No really, they are everywhere. Over 1,000 Citi branches across the country. Plus Citi Financials, plus Citi home mortgages, plus lots of other stuff. Over 6,000 Bank of America banking centers. They are in almost every state in the union with the biggest retail presence in the country.
These two companies are the #1 and #4 top financiers of coal. Citi funds coal twice more than it’s next closest competitor. Bank of America is the banker for Peabody Energy, the biggest mining company in the world, and Massey Energy, the “poster child of mountaintop removal.”
You can turn over a piece of coal in this country without finding a Citi or Bank of America branch underneath. If we’re in a struggle to save the climate and communities devastated by coal extraction and combustion than these two companies are the top perpetrators.
Not everyone concerned has the companies responsible for mountaintop removal and coal fired power plants in their towns and cities, but you can always find banks. With the wave of bank consolidations over the past couple of decades you can find lots of Citis and Bank of Americas.
This is an opportunity to localize and decentralize the coal finance campaign. Already Mountain Justice, Rising Tide, Southern Energy Network and heaps of other groups have been putting heat on the banks. Now we can do it even more.
You can sign up online and download our complete Adopt-a-Branch toolkit that has everything you need to get started. Since Friday, we’ve gotten almost 25 branches adopted and we’re getting more all the time.
Once you’ve “adopted” your branch, or branches, you can begin a local campaign of letter-writing, petitioning, leafleting, picketing, creative actions and educating the branch manager, employees and customers.
If we’re going to avert the worst effects of climate change, we need to get these banks to stop funding coal and start funding renewable energy now. And to do that we need to show them that people everywhere care about the climate and want action now!
Subscribe by Email!
Subscribe by RSS!
Share on Facebook
Hey Guys,
First, let me say that it’s good to let Citi know about the effects of their financial decisions.
Your case would be even stronger if you could show that Citi gave preferential loan terms to coal for some dubious reasons. For instance, if Citi’s people were relatively less concerned about the risk of carbon prices being implemented. But this would be difficult.
But I think the restructuring–not what happened during the 90s–of the electric utility industry is what really needs to be done to prevent more coal. When comparing cogeneration, combined heat and power, and energy efficiency upgrades to the price of coal-generated energy, COAL IS NOT THE LOW PRICE LEADER. This is even more true if we look at the risk of a price on carbon.
So the US is about to embark on a new wave of power plant construction, and we don’t want this to be coal. If regulations permitted low-cost producers to interconnect to the grid, we could avoid locking coal into our baseload for the next 30 years. If we can achieve this, CITI be financing mass energy efficiency retrofits and CHP, rather than coal. And it will do so purely on profitability grounds.
Sean Casten has some good ideas about this. His Grist articles are here: http://gristmill.grist.org/user/Sean%20Casten
Scott, thanks so much for putting this “adoption” kit together. Yall are rocking. Even thought your far away from Appalachian, you sure are working hard on behalf of us!
If you havent already, please consider joining the iLoveMountains.org Bloggers Challenge and adding a WIDGET to ItsGettingHotInHere and RAN.org. To date, 460 bloggers have take the challenge!
http://www.iLoveMountains.org/bloggers-challenge
Again, thanks, and take care. - - Benji@iLoveMountains.org