The “crisis” at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform. But this might also be a moment for thinking about what globalism means in a world where borders ultimately can’t offer protection against the most serious threats.
To give an example: owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season last year, with the last two storms, Eta and Iota, striking Central America. As Nicole Narea explained in a recent article in Vox, the Northern Triangle countries—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—have been afflicted by climate-induced drought for a decade, leaving 3.5 million people facing food insecurity, but the floods from those two storms produced even more savage damage. Twelve hundred schools were damaged or destroyed; forty per cent of corn crops and sixty-five per cent of the bean harvest were lost. As a percentage of G.D.P., the damage is greater than that done by the worst storms ever to hit the United States, yet the people of these countries did comparatively little to cause the climate crisis—whereas the four per cent of us who live in this country have produced more greenhouse gases than the population of almost any other nation. So there’s really no way to pretend that migrants arriving at our southern border have no claim on America. Honduras could have built the biggest, most beautiful wall on its northern border, and our CO2 would still have sailed right across it.
And it’s not as if this is an isolated case. As early as 2017, according to the organizers at climate-refugees.org, sixty per cent of displaced people around the world were on the move because of “natural” disasters, not civil conflict. In the past six months, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, about eighty per cent of displacements have been the result of disasters, “most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes.” As Axios reported last week, using a projection model created by the Times, ProPublica, and the Pulitzer Center, “migration from Central America will rise every year regardless of climate change,” but, “in the most extreme warming scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the next 30 years.”
There’s a rough analog emerging right now around access to COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. and other rich countries are stockpiling more doses than they need. This is morally dubious; unlike with climate change, we didn’t actively cause other countries’ health crises, but it’s hard to make a case that the people living through them need inoculations any less than we do. It’s also epidemiologically dangerous: if we allow the virus to continue to ravage poorer nations, new variants will keep emerging and keep crossing into privileged ones. “As long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed,” the head of the World Health Organization said recently. According to the Times, for example, “even under the best of circumstances,” just thirty per cent of the population of Kenya will be vaccinated by mid-2023.
We could solve some of these problems by donating lots of vaccine, encouraging cross-national coöperation, and overriding patent protections and other intellectual-property restrictions. That would allow everyone to access cheap versions of these remarkable drugs—just as we need to make sure that the use of solar power and cheap batteries spreads globally, because we can’t solve climate change in one country. The pandemic and climate change are defining events in our century, and it’s useless to pretend that national boundaries are the best way to think about them. Biology and physics are mandating new ideas about human solidarity, and demand action in real time.
Passing the Mic
One of the decade’s key questions is whether large banks can be persuaded to end their lending to the fossil-fuel industry. Two weeks ago, more than four hundred advocacy groups called on the Biden Administration to end public financing for coal, oil, and natural-gas projects. Meanwhile, researchers at the Rainforest Action Network issued their annual report on the private-banking sector. They found that, though financing for fossil-fuel projects dropped a tad during the pandemic, it’s higher now than it was in 2016, shortly after the Paris climate accord. Funding for the hundred fossil-fuel companies with the biggest expansion plans—projects that will build new infrastructure—has actually increased in the past five years. JPMorgan Chase maintains its position as the biggest lender, with Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America in second, third, and fourth. (Inside Climate News points out that the same banks are also financing food companies implicated in rainforest destruction.)
The biggest changes need to come from government regulators, but there are lots of interesting ideas for how consumers can avoid aiding climate destruction. A new app from GenE can round up your purchases to the next dollar and donate the change to environmental groups. There are alternatives to regular banking, too. Scheduled to open later this year, in Tampa, is the Climate First Bank, where “eco-conscious customers will find dedicated loan options for solar photovoltaic (PV), energy retrofits and infrastructure.” On the East Coast, the Amalgamated Bank has committed to divesting from fossil fuels; Beneficial State, on the West Coast, is also fossil-fuel-free. (Bank of the West has been positioning itself in the same space, but RAN’s annual report shows that its French parent, BNP Paribas, actually increased fossil-fuel funding by over ten billion dollars last year.) And there are online banking options, too, such as Aspiration.
Ben Jealous, an Aspiration board member and a leader of the environmental-justice movement, helped highlight the role that banks play when he served as the youngest-ever executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., from 2008 to 2013. He is currently the president of the advocacy group People for the American Way. (Our conversation has been edited for length.)
You’ve been an activist at the highest level. How does banking fit into the effort to fight climate change?
Finance shapes the destiny of the communities we live in and the planet we live on. My great-great-grandfather started a bank shortly after the Civil War to help build strong communities for people like him, who had been recently freed from slavery. It feels good to have another way to help insure that our planet and humanity thrive for generations to come.
Can we actually measure the scale of change: carbon saved, trees planted?
Yes. It starts with measuring dollars moved. This is critical because, while account holders at the major banks may not realize it, most of those financial institutions are financing oil pipelines and other destructive fossil-fuel projects.
We refuse to finance destructive projects like pipelines and offshore drilling. We estimate that, for every dollar you pull out of a big bank and put into a place like Aspiration, you are eliminating up to five pounds of carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere.
Moreover, Aspiration’s Plant Your Change program allows consumers to plant a tree every time they swipe their card. Already, in less than a year’s time, we have funded the planting of five million trees, which has the impact of offsetting the carbon emissions of twenty-three thousand cars.
Between the fossil-fuel-free deposits and the trees planted by Aspiration members, we’ve had about six billion pounds of carbon impact. That’s like taking every car in West Virginia off the road for a year.
And is this just a niche, or are there ways that these signals start to reach the giants at Chase and Citi and so on, who are funding the fossil-fuel industry?
Every time an account holder leaves them to come to us, or any of the small yet growing number of banks who have pledged never to loan one cent to Big Oil and Big Gas, they get that message. Every time the broader anti-fossil-fuel divestment movement we have all helped build announces a new major partner, pulling billions more out of circulation from them, they get that message.
Increasingly, they get that message from their richest customers, too, as more of them are demanding that their dollars be invested in companies that are actually good stewards of our planet. The message is this: the old economy is dying because it was unsustainable. A good economy is coming that will better sustain us all. Join us or be left behind.
