Green Tip: Tell Banks to Keep Money Green

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Kaya Foster, a member of the Resilient Palisades Green Banking Team.

A group of Palisadians stood outside of a Sunset Boulevard bank on Saturday, January 27, holding signs reading “This Bank Finances Fossil Fuel” and “Change Your Bank.” As a partnership between local environmental group Resilient Palisades and the Southern California chapter of Third Act, volunteers demonstrate every other weekend in front of a “big four” bank.

The purpose of these demonstrations is to:

Expose banks’ “greenwashing”—marketing attempts to convince customers they are environmentally friendly when they are financing destructive climate change

Ask customers to demand better from their banks

Persuade people to switch to a more values-aligned bank or credit union if their bank continues to finance the climate disaster

Why target banks? Banks have loaned the fossil fuel industry over $4 trillion in just the past six years, according to the Banking on Climate Chaos Fossil Fuel Finance Report from 2021. If the financial services industry was a nation, it would be the fifth-largest emitter on earth, Bloomberg reported.

In the past few weeks, volunteers helped deliver over 40,000 petitions to Costco headquarters, urging the company to rethink its banking relationships. Activists targeted Costco after data gathered by Topo Finance showed that around 85% of the corporation’s entire carbon footprint actually comes from banks using Costco’s cash deposits to fund oil, gas and coal. The pressure of climate activists on Costco resulted in the CEO publicly acknowledging their campaign at the Costco annual shareholders meeting.

If you’re interested in switching banks or having a conversation with your financial institution about their environmental impact, visit resilientpalisades.org/green-banking.