Line 3 campaign builds momentum on banks: Bloomberg
Bloomberg Green recently covered the growing campaign to pressure banks – including Canada’s top fossil bank RBC – to stop funding the controversial Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
Pressure has been building on stopping this $9B climate, water, and Indigenous-rights violating disaster of a project for months now. And since no one believes Enbridge will stop what they are doing, while they pressure the Biden Administration to kill it like they did Keystone XL, the movement is also following the money pipeline.
Take away the finance, and you take away the pipeline.
The article highlighted the variety of tactics activists are using, from “calendar jamming” senior executives (something groups in Canada are starting to do at RBC) to Indigenous-led direct actions and trainings to legal strategies.
Bloomberg also highlighted the incredible gall and hypocrisy of Enbridge positioning its finance mechanism for this project as “sustainable”, giving banks like RBC the ability to call funding a tar sands pipeline, part of its “green” or ESG investing portfolio. From the article:
For a company building fossil fuel infrastructure that will have a climate impact 4.5 times that of the country of Scotland to be having any type of sustainability conversations strikes me as greenwashing,” says Alec Connon of Stop the Money Pipeline.
“And any banks continuing to support this awful Line 3 tar sands project clearly need reminding that this pipeline violates any commitments they may have made on climate change.”
Indigenous leader Tara Houska added:
“I’d be curious to hear how a tar sands fossil fuel company is going to try to tell us, tell the public, that they are engaging in sustainable practices when they are responsible for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” Houska says. “I don’t think that they can slap a coat of paint on an entire body of work that involves destroying the planet.’”
We’re looking at you too, RBC.