Letter from our director: Banking and emotional rewards

Photo: Lisa Goulet

Dear Friends,

I’m proud to tell you that the Climate Museum has moved its money out of a bank that finances fossil fuels and into Beneficial State, a fossil-fuel-free bank that invests in local communities and renewable energy.

It feels great. 

We started on this path while creating our exhibition Taking Action (pictured above) in early 2019. After learning about the remarkably large and negative role played by major banks in the climate crisis—a role that is underreported and thus underrecognized—we decided that one of our curated civic actions for the show’s visitors would be to “call your bank” to urge disinvestment from the fossil fuel industry.

Now we join a growing movement of banking consumers large and small going one step further to switch our banks, and we hope you will do so, too. 

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We’ve launched a toolkit for formally registering your concerns about fossil fuel financing, spreading the word on social media, and, when you’re ready, switching to a fossil-fuel-free bank. Find facts, tips, resources, analysis, and phone numbers here.

The toolkit includes ways to check on your bank’s policies on fossil fuel financing. While all large American banks are financing fossil fuels at a staggering scale, you can make informed decisions about yours. Chase—my personal bank for many years—is the worst, by a lot.

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The background: Science tells us that to stabilize the climate, we must immediately prioritize the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. We must wind down dirty energy and build up clean energy fast—cutting fossil fuel burning in half by 2030.

What’s needed to carry this out? Two things. (1) The renewable energy technologies we already have and (2) decision-making that is logically and ethically sound.

Our major banks have turned away from that sound decision-making. When the Paris Accord was signed in late 2015, these banks lined up one by one to declare their support for climate progress. But what actions did they take following these pronouncements? $3.8 trillion in fossil fuel financing.

Imagine that capital carefully but quickly shifting direction over to renewable energy. In just five years, we’d have made huge progress on the infrastructural and job components of a just transition to a stabilized climate, and we’d be on a pathway to decarbonizing the economy.

Banking leaders ought to be able to recognize all of this. But it’s hard to break with business as usual. Quite apart from conscious motivation, biases build up and cloud perception. In short, regardless of subjective intentions, our banks need an assist from us, from you, to be reminded that the time is now to make a change. Like museums, banks only work if they hold the public trust. That’s a commodity that can be maintained or lost, regained or destroyed.

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The upshot: Financial institutions don’t deserve our trust or our business when they are bankrolling our destruction. 

The Climate Museum has been among those previously applauding big banks’ positive moves, such as ending funding for Arctic drilling. But humanity is now definitively out of time for us to coo over baby steps. Nor should we applaud sustainability announcements—such as those banks publicized for Earth Day last month—that fail to address the basic problem: the massive, continuing free flow of capital into an unrepentantly harmful and dishonest industry with a singular capacity to wreck our civilization. 

Instead, we’ll applaud when the banks exercise their immense power, do the hard work of breaking with business as usual, and take concrete steps to disinvest from the fossil fuels whose particulate matter alone kills 8.7 million people per year—more than twice the death toll of covid since December 2019. (This is one fifth of all human deaths per year.)

In the meantime, we’re taking our business to Beneficial State, one of the many options you can find in our toolkit. Our new bank is fossil-fuel-free, invests in the communities in its West Coast catchment area, and offers a complete suite of business banking services. Have a look to identify the right option for you and your household.

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Join us in moving toward freedom from fossil fuels.

Sincerely and with gratitude,

Miranda Massie
Director

P.S. I’ve been meaning to switch my personal banking account from Chase, aka “the Doomsday Bank,” for quite a while, having already registered my concerns as a customer. The pleasure of switching the Climate Museum to a bank that shares our values—starting with not being an active agent of climate injustice and destruction, and extending past that to affirmative community benefits—has been a very strong nudge, and my own personal switch is underway. 

P.P.S. The Climate Museum’s work in this area is built on the efforts of many extraordinary leaders and organizations—you’ll find information about them in the new toolkit.