Above photo: Protests in front of Citi’s headquarters in Manhattan on June 10, the first day of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street campaign. Summer of Heat/Luigi W. Morris.
A new climate campaign is testing whether relentless civil disobedience can stop Citi from backing the fossil fuel industry.
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.
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.
It is an experiment: Can sustained disruption play a major role in toppling support for the fossil fuel industry from a big bank like Citi? For now, with the campaign ongoing, the jury is still out. So, we will keep hammering away at Citi in the coming months and, if need be, years. But in order to maximize our chances of winning, we are organizing with a few things in mind.
First of all, we know it is not about just being disruptive: It’s about a wide range of constituencies being disruptive. With only one kind of visible activist, we could easily be written off as a radical fringe. That’s why the campaign has intentionally organized many different communities and built themes into each week that invite participation and leadership from those communities, including weeks that were focused on Gulf South solidarity, migrants and displaced peoples, faith, youth and elders.
During Gulf South Solidarity week, over 130 predominantly Black and brown community leaders from states like Texas and Louisiana joined protests to shine a light on petrochemical production and liquified natural gas buildout, which is the area of U.S. fossil fuel expansion ramping up most rapidly at the moment. During Migrants and Displaced Peoples week, migrant-led groups organized actions to connect struggles around climate impacts in members’ homelands with what is happening here in New York City, where working-class immigrant communities often experience the worst impacts of floods and extreme heat. These are two examples of how, when it comes to the battle of the story — in which we strive to convey the urgency to act and the righteousness of our cause — who is participating is a key part of our narrative power.
We also know that to sustain disruption, we need more people, period. That is why we have employed many recruitment methods. We have partnered with community-based organizations to activate existing membership bases, and with grassroots groups and NGOs small and large to send email blasts to recruit supporters into mass calls and meetings. We have hired campaign fellows and activated volunteers to phone, text bank and flier, sticker and put up posters.
And in addition to a traditional earned media strategy, we have made viral videos and ran digital ads to reach new audiences. Blending organizing orientations, we have moved and developed leaders through formal organizational structures, more informal grassroots activist networks and digital supporter lists, and used cold in-person and online methods to reach entirely new audiences.
Recruitment has certainly not been without its challenges, however. The upcoming presidential election has unsurprisingly consumed media airwaves and public attention. New York’s Democratic primaries in late June captured significant local activist energy as well, especially with high-profile races of national significance like Jamaal Bowman’s primary fight. Such is the inescapable challenge of running a non-electoral campaign during a major election year — especially one with such high stakes.
Another factor affecting recruitment is the fight to end the genocide in Gaza, which has rightfully captured a massive amount of grassroots energy and some institutional organizing capacity. We are in the middle of a movement moment around Palestinian liberation (one which had not begun yet when we conceived of this campaign last September). As people of conscience and as anti-imperialist organizers who understand the power of intersectional campaigning, we have organized Palestinian solidarity actions as part of the Summer of Heat.
Our main target makes it easy to connect the dots: Citi is the largest foreign bank operating in Israel, and has on numerous occasions provided financing to the Israeli government as well as to weapons manufacturers. Combining the fights against fossil fuels and genocide alongside partners like the Banking on Solidarity campaign has helped our recruitment efforts intersect with organic movement currents. It has also allowed us to play our part to hold U.S.-based institutions accountable for their role in genocide and occupation.
Despite these recruitment challenges, we have built a beautiful multi-generational, multi-racial and cross-class community. It comprises a highly-engaged campaign base of several hundred people who frequently join actions. There is also a core of a few dozen dedicated leaders who have played critical roles in the campaign, including attending many actions and risking arrest multiple times; stepping into action planning, speaking to the press, art making, media production and other leadership roles; and recruiting other people to join. Some of the most involved leaders were brand new to the climate movement when they joined this campaign, and all of them are committed to relentlessly throwing down this summer and beyond to win the future we need and deserve.
And how is it going with Citi so far? Campaign leaders have had one negotiating conversation with Citi representatives, during which Citi did not budge an inch. We made the decision to share details about the meeting with reporters at Bloomberg who wrote about the conversation and described it as “a stalemate.” Since then, Citi staff have been dodging our requests for further negotiations.
But we do have clear signs that the company is having to respond to us, and that the campaign is impacting employee morale. Three weeks into the campaign, Bloomberg reported that “Citigroup [has] urged staffers not to get drawn into altercations with protesters targeting the bank’s New York headquarters, a sign that activists’ protracted campaign is beginning to wear on employees and executives alike.” Despite these company efforts, individual employees are starting to lose their cool in incidents of verbal threats and physical abuse that mainstream press have begun reporting on.
Additionally, as our sustained effort has started to impact our target, Citi has begun to engage in repressive tactics against the campaign. These include Citi and the NYPD targeting campaigners with unwarranted arrests. Most egregiously, six weeks into the campaign, a senior member of Citi’s security team made false allegations against two campaign leaders to the NYPD, resulting in both receiving trumped up charges and restraining orders that prevent them from going back to Citi’s headquarters to protest.
The two organizers then returned three weeks later to defy this attempt to quell peaceful protest in the most nonviolent and non-threatening manner: The crowd arrived slowly, singing, and one of the targeted activists, a 63-year-old grandfather and professional musician, brought his cello to perform Bach in the pouring rain. Citi had both organizers arrested almost immediately, continuing their commitment to repressive tactics.
Heightening tensions between protesters and employees or police and increasingly repressive backlash are no guarantee that a campaign will eventually win. But they are signs that an effort is having a real impact. After all, the point of disruptive, confrontational civil disobedience is to elicit responses from the target and force their attention toward the protesters and their demands, rather than whatever the opponent’s leadership would rather be dealing with. And targets do not respond to campaigns that are ineffective and fail to occupy their attention.
So back to our experiment: can sustained disruption play a major role in toppling support for the fossil fuel industry from a big bank like Citi? Two and a half months in, we have not had enough time to sufficiently test the hypothesis that our strategy can move Citi, but the initial signs are very promising. We certainly plan to continue with these disruptions, with an eye toward scaling up protests to be even larger and last even longer next year.
The Summer of Heat on Wall Street campaign is, and will continue to be, many things. It is an organizing project that seeks to recruit and empower many more people and groups to step into escalated risk and disruption. Far more of us need to confront the fossil fuel industry’s biggest backers if we want to live free from climate chaos. It is a storytelling project around the moral imperative of the world’s economic elite to act in this perilous moment, and the power of mass nonviolent civil disobedience to change the conditions of our lives on this planet. And finally, it is an exercise in courage and hope — a way of raising our ambitions as we face losing everything that we love, but still have time left to fight with all that we have.