Pressure from Summer of Heat on Wall Street Campaign Leads to NYC Pension Fund Divestment
With funding from CEF and leadership from New York Communities for Change, Climate Defenders, Planet over Profit, and Stop the Money Pipeline, the New York City climate movement launched the Summer of Heat on Wall Street in May 2024, demanding that Wall Street financiers, especially Citibank, end financial support for new fossil fuel projects. The campaign organized dozens of blockades of Citi’s headquarters in New York City, which frequently shut down the building and prevented hundreds of Citi employees from entering.
A huge array of groups and constituencies participated in the actions, from young climate protesters wearing Orca suits, to faith leaders from numerous traditions, to frontline communities impacted by fossil fuel pollution on the Gulf Coast, to a grandfather arrested for playing the cello. Despite the frequently aggressive responses of Citi staff, the protesters kept coming back. Over the course of the summer, the Summer of Heat mobilized over 5,000 people, with over 700 people arrested for participating, and over 1,000 press hits written about the protests.
As the campaign was winding down, in October 2024, New York City announced that it was expanding its efforts to divest the city’s pension funds from fossil fuels, specifically by ending investments in private equity firms involved in financing upstream and midstream fossil fuel projects. It’s hard to say for certain, but it’s likely that this move will affect hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investments in firms supporting fossil fuels. Now, the cost of capital for fossil fuel projects will be higher, and being in the business of producing oil and gas will cost more. This is the first time a pension policy of this type has been implemented - hopefully it will set an example that is emulated across the world.
Although the NYC pension funds were not a direct target of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street, we believe this progress on divestment would not have happened without the powerful narrative intervention generated by the protests. Climate protesters succeeded in making fossil fuel finance a top political issue in NYC this summer, and government officials responded to the secondhand pressure generated by the campaign.
The organizers of the Summer of Heat on Wall Street are already working to ensure that the seeds of resistance planted this summer lead to even larger and more powerful protests in the years to come.