Elderly people protest against banks that finance oil companies – 03/24/2023 – Environment

They were parents, grandparents, aunts and great-uncles, ranging in age from 50 to 80 and up, and together they braved freezing temperatures to protest — and rock — all night long.

Bundled in long underwear, padded coats, layered knit hats, sleeping bags, and fortified by cookies mailed in by a well-wisher, dozens of gray-haired protesters sat in rocking chairs in front of four benches in downtown Washington for 24 hours, in a national protest considered the biggest climate action ever taken by older people.

Calling themselves the Rocking Chair Rebellion, they participated in more than 100 climate actions held across the United States on Tuesday (21) by Third Act, a protest group for people 60 years and older, co-founded by the author. and climate activist Bill McKibben.

Its targets were Chase, a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America, the biggest investors in fossil fuel projects, according to a 2022 report by the Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups. Collectively, the four banks have invested more than $1 trillion between 2016 and 2021 in oil and gas.

“This is the world we helped create,” said Katie Ries, 66, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sitting in a rocking chair outside Chase’s downtown Washington branch, just after an unusually cold Tuesday morning.

“When you put that temporary discomfort into perspective, against why we’re here, what we’re facing, it pales, it fades away.”

Formed in 2021, Third Act has about 50,000 members on its mailing list, according to McKibben, including some centenarians.

While the group has staged protests before, sometimes with signs that read “fossils against fossil fuels”, they said Tuesday’s actions were the biggest yet, with participants motivated in part by the conviction that it is unfair to attribute the responsibility for solving the climate crisis to the younger generations who will bear the brunt of it.

“For all their energy, intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to make changes on the scale we need and in the time we have,” said McKibben, 62, speaking Tuesday morning ahead of a climate rally against large benches in Franklin Park in Washington.

“We all vote, we end up with most of our society’s resources. If we want Washington and Wall Street to change, it’s going to take some people with thinning hair like mine.”

The protests came on the heels of the latest dire report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicts that over the next decade global average temperatures are likely to rise by 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. , making catastrophic weather events harder for humans and other life to bear.

To avoid the worst, countries must cut greenhouse gases in half by 2030, the report said, and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the early 2050s.

However, in 2022, carbon emissions hit record highs and major oil producers reaped record profits of $220 billion.

While major oil-financing banks are also investing in renewable energy sources, several protesters have dismissed such efforts as “greenwashing”.

“They’re running ads on TV, a lot of big oil companies, about doing a lot of environmentally friendly things, but they’re doing record oil exploration,” said Fred Solowey, 71. “And there are these false offsets that they use a lot to fake that they’re going to be carbon neutral. It’s a lie.”

The aim of the seniors was to incite people to withdraw their money from the oil-funding banks and to stir up the conscience of bank executives.

“I think anyone who’s not trying to do anything is complicit,” said Pam Murphy, 64, as she sat outside the Chase branch on Tuesday, in front of a sign that read “This bank finances climate chaos.”

In a rocking chair sat Susan Flashman, 68, a retired electrician who lives in Mount Rainier, Maryland. “We’re the activists, we’re the boomers,” Flashman said. “People our age are furious because nobody is doing anything. So here we are.”

Most of the rocking chairs (there were about 50 in all) were assembled by Lisa Finn, 57, and her husband, who lives outside Alexandria, Va., and hosted a painting party for the chairs before loading them into a rented truck.

Along with the demonstration in Franklin Park (speakers included Ebony Twilley Martin, co-executive director of Greenpeace USA; and Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club), there were marches with banners, giant puppets and at least one “shofar” ( kind of kosher scream), and the blockade with more rocking chairs from Wells Fargo and Chase. One protester was arrested for using paint in the street, organizers said.

Before speaking at the rally, Jealous said pressure from older activists should make banks take notice.

“For banks, this is a very worrying sign,” he said. “They can write off young people, they don’t see them as having a lot of money right now. They know these people do.”

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}