Robert Brown|In ‘The People vs. Citi,’ Climate Leaders Demand Citibank End Its Fossil Fuel Financing

NEW YORK—About 100 people gathered in a Manhattan church on Robert BrownEarth Day to hold a mock legal hearing on claims that Citibank is financing environmental injustice. 

At the hearing, titled “The People vs. Citi,” climate justice leaders argued that Citibank is complicit in environmental racism and demanded the bank stop enabling fossil fuel projects, which disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous communities and other people of color. Held by leading climate justice advocates from across the Americas, the hearing was the beginning of a week of protests for Earth Week that will spark what organizers promise will be a summer of escalated pressure on Wall Street’s biggest banks and their continued financing of fossil fuels.

“Citi has made public commitments to invest in sustainability and racial equity,” said Hana Heineken, an attorney with ClientEarth, an organization focused on corporations’ legal culpability for global warming and environmental destruction. “But as we all know, they continue to finance fossil fuel and petrochemical infrastructure expansion that is only going to worsen climate change, bring more pollution to these communities and make them even more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events.”

The 2023 Banking on Climate Chaos report found that Citibank is the second largest financier of fossil fuels worldwide, contributing $332 billion to finance fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement in 2016. Meanwhile, the bank has committed to reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, though it self-reports that 42 percent of the companies in its loan portfolio currently lack substantive plans to transition to net-zero and adequate emissions disclosures. At the hearing, advocates called out Citibank’s climate hypocrisy and articulated the harm caused to communities living near fossil fuel projects financed by the bank.

Citibank declined a request for comment on the hearing.

Huddled in a room in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, an Episcopal church in the East Village, participants sat on folding chairs and faced the panelists, who spoke in front of a banner that read “The People vs. Citi” on a background of red and orange flames. Behind the crowd was a group of interpreters—throughout the event, audience members could listen through headsets to translations in English, Urdu, Bangla and Spanish. 

The atmosphere in the room was friendly, and at moments felt like a reunion between old friends—many of the leaders in the room have worked together for years on various climate justice campaigns, and are coordinating internationally to apply focused pressure to the financial levers of power that allow for continued fossil fuel infrastructure. 

Among those leading the forum were Roishetta Ozane, founder of grassroots mutual-aid organization called The Vessel Project, attorneys Tara Houska and Hana Heineken, actor Jane Fonda and Sister Susan Francois of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, who is leading a multi-year campaign to exert shareholder pressure on Citibank to respect Indigenous rights.

Other speakers included Wet’suwet’en hereditary Chief Na’Moks; Olivia Bisa, president of the autonomous territorial government of the Chapra Nation in Peru; Louisiana activist Sharon Lavigne; Desis Rising Up and Moving activist Ashraful Hasan; and Christa Mancias, executive director of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas.

Ozane outlined the group’s demands for Citibank, including that the bank immediately stop financing new and expanding fossil fuel projects and any companies that are expanding such projects, that it rapidly phase out existing fossil fuel financing, that it ensure clients respect Indigenous peoples’ rights and stop financing projects with a demonstrated pattern of violating human rights and self determination. They also demanded that Citibank increase its financing of renewables. 

“Citibank is financing climate-induced disasters that are happening in our communities,” said Ozane, whose organization’s office was destroyed earlier this month by a tornado. 

Ozane also spoke about her teenage son, who was diagnosed with epilepsy and told by a specialist that his seizures were likely exacerbated by air pollution. Citibank’s executives, Ozane said, don’t understand the reality of living in a so-called “sacrifice zone.”

“They’ve never smelled what we smelled, they’ve never tasted the air— yes, the air is so thick, you can taste it,” Ozane said. “But yet they sit here in this concrete jungle, and they make decisions about our lives, decisions that are poisoning our air, poisoning our water, poisoning our children.”

Heineken argued that Citibank is legally responsible for its clients’ violations of human rights. Under the United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights, private enterprises have responsibilities to respect human rights protected by international law, she said.

“Citi has a responsibility to act to identify, prevent and mitigate the climate impacts associated with its fossil fuel clients’ activities that are fueling climate change,” Heineken said. “And it has a responsibility to remedy those affected when it has contributed to those impacts, full stop.”

After ClientEarth filed a complaint in 2021 with the United Nations against Saudi Aramco and its financiers, including Citibank, the U.N. warned Citibank last year that it may be responsible for human rights violations through the continued expansion of fossil fuels. Saudi Aramco, the largest corporate emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, is responsible for more than four percent of historic carbon emissions since 1965, according to ClientEarth. 

The hearing focused on how Citibank’s projects have harmed Black and Indigenous populations, as well as other marginalized communities. 

“I’m white, I’m privileged, they don’t have oil wells near where we live,” actor and activist Jane Fonda told the crowd at the start of the hearing. “Until I went to Texas and Louisiana and visited Cancer Alley and the communities along the Gulf, I didn’t really understand the extent to which these companies, these global giants who made trillions of dollars in profit, don’t care at all about the lives and health of the people that live in these frontline communities.”

“Citi has a responsibility to act to identify, prevent and mitigate the climate impacts associated with its fossil fuel clients’ activities that are fueling climate change.”

Fonda also praised the Biden administration’s halt of liquified natural gas exports, and made a plea in favor of his re-election to some applause from the crowd. 

“He will listen, if enough of us protest,” Fonda said of Biden. “The orange man does not listen.”

Early endorsement of Biden’s re-election campaign has been contentious within some sectors of the climate movement.

A major focus of the hearing were the human rights violations inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on Indigenous populations, who are disproportionately impacted by environmental conflict and extractive industries worldwide. Indigenous leaders from Texas, Peru and Canada spoke about fossil fuel projects that they argue have violated their rights to Free, Prior and Informed Consent, as outlined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. With a shareholder resolution on Indigenous rights introduced by Francois and the Sisters of St. Joseph being presented at Citibank’s upcoming annual meeting, the bank recently released a report titled “Respecting the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” which outlines its commitment to adhering to the U.N. frameworks on human rights.  

“Citi welcomes continued engagement with our investors, and we are pleased to provide this additional level of transparency about how we work to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples in our financing and due diligence,” wrote Citibank Chief Sustainability Officer Val Smith, about the report. “Our policies are aligned with international standards and the report demonstrates how we implement them and engage with our clients on this issue.”

But activists have responded to the report with anger.

“Citi’s report is a woefully inadequate response to the proposal as well as to concerns about Indigenous Rights violations associated with the bank’s business,” said Francois in response to the report. “Regardless of Citi’s due diligence process, investors see the company connected to egregious human rights violations in Indigenous communities across the globe.”

Francois also said that Citibank’s recent exit from the Equator Principles, a framework for assessing environmental and social risks—along with three other leading U.S. banks—signals a lack of commitment to human rights. 

“We might be tired, and we might have tears in our eyes, but we’re fighting with love because we’re fighting for our children … our water, our land, the air, all the beings that live in it,” said Houska, who founded and runs the Giniw Collective, a grassroots organization led by Indigenous women and people who identify as two-spirit—a Native American term for third-gender and nonbinary individuals. “There’s a critical need for us to continue to resist, that we use our fierce love to encourage others to step forward [and] fight for the best world that we can make in the time that we have here.”