If you look at Citi’s marketing and PR, you’d be mistaken for thinking this is a company that cares about the climate crisis and racial equity. Jane Fraser talks a good game about climate commitments and equity, but LEED-certified buildings and diverse models on the website aren’t enough.
Citi paints itself as a climate champion, but data shows it’s one of the world’s biggest funders of fossil fuels, pumping over $333 billion into oil, gas, and coal companies since the Paris Agreement in 2016. Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gasses into the air, and is the primary current cause of global climate change.
If we don’t stop business as usual, we and all of our children will have to live with the worsening storms, extreme weather, and food shortages created by Citi’s fossil fuel financing. But communities of color feel the impact first and worst.
The fossil fuel projects Citi funds aren’t located in wealthy suburbs. Citi provided over $5 billion to pipeline company Enbridge, supporting the controversial Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines that are staunchly opposed by Indigenous communities. It provided over $15 billion to ExxonMobil, and is one of the biggest funders of state-run oil companies in the Amazon.
Recently, Citi has teamed up with KKR to provide financial support for a methane gas project in Port Arthur, Texas, a majority Black and Latino city that is already home to the United State’s largest oil refinery. Residents of Port Arthur already suffer from lung and respiratory conditions as a result of their proximity to polluting infrastructure. Now, over the objections of the city’s residents, Citi and KKR are financing greater pollution and environmental destruction.
KKR has invested $14.5 billion in several oil and gas projects over the last two years, including fracked gas, offshore drilling, methane gas terminals and coal plants. It owns two-thirds of the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline being built to transport fracked gas from British Columbia, a project that crosses through unceded sovereign territory and is fiercely opposed by hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en.
Citi wouldn’t fund a pipeline that ran through Jane Fraser’s backyard. Continuing to finance toxic fossil fuel infrastructure in Black and Indigenous communities and communities of color is environmental racism, plain and simple: and that’s what Citi and KKR are doing.
If you look at Citi’s marketing and PR, you’d be mistaken for thinking this is a company that cares about the climate crisis and racial equity. Jane Fraser talks a good game about climate commitments and equity, but LEED-certified buildings and diverse models on the website aren’t enough.
Money talks, and Citi’s money is saying: we don’t care about frontline communities. We don’t care about the planet. As Citi CEO Jane Fraser goes to bed tonight at the four-star Beverly Hilton, she’s not losing any sleep as her bank poisons land, air, water, and communities around the world.