Barclays must take responsibility for its role in the climate crisis

The climate column: The bank needs to end its financing of fossil fuels and stop funding projects that tear apart indigenous communities

Police officers detain an activist from the Extinction Rebellion outside the Barclays offices in Canary Wharf (REUTERS)

A loud banging at the crack of dawn on the door of her home in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and Dr Gail Bradbrook, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion, was being arrested.

At the door were four Metropolitan police officers who had come from London – a spokeswoman later confirmed that a 49-year-old woman had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage and “encouraging or assisting the commission of defrauding financial institutions”.

The “defrauding” referred to is XR’s Money Rebellion campaign, which is a call to “expose and disrupt the economic rules and institutions driving us toward societal collapse”.

This campaign urged climate protectors to get a Barclaycard and make a donation with it to organisations such as Survival International, which helps indigenous people suffering from the impact of bank-funded deforestation and fossil fuel projects, in rainforests and other indigenous lands in North America, Africa and Asia.

The campaign, called ‘Repair the Harm’, has suggested that people tell Barclays that they may not repay the donations, unless Barclays makes a matching donation. Bradbrook said about £4,000 in total has so far been donated to indigenous charities by protesters.

Whilst this type of action may not be legal, as somebody who has been arrested for peacefully occupying the road in an Extinction Rebellion protest calling for government action, I have sympathy with acting in this way – as Gandhi exemplified, peaceful civil disobedience can be necessary to effect urgent changes needed.

Why are they targeting Barclays? Well, Barclays, according to the latest RAN fossil fuel banking report, is the “worst” funder of fossil fuels in Europe.

They say Barclays invested a staggering $145bn into fossil-fuel projects, since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.

These projects read like a who’s who of the world’s infamous fossil fuel projects, including fracking, coal, the Dakota Access pipeline and the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline. Barclays was also reported to be among UK banks lending money to corporations involved in global deforestation.

The destruction being caused to our remaining rainforests and their unique wildlife is irreversible. It is also devastating to indigenous peoples, who have been the forests’ guardians for millennia.

For years, Barclays has allegedly been providing finance to corporations who have been involved in controversial and sometimes law-breaking activities.

Peter Hain, the former Labour minister who is famous for leading peaceful civil disobedience against apartheid South Africa, has written about how student action forced the bank to drop its operations in South Africa. Its subsidiary was called Barclays (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas).

Over the last two decades, there have been a number of banking scandals that has forced Barclays to pay over $1.5bn in fines and repaid avoided taxes.

These include £290m for attempts to manipulate (in 2012) the Libor bank-rate, a $453m fine for manipulating the US electricity market (in 2013), £500m avoided in tax (in 2012), a $70m fine for US Dark Pool violations (2016), $150m for Forex rigging and $44m for manipulating the setting of gold prices (in 2014).

After her release under investigation, Bradbrook said that she had long expected and had prepared herself “spiritually” for this moment. She said she was just glad her two young boys were away with their father when the police came to her home.

She did express frustration at XR being frequently accused of being “anti-capitalist” by some sections of the media. She told me: “We do not really have an actual capitalist system – but one riddled with corruption and tax avoidance, which is destroying our planet’s life-support systems.”

Money Rebellion’s demands from Barclays include full transparency on their social, climate and ecological impacts, ending their financing of fossil fuels, an immediate moratorium on funding of forest and habitat destruction and to stop funding projects that tear apart indigenous communities.

Encouragingly, the respected International Energy Agency has stated in a new report that to achieve net zero, we need to halt all new fossil fuel exploration immediately.

We can each take positive actions to encourage banks to stop using our bank accounts to destroy our children’s futures. We can move our accounts to green banks such as Triodos or Nationwide, read about the Repair the Harm campaign or write to the Governor of the Bank of England, demanding that they place an immediate moratorium on any UK banks funding new fossil fuel and deforestation projects.

The upcoming Cop26 must likewise end the financing of all new fossil fuel projects and deforestation, if the November climate summit is not to be a suicide note to Mother Earth.