyond university investment boards and extended to direct anti-corporate action. At the UCLA recruitment center, students passed out literature explaining  “they had selected the career-placement office as the focus of their protest because it…represents the University of California’s complicity with apartheid South Africa. It is in this office that companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America and Shell, companies which help continue the oppression of apartheid, recruit students to work for corporate irresponsibility.” Sound familiar to our context?

Millennial Derecruitment

Yale students Stop the Brain Drain, 2011

More recent times have provided examples of coordinated student interference in unjust corporate recruitment. In 2005, the huge Campus Anti-war Network (CAN) marked the second anniversary of the war in Iraq with disruptions and shut-downs of campus military recruitment, spawning actions from coast to coast. CAN organizers incorporated an economic justice analysis into their disruptions, pointing to the disparity between military recruitment on private and public campuses, and presenting students with alternatives to enlistment. Rutgers student organizer Ian Chinich wrote, “We hope that the public and the anti-war movement realize that counter-recruitment is one of the most effective strategies for fighting against the war and is also a moral imperative.” Seven years later, students members of the Occupy movement launched “Stop the Brain Drain,” disrupting and shutting down the recruitment sessions of Wall Street banks defrauding the public. At campuses including Yale, Princeton, Harvard, University of Illinois, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, and UPenn, students organized to kick recruiters off campus and save their peers from joining the ranks of Wall Street’s calculating drones.

Divestment Disruptions

What of the current fossil fuel divestment movement? This semester, I’ve had the pleasure of coordinating with students on ten campuses in five states to disrupt Bank of America’s campus recruitment sessions. As the number one underwriter of the U.S. coal industry, Bank of America profits from and makes possible mountaintop removal mining and coal burning infrastructure. More than any other U.S. financial institution, Bank of America is responsible for coal’s contributions to the climate crisis, having pumped more than $6.4 billion into the industry over the last two years. Thankfully, student divestment organizers are pushing back at campuses like Harvard, UNC-Charlotte, UC Berkeley, NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, Boston College, MIT, Florida International University, and New York University. After an initial round of disruptions on five campuses, including a 30-student deluge in the UC Berkeley career center, student disruptors at MIT and UNC-Charlotte found Bank of America recruiters hiding behind police guard to prevent further disruption (see a video here). At Florida International University, students discovered that campus administrators had been warned by the bank to watch out for “coal protestors.” Last week, at New York University, divestment organizers and their Occupy allies were successful at completely shutting down a Bank of America recruitment session: the bank canceled the entire session just hours before it was set to begin. The takeaway? Disruption of campus recruitment events has a direct impact on the operations of the fossil fuel industrial complex.

Where to from here?

What’s next? The fossil fuel industry and their financial abettors are using your campuses for their greenwashing purposes, and are recruiting our generation for jobs that, in an era of rapidly changing climate, are meaningless.  Bank of America’s recruitment sessions are finished for this semester, but next fall they will be back on your campus, recruiting your peers to work for their profits and at the expense of our planet. I have a vision of the campus divestment network standing up to shut down Bank of America’s recruitment activities, a threat too big for the bank to ignore. This will only be possible if students are willing to embrace their own autonomy, and figure out what degree of interference is possible and appropriate for their context. With our combined power, our movement has the potential to shut down the operations of climate change’s worst villains. Our responsibility to extraction and climate impacted communities demands that we use our position as members of a university community to confront and inhibit bad actors like Bank of America. To do that, our movements must move beyond symbolic protest to directly confront and disrupt the operations of the corporations that are destroying our future. There are many tactics, justice is the goal. For now, you can sign here to tell Bank of America’s CEO to expect resistance on your campus.

A Bank of America recruiter flees divestistas, UC-Berkeley, 2013

This mine cannot be built without the support of the banks that finance Arch. Of particular concern, nine major banks (Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, BBVA, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Union Bank) loaned $250 million dollars to Arch Coal last November, providing a financial lifeline to the coal company.

For these banks, this loan to Arch Coal is just a routine transaction. But for residents of Blair, the stakes are a lot higher. The town used to be a thriving community of 700 people and now has less than 50 residents because of the extreme dangers posed by existing mountaintop removal mines near the town. The people who stayed behind live with dynamite blasts, dust from mine sites, and water that is no longer safe to drink. Arch’s proposed mine would further harm Blair’s residents, while obliterating an irreplaceable piece of history. (See this video from the Blair Mountain Heritage Alliance for interviews with residents of Blair on the impacts of mountaintop removal on the community.)

Six of the banks on the Arch loan have policies that prohibit financing companies that violate human rights. If these policy commitments were working as they should have been, the Arch loan should have raised several red flags due to several human rights concerns, including as the following:

• The potential water, noise, and air pollution impacts from the mine will threaten the human rights to water and health of Blair’s residents.
• Arch’s past mining operations near Blair that, according to testimony of Arch officials, “would make life so miserable for many Blair residents that they would want to sell their homes and move” raise concerns about the human right to housing.
• Human rights norms also proscribe the intentional destruction of cultural heritage sites such as the Blair Mountain battlefield.

So will Arch’s planned mine violate human rights, even though it is in the United States? Due to systemic regulatory failure on the part of state and federal environmental protection agencies, the risk of human rights violations from mountaintop removal mining remains acute. And Arch’s environmental and community relations track record at its existing mines in Blair, combined with sworn statements by Arch employees such as “It is easier to mine coal without people around” cast doubt on Arch’s willingness or capacity to respect human rights norms.

For Arch’s lenders, Arch’s planned mine raises serious concerns: these banks failed to flag a transaction that was deeply flawed on environmental and human rights grounds. Arch’s lenders should, at a minimum, overhaul or establish lending policies and due diligence processes that are robust, verifiable, and capable of screening out similarly egregious transactions in the future. For unless they are implemented effectively, lending policy commitments are merely paper promises.

As we conclude in the update, this transaction should serve as a warning that respect for international human rights norms is no longer “optional” for banks: The U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in 2011 established a global baseline for the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, which Arch and its lenders have failed to meet.

Yesterday in Tyler County, TX, a pipeline operated by Sunoco Logistics sprung a leak and spilled 20,000 gallons (or 550 barrels) of oil into local East Texas waterways. Deep East Texas is known for its creeks and lakes, freshwater eco-systems and aquifers that provide water to the eastern part of the state, including mega-cities Dallas and Houston. But oil companies treat these forests and waterways as collateral damage.

Quality control requires that oil companies use “leak detection systems.” Those systems reported nothing until local residents began to report that oil was in the water. (Ummm… so, how do you not detect a 20,000 gallons oil leak?)

Sunoco’s spill is merely a prologue for leaks and spills that might come once the southern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline is completed.

The site of the spill is not far from a Tar Sands Blockade (TSB) action in Diboll, TX in January.  It’s only a few hour away from TSB’s tree blockade that prevented construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline for 85 days.

The Keystone XL itself will cross major waterways such as the Neches, Red, Angelina and Sabine rivers as well as the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which provides drinking water for more than ten million Texans. The pipeline route will run near the Big Thicket National Wildlife Preserve in southeast Texas. Big Thicket is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the country and is full of bogs, lagoons, plants, trees and a variety of wildlife including the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

In a sense, local Texas landowners and environmentalists that began blockading the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline foretold this story. TSB continues to tell a story trying to stop environmental disasters like this with grassroots organizing and spectacular direct actions as their message delivery devices. The courts and cops, owned by companies like TransCanada, throw everything at them to stop the campaign and now local communities and eco-systems are paying the price.

Last month, a Tar Sands Blockader locked himself inside an oil and gas industry conference in Houston and decried the lackluster construction and maintenance of these pipelines.

While local pipelines continue to poison communities and eco-systems, TransCanada continues to move forward with its massive Keystone XL Pipeline.

This only begs the question “when will the next Texas oil spill happen?”

“Now that we have seen what the Tar Sands in Alberta looks like, this is not about the pipeline going through our farm. This is about Alberta, about the world. ”

This week tens of thousands of people have arrived in Washington D.C. to defend the climate and demonstrate their opposition to the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline in what has become the largest rally on climate change in U.S. history.

What’s the issue?

The pipeline is a 1700-mile, $7-billion project that would bring 700,000 barrels of carbon-heavy tar sands oil every day from the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada to the Gulf Coast for global export. Far from bringing America energy security, as its proponents claim, the KXL pipeline undermines action on climate change and keeps America hooked on dirty oil.

Why protest now?

In 2012 extreme weather pushed climate change back onto the U.S. political agenda. In his inauguration speech, President Obama promised to “respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations”. He repeated this sentiment again last week in the State of the Union address. It’s good to hear strong language on climate from the President, but it’s strong action that will make a differecet for our children and future generations. And the KXL pipeline is the first test for Obama’s new climate strategy.

The pipeline is not only a climate issue. Its proposed route slices right through Middle America, from the Canadian border down to the Texas coast. This raises many concerns about pipeline safety and land-use. Among the crowds in DC are contingents from the states that are most directly impacted, including land-owners who are opposed to the pipeline coming through their properties.

I asked several of these folks why they had traveled all the way to D.C. to speak out. Each had their own powerful answer, and all made the clear connection between the issues in their own backyards and the urgency of stopping the pipeline for all of our futures.

“I’m here today because my family farm lies on the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. It was homesteaded in 1864, we have huge pride in that farm. But now that we have seen what the Tar Sands in Alberta looks like, this is not about the pipeline going through our farm. This is about Alberta, about the world. I have kids and if I don’t stand up for this, their lives will be hugely affected. That’s why I’m doing everything I can, rattling every chain.” – Jenni Harrington, Nebraska

“Tar Sands mining is the most ecologically destructive project on this continent. Stopping KXL is a necessary condition, not only for life in my region, but for life on this planet itself.” – Grace Cagle, Texas

“I’m here to support communities who will be impacted by this toxic pipeline and to challenge the President to take definitive action in protection of our future.” – Cherri Foyntlin, Louisiana

Not everyone could make it to a climate protest today, but we can all speak out on this critical issue. Please stand with these brave communities and take action by adding your voice to the masses who are urging President Obama to reject the Keystone pipeline.

This is the first time in 25 years that I’ve committed an act of civil disobedience. Because this moment, with the threat of inaction in the face of climate change, demands something more.

Will you stand with me? Will you take five minutes right now to ask President Obama to make climate change a priority this year, starting by putting an end to the Keystone pipeline? And then ask five of your friends to do the same?

I need your helpto show the president that the 40+ of us out here today are backed by a national movement that is more determined than ever to see action on climate change.

As NASA scientist James Hansen, who is out here with me today, has said: “The Keystone pipeline spells game over for the climate.” If we don’t act, this massive 1700-mile pipeline would allow some of the world’s dirtiest oil to travel from Canada’s tar sands through America’s heartland—jeopardizing our water, our air, and our climate.

We need to keep up the pressure on all sides—in the streets and online. Please send an email to President Obama right now reminding him that this climate movement is only getting louder.

The entrenched, powerful fossil fuel industry has kept our government from taking comprehensive action to address the climate crisis. But we’ve outmatched them at every turn with the Keystone XL pipeline.

It’s the actions of people like you and me that have stalled pipeline construction for more than a year. This is a dramatic political shift. It tells me we’re on the right track and need to keep it up.

To be clear, putting an end to the Keystone XL pipeline is just our first demand. When I say this is the year for climate action, I mean it. This is the year to push to limit carbon pollution from our nation’s dirty power plants, move beyond coal and natural gas, and fire up our clean energy economy.

As we’ve seen with the Keystone pipeline, it takes strategic, powerful grassroots opposition from all sides, spanning from First Nations in Alberta to farmers in Nebraska—from loud online actions to the 40+ of us at the White House here today. I believe that massive grassroots activism is what it takes to make change in this country. If you agree, join me today, and let’s keep it up!