The situation in Anishinaabe territory is dire right now.
Enbridge is spilling drilling fluid in wetlands next to the Mississippi headwaters as it builds the Line 3 pipeline and Water Protectors are chaining themselves to drilling equipment to prevent Enbridge from violating Anishinaabe treaty rights
Militarized police are assaulting peaceful Water Protectors using tear gas, mace, and rubber bullets. Recently, police brutalized twenty Water Protectors and kept them in jail for nearly a week, denying them medications, placing them in solitary and giving them moldy and inedible food to eat. Upon her release Tara Houska, founder of the Giniw Collective, posted these pictures of her wounds from being shot with rubber bullets.
This brutality, it is important to remember, is being directly paid for by Enbridge, the fossil fuel company that literally bought the tear gas that police used last week. This means that Wall Street’s loans to Enbridge are literally being used to pay for military weapons for MN police, which they are using to brutalize Water Protectors.
Despite all of this, in June, major banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, facilitated $1.5 billion in so-called “sustainability bonds” for Enbridge.
Sustainability-linked bonds sound good, but when you look more closely you’ll see they’re close to meaningless. Enbridge’s “sustainability” bonds reward the company for reducing emissions from its buildings and vehicles (in technical terms known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions), but do nothing to address the human rights abuses happening in Minnesota or oil that flows through its pipelines and is responsible for 99% of its climate pollution (also known as Scope 3 emissions).
According to Wall Street, so long as Enbridge uses electric vehicles and solar power to build their oil pipelines, everything is fine. This kind of corporate greenwashing is the new climate denial. That’s one reason why we launched Deadline Glasgow last week, an all-hands-on-deck campaign, demanding genuine, transformational climate action by the start of the Glasgow Climate Talks.
It’s now just 90 days until the start of Glasgow and Line 3 is a litmus test for Wall Street ahead of this historic climate moment. If banks continue funding Line 3, they should not be welcome at the Glasgow Talks ― and we should take every action possible to expose and shame their greenwashing.
Last week, we did receive some good news. Three major loans to Enbridge were not renewed, just as we had demanded. However, we have no reason to believe that is because banks did the right thing. It is more likely that Enbridge simply decided they didn’t need the loans anymore ― because they’ve already bought all of the pipeline they need to build Line 3 and because they’d received billions in BS “sustainability” financing the month before.
And please follow the Giniw Collective on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more updates from the frontlines of the fight to stop Line 3.