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NEW YORK—Climate demonstrators blocked entrances to Citibank’s headquarters in Manhattan at the start of the workday on Wednesday and Thursday, part of a series of Earth Week actions pressuring the bank to end its financing of fossil fuels. On both mornings, it took the New York Police Department less than 10 minutes to start making arrests.

Climate activists, citing Citibank as the second largest financier of fossil fuels in the world, are engaged in a multi-year campaign to pressure the bank to stop financing oil, gas and coal projects. The week’s protests follow a mock environmental justice hearing at a New York church on Monday, where advocates spoke about the health harms and human rights violations of Citibank-financed fossil fuel projects in Peru, Canada and domestically. The New York demonstration was timed alongside actions in Seoul, South Korea, Melbourne, Australia, Jakarta, Indonesia, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Dallas that also targeted Citibank’s financing of coal, oil, natural gas and military projects.

At about 8:15 Wednesday morning, activists holding four large white banners that together read “Stop Funding Fossil Fuels” blocked the main entrance to Citibank’s headquarters while smaller groups of demonstrators stood outside other entrances to the building. Police began taking protesters into custody at 8:30 and arrested approximately 33 activists for disorderly conduct at Wednesday’s protest, according to activists and the office of NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information. 

As an NYPD officer zip-tied her hands behind her back, climate activist Rachel Rivera, a board member for New York Communities for Change and a hurricane Sandy survivor, said she was participating in civil disobedience “to let Citi know that they need to stop climate change.” 

“Stop funding fossil fuels,” she said.

Protesters sang, chanted and gave speeches until about 9:15.

On Thursday, police arrested 20 activists, some of whom, like Rivera, were arrested two days in a row. 

“We’ve tried polite petitions for years, we’ve had pleading talks with the banks,” said Alice Hu, a climate campaigner at New York Communities for Change who was among those arrested on Thursday. “They haven’t listened to us, they’ve ignored us, so now we are resorting to the last, best tactic we have, which is mass, sustained nonviolent disruption to actually get their attention, to actually force them to respond to us.”

Why Citibank?

The movement for fossil free banking has targeted an array of major banks, including JP Morgan, the top financier of fossil fuels. But this Earth Week, campaigners are laser-focused on Citibank, which they see as a strategic target that could potentially be influenced to refrain from investing in fossil fuels and could subsequently influence other banks, Hu said.

“We believe that Citibank can be the first to move, they can be the hero in this story,” Hu said.

Hu cited the bank’s public commitments to sustainability, which include transitioning to “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and chief executive officer Jane Fraser’s apparent interest in addressing climate change. Fraser announced the bank’s net-zero commitment on her first day as CEO. 

Still, Citibank and Fraser have consistently advocated for “responsible retirement of carbon-intensive assets rather than divestment.” The bank’s leadership has not publicly expressed an interest in ending its financing of fossil fuels, and has repeatedly asserted that transitioning to a “net zero economy” will be a nonlinear process, advocating for a “balanced approach” to addressing climate needs while also continuing to finance energy companies, including those in fossil fuels.

In an emailed statement on the protest, Citibank reiterated this framing.

“Citi respects the advocacy of climate activists, and we are supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy through our net zero commitments and our $1 trillion sustainable finance goal,” the statement read. “While we respect the right to protest, activists do not have the right to prevent people from entering our building. The activists were given the opportunity to protest peacefully but they chose to continue to prevent people from coming to work. The NYPD responded and restored access to our building for our employees and clients.”

During the protests an automated graphic on the side of the headquarters building boasted that water bottle filling stations at the bank avoided the use of 168,171 plastic water bottles in 2021.

Campaigners have said that, since 2016, Citibank has provided $332 billion in fossil fuel financing, and calculate that the bank has given $1.85 billion in financing to oil and gas operations in the Amazon since 2009 and $1.78 billion in financing to ConocoPhillips, the company behind the contentious Willow Project. 

Citi did not respond to requests for comment specifically on these numbers, but has released its own disclosures using different methodologies.

A line of hundreds of Citi employees waited to enter the office in a line stretching through the building’s large courtyard and to each end of the block. Some attempting to get inside the building declined to comment on the demonstration, although one employee, who did not provide their name, said they did not understand what the demonstration was about, and that they had not heard that Citibank was the second largest fossil fuel financing bank in the world.

Demonstrators included representatives from high-profile climate action organizations like Extinction Rebellion, Third Act, Climate Defenders, Stop the Money Pipeline and Scientists Rebellion. 

Griffin Gowdy, a biomedical researcher with Scientists Rebellion, said Wednesday that participating in climate action is a responsibility for scientists. 

“It feels less than productive to just continue doing research in a world that isn’t listening to it,” Gowdy said. “I think that this is in my job description, this is one of my responsibilities as a scientist, is to communicate the science.” 

Protests Across the City and Rapid Law Enforcement

The Citibank protests, right in the middle of Earth Week, come as New York City is awash with daily anti-war demonstrations against the government’s continued funding of Israel’s military, including highly publicized multi-day encampments at Columbia University and New York University. According to data provided by the office of the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information, the NYPD has made more than 490 arrests at demonstrations since April 17 alone, including more than 100 at Columbia University and New York University each and 208 at an anti-war Passover seder in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. 

On Thursday, officers with the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a unit of the broader department that was formed in 2015 specifically for counter-terrorism and the policing of political protests, began issuing arrest warnings just 6 minutes after the protesters began blocking the building’s main entrance. New York Communities for Change campaigns director Alicé Nascimento said Wednesday that she was surprised at how quickly the NYPD began arresting protesters after demonstrators at a similar action in September of last year held the space for nearly two hours before getting arrested.

“The NYPD has been pretty violent and pretty steadfast in the removal of protesters,” Nascimento said, referencing protests elsewhere in the city. “I wonder if that mentality is also applying to protests of this kind, because this has never happened before and we’ve been doing this a long time.”

Some of the climate demonstrators on Wednesday and Thursday said they were inspired by the dedication of students organizing encampments to protest the war in Gaza. 

“As a proud Columbia alumna who got radicalized partly through being a student organizer there, I think the ongoing student encampments in different parts of the country right now show that when people take up space and put their bodies on the line, they can get the most powerful institutions to respond to them,” Hu said. “We are very inspired by them, we are very inspired by the whole history of nonviolent civil disobedience in this country, and we know that if we can sustain this and do this again and again we can also get Citibank to cut off financing for the fossil fuel industry that is literally killing us, and killing our futures.”