Stop the Money Pipeline

Among the stressors global heating will place on society there’s the fact that adapting to a hotter world is going to cost a ton of money. Stormwater systems, dams, and sea walls will need to be upgraded to withstand more intense flooding. Schools and hospitals designed to retain heat will need to be refitted to withstand punishing heatwaves.

In New York State alone, the costs of adapting public infrastructure due to the climate crisis is projected at $519 billion by 2050. That’s one state in one country. Multiply that across the world and you’re talking many, many trillions.

The question is: who is going to pick up the tab?

This question has vexed global climate talks for years. Low and middle income nations have done the least to cause global warming. Yet, they’re being hit hardest by punishing climate extremes. In response, Global South leaders have pushed the world’s wealthiest nations to pay their fair share for climate damages for decades.

This pushing is what helped create (the still shamefully underfunded) multilateral financing mechanisms, such as the Loss and Damage Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund ― which are designed to move money to the world’s poorest countries to support climate mitigation and adaptation. 

Much more needs to be done to ensure nations that have benefited the most from fossil fuel-driven development are financially supporting those nations hit hardest by climate change: The estimated cost of the rebuilding from the deadly Nepal disaster is $5 billion, but they might not even get $20 million from the UN’s Loss and Damage Fund.

Here in the US, the question of who is going to pay the costs of adapting to a hotter, harsher world has become a key question at the local and state levels, too. 

This was the central observation of New York’s Climate Superfund Act. Passed in the twilight of 2024, the Climate Superfund Act requires the largest fossil fuel corporations to pay $75 billion to New York State. Payments would be made in annual $3 billion instalments over a 25 year period. 

This bill makes perfect sense. After all, somebody’s going to have to pick up New York’s $519 billion climate tab – and the industry that caused the problem should pay their fair share. 

Unfortunately, last week, New York’s efforts experienced a setback when a federal judge ruled that it cannot enact the legislation. While the case is sure to be appealed, it’s a frustrating development at a time the costs of the climate crisis are becoming ever more clear.

But a single court ruling in a single court can’t stop a movement. Climate superfund legislation has been introduced in sixteen states and one ruling in a single court district does nothing to stop other states from implementing their own Climate Superfund laws.

And across the world, additional efforts to make polluters pay are proliferating like wildflowers after a rain. 

In July, Portugal passed a 33% windfall tax on extraordinary profits earned by oil companies due to the Iran War. A bill to that end has also been introduced in the US Senate, and been championed by French campaigners and leading UK politicians. 

This year, legislation introduced in California, Hawaii, and New York would enable state attorneys general to sue fossil fuel companies for economic losses from climate disasters. 

In Connecticut, a bill we’re working on would place a 5% surcharge on fossil fuel companies’ insurance policies, raising millions for climate resilience programs; the bill passed out of the appropriations committee with a supermajority last year. It could well pass in 2027. 

The fossil fuel industry clearly sees these attempts for accountability as a serious threat. Big Oil’s puppets in Congress have introduced legislation that would provide the fossil fuel industry with near total immunity from lawsuits and legislation designed to make it pay for climate damages.

This front of the climate fight will enter a new phase next month, as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Boulder vs Suncor case. If you’re in DC, you should join the People Vs Big Oil rally at the Supreme Court on October 5th.

No matter the outcome of the Supreme Court case though, the question of who is going to pay for the climate crisis is only going to become more salient in the years ahead.

Our job in this fight is to bring a new common sense into being: Polluters should pay for the harm they have caused. 

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director 

– Calls to Investigate Musk & DOGE gain traction

Members of Congress are responding to our calls to hold investigations into Elon Musk and DOGE in the new Congress. Since last month, we’ve secured new commitments from 8  elected officials, including Rep. James Walkinshaw (VA), Senator Cory Booker (NJ), and Rep. Mark Desaulnier (CA). See what they’re saying here. 

Check out our latest campaign video, made in collaboration with our friends at Feds Work for You and featuring a former FDA worker who was fired by DOGE last year. Months before the cyclospora outbreak, he warns our food supply will become less safe due to Musk’s disastrous mass firings at the FDA.

To get all the latest campaign updates, sign the petition here.

– Insure our Communities

Last week, news broke that as insurance companies abandon communities vulnerable to climate disasters, millions of Americans are being forced onto subprime insurance policies that offer less coverage and fewer protections. 

In the coming months, we’ll be announcing a major new campaign to hold insurers accountable and pass legislation to make insurers and fossil fuel companies pay for their role in the climate crisis.

If you’re in New York State, take two steps to support this effort right now:

• Complete the Insure our Communities survey – we’ll use the responses to this survey to advocate for the game changing Insure our Communities Act. If passed, the IOC Act would force insurance companies to stop underwriting new coal, oil, and gas projects, raising the costs of all new fossil fuel expansion. The survey takes 15 minutes to complete.

• Join us on Weds, Sept 23rd at City Winery in Manhattan for our New York Climate Week panel event: An Honest Conversation about the Insurability Crisis. We’ll be joined by NY Assemblymember Gallagher and Assemblymember Forrest’s legislative director, Mirabel Sandler, as we discuss how the climate crisis is driving the affordability crisis, why the Insure our Communities Act is a key part of the solution – and what you can do to help pass it in 2027.

 – Unplug AI Week of Action

Between September 19-24, our partners at Planet Over Profit, Climate Defenders, NYCC, RAN and Public Citizen, are organizing a week of action targeting the Big Tech companies driving the AI data center buildout. 

The data center build out is a huge threat to our climate goals. US power emissions could rise 20% from data center build out. Not only that but data centers raise our energy bills and pollute our communities, all in service of entrenching Big Tech’s political power over our lives.

The goal of the Unplug AI Week of Action is to make it crystal clear that Big Tech is a climate villain and challenge Big Tech’s political power. Join the Unplug AI Week of Action here.

 – BlackRock loses billions over climate concerns

The Dutch pension fund, Recreation Pension Fund (RPF), is divesting €450 million ($525 million) from BlackRock, owing to climate concerns. This makes RPF, the fourth major European pension fund to break ties with BlackRock, the world’s second-largest funder of fossil fuels. This news also follows analysis suggesting that BlackRock recently lost a $52 billion mandate from Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (PIF), owing to a shift in the pensions climate policies. If this is accurate, total divestment from the US-based asset managers, BlackRock and State Street, owing to climate concerns now stands at more than $102 billion. 

Meanwhile, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has announced a search for new asset managers for the city’s pension funds and that “limits on carbon” will be a factor considered by the City. Currently, New York City invests approximately $60 billion of its funds with BlackRock.

– Two wins from the frontlines of fossil fuel expansion.

Two important developments from the Gulf South, which is home to the world’s largest buildout of new fossil fuel projects. First up, a federal court revoked a license for the Texas Gulflink deep-sea crude oil export terminal project planned off the coast of Brazoria County, Texas. 

Next up, one of Japan’s largest public financing institutions, JBIC, announced it would be investigating complaints filed by community advocates over its financing of the Freeport Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export project. JBIC has provided more than $2.6 billion in financing for the construction of the Freeport LNG project, so this could potentially be a big deal. More here. 

– Align Your Money With Your Values

• Our partners at Third Act host an interactive on-line learning series every month on how we can take action to prevent our bank deposits, credit cards, home/auto insurance premiums, and investments from being used to finance the fossil fuel industry… and instead fund local businesses, community development, and the buildout of renewable energy. 

  The next learning session is on Monday, Sept 14th at 1PT/4ET. RSVP here.

– Costco campaign

The Costco Clean Up Your Credit Card campaign is still going strong. Last week, a coalition of frontline community organizations delivered a letter signed by nearly 500 Texans and Louisiana’s to Costco’s regional office in Plano, Texas. Shortly after, the team got confirmation from a local warehouse that this delivery caused the regional office to send a note to the nearby warehouses in the area, telling them that they are passing our concerns up to leadership.

We’ve also gotten an overwhelmingly positive response from Costco HQ employees, dozens of which have agreed to share our concerns internally with their teams. Check out this fun video of our canvassing efforts. 

Reach out to sarahlasoff@stopthemoneypipeline.org if you want to hear about upcoming on-the-ground campaign opportunities in San Antonio, TX, across Louisiana, or around the Seattle area.

And to close out this month’s newsletter, here’s a photo of Sarah – on helium, apparently  – outside of Costco’s HQ:

The post September Newsletter: Who’s going to pay? appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

If you feel like you’ve heard less from us recently, there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been deep in campaign research, developing what we think will be a central pillar of our strategy for the next several years.

We’re not ready to announce our plans yet, but we can say that we’re looking very closely at the insurance industry. 

It may be one of the dullest industries on earth, but the insurance industry is a key player in the energy transition, one that could hasten the end of fossil fuels, or slow down the energy transition considerably. 

Between 2004 and 2024, one-third of all weather-related payouts made by the industry ― totalling $600 billion ― could be directly attributed to climate change.

In a sane world, this would push insurance companies to recognize that Big Oil poses an existential threat to its business model, cease their support of oil and gas, and scale up support of renewables.  

Instead, insurance companies, such as State Farm, Chubb, and Liberty Mutual, are passing the full costs of the climate crisis onto their customers ― and doubling down on oil and gas.

Between 2019 to 2025, insurance companies hiked home insurance premiums by an average of 70 percent across the country, causing insurance costs to become a major challenge for millions of homeowners and prospective home buyers. 

As many as 1 in 8 homeowners can no longer even get home insurance, leaving them financially exposed in the event of a climate-driven extreme weather event damaging their property. 

At the same time as implementing record-breaking rate hikes, CEOs are making more money than ever. In 2025 ― the most profitable year for the property and casualty insurance industry in decades ― the CEOs at the 10 largest insurers banked a whopping $134 million, a 27% increase from 2024.

And as Big Insurance sticks working- and middle-class Americans with the bill for the climate crisis, it’s fueling the flames of the climate crisis further still.  

Insurance industry trade groups regularly lobby against climate policy and recently filed an amicus brief, siding with oil and gas companies in an impending Supreme Court case. Worse still, insurance companies continue to enable oil and gas expansion, both as a major investor in fossil fuels and by providing insurance coverage to new coal, oil, and gas projects.  

U.S. insurance companies are also falling well behind their global peers in terms of revenue growth from renewables, as they fail to insure clean energy projects. 

So to summarize, here we have an industry that’s:

• Making life less affordable for tens of millions of Americans 

• Making record profits and boosting CEO pay 

• Fueling the climate crisis by lobbying against climate policy, backing oil and gas expansion, and failing to adequately support the clean energy sector

Fortunately, unlike every other pillar of the financial industry, insurance companies are regulated at the state level. 

That means that any state legislature or Insurance Commissioner that cares about stopping the climate crisis and protecting people from the predations of corporate greed can pass legislation and regulations curtailing the industry to that effect. 

A lot of these efforts are already in motion. In Connecticut, Senate Bill 453 would place a surcharge on the premiums insurance companies charge on fossil fuel projects to raise money for climate resilience projects. In California and Hawaii, campaigns are underway to get state Attorneys General to sue oil and gas companies to recoup the costs borne by consumers from climate-driven insurance premium rate hikes. 

In New York, we’re building a coalition around the Insure our Communities Act. The strongest insurance-related, anti-oil and gas bill in the country, the Insure our Communities Act would compel any insurance company that wants a license to do business in the state of New York to stop underwriting new oil and gas projects. 

But I’ve probably said enough for now. As I said at the start of this newsletter, we’re still in the process of developing our campaign plans.

Over the next month or two, we’ll be continuing to figure out the best way that we can take the fight to the insurance industry head on, fighting to get mega corporations like State Farm to pay their fair share for the climate crisis, take care of communities, and end their support of oil and gas.

If you want to support this work, you can make a donation here. We look forward to sharing more soon.  

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline, coalition director

– Calls to Investigate Musk & DOGE gain traction

As it becomes clear that Musk’s dismantling of USAID has killed countless children around the world, our Investigate DOGE campaign has secured commitments from five Members of Congress to support investigations and hearings into Musk and DOGE in the new Congress ― Rep. Robert Garcia (CA), Rep. John B. Larson (CT), Rep. Ro Khanna (CA), Rep. James Talarico (TX), and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY). 

But to make investigations and hearings into Musk and DOGE a reality, we need many more Members of Congress to stand up and fight to hold the world’s richest man to account.

Email your Members of Congress now and urge them to hold Musk and his DOGE bros to account. 

– Santander backs off a dangerous LNG project

In April, 33,000 of you sent emails to Santander’s leadership, demanding the bank stop financing new fossil fuels. In May, we joined Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch to meet their senior management and push them to stop backsliding on climate.

Now, in response to years of organizing from partners in Mexico and Latin America, Santander has felt the need to publish a statement claiming that it is not financing the controversial Saguaro and AMIGO LNG projects, both of which would threaten biodiverse marine ecosystems and lock in decades more fossil fuel pollution.

This claim contradicts a public statement made in October 2024 by the CEO of the company behind Saguaro LNG, who named Santander as one of the financial advisers for the project.

The fact that Santander now feels compelled to publicly distance itself from these toxic projects is a notable victory for the growing global campaign on Santander.

– Supporting state leadership through Local Leads, Global Impacts

Through our year-long leadership development program, Local Leads, Global Impacts, we have the honor of supporting and coaching a cohort of talented, dedicated campaigners across the country. One of the cohort members is 350 Seattle’s campaigns director, Aki Chatterji, who is leading the Make Polluters Pay WA campaign. 

As 65,000 people are evacuated from Spokane in the face of terrifying wildfires, and Big Oil makes record profits, it’s never been clearer that Big Oil, not everyday people, should pay for the wildfire response and recovery in Spokane and elsewhere, and that Big Oil, not everyday people, should pay for the cooling centers, affordable clean energy, healthy housing and other climate resilience solutions our communities need to survive.

If you’re in Washington State, get plugged into the Make Polluters Pay WA campaign by sending an email to your state legislators urging them to Make Polluters Pay.

You can also find more ways to plug into the campaign here.  

– And fighting off Big Oil’s attempts to gain legal immunity

With arguments before the Supreme Court between the City & County of Boulder and Suncor and Exxon-Mobil set to begin on October 5th, Big Oil is desperately trying to win legal immunity from the many lawsuits and pieces of legislation seeking to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for their decades of lies, deception and pollution that have led us to the world of climate disasters we’re now living through. This includes efforts from Big Oil to pass a “legal immunity shield” in Congress, pass state bills invalidating climate lawsuits and legislation, and pleading their case in the courts. 

Two weeks ago, more than 5,000 of you sent emails to your Members of Congress, urging them to sign onto an amicus brief on the side of Boulder in the impending SCOTUS case that starts in October. In response, more than 90 Members of Congress added their name to the legal briefing, the most sitting Members of Congress to ever sign on to such a legal manoeuvre. 

Learn more & join the No Immunity for Big Oil campaign here.

– Aligning your money with your values

Last month’s annual Banking on Climate Chaos report reminded us just how bad the big Wall Street banks are: More than one-third of the $900+ billion commercial banks provided to fossil fuel companies in 2025 came from just ten US megabanks. 

So, we were glad to see our partners at Green America also reminding us that you can ensure your money isn’t going into new fossil fuel projects by finding a better bank. Check out their amazing Get A Better Bank tool to learn how. Incredibly, every $1,000 in a major Wall Street bank has the emissions equivalent of a return flight between New York and Seattle.

– If bombing an elementary school isn’t a redline. What is?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently admitted he doesn’t know if Anthropic’s AI was used in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School which killed nearly 200 people, including 120 children. Amodei also claimed that regardless of whether his company’s AI was used in the strike, it was not a violation of its use-case “redlines” because “a human made that final call, not Claude.”

To call out the role of AI companies in the Iranian school bombing and the US war machine, we teamed up with Tesla Takedown to deploy art-installation actions at the offices of Anthropic, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Tesla, leaving child-sized body bags, flowers, audio of bombings and children playing, and a banner that read: Stop AI School Bombings.

Because, at the end of the day, if bombing an elementary school full of children doesn’t cross one of your red lines, there’s something deeply wrong with you and your company. 

– And, finally, keeping our eyes on Costco until we win

Costco’s 13 million co-branded credit cards are with Citibank, the #1 funder of toxic petrochemicals in the U.S. and the world’s 3rd largest funder of fossil fuels in recent years. Costco’s contract, which is worth 13 million credit cards, goes up for bid next year, so we’re doing everything possible to let Costco know we want them to choose a better credit card partner! 

If you’re in Texas and Louisiana, sign on to the Gulf South letter to Costco urging Costco to choose a credit card partner that is not destroying communities in the Gulf South.

If you’re in the Seattle area and want to canvass Costco headquarter employees, shoot our Seattle-based organizer Jake an email: jake@stopthemoneypipeline.org. And for all the latest updates, follow the campaign Instagram.

To close out this month’s newsletter, here’s Jake and the crew speaking about the campaign at a recent campaign event:

– Not read enough about insurance in this newsletter? Read on!

Later today at 2ET, our friends at AFR are hosting an informational webinar: Skyrocketing insurance costs hitting renters: How cities and affordable housing providers are fighting back. RSVP here.

On the call a panel of experts will discuss how cities and affordable housing developers can push back against skyrocketing insurance costs, and NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Housing Commissioner Dina Levy, will share updates on the Mayor’s affordable insurance program.

The post August Newsletter: Big Insurance – gouging customers and siding with Big Oil. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

They can be easy to miss, but in the climate fight there are positive signs: Globally, clean energy investment has doubled fossil fuel investment two years in a row; despite Trump’s best efforts, solar and wind continue to dominate new power plant construction in the US; China’s emissions appear to have peaked in 2024.    

Scratch an inch deeper however, and the climate math is scarier than ever. Eight years on from the IPCC’s landmark 2018 report that warned we had twelve years to slash global emissions to avoid dangerous climate feedback loops, emissions are higher than ever.

Today, we’re beginning to live with the consequences of our failure to heed the warnings. According to modeling commissioned by the Economist, the recent European heatwave probably killed 12,000 people in three days; at least 25 people died due to heat stress in New Jersey over the holiday weekend; deadly rainfalls are currently pummeling Mumbai and much of China. 

Last month saw the release of two major reports that highlight how we’ve gotten into this mess. Released in early June, Banking on Climate Chaos is the world’s premier annual assessment of bank financing of fossil fuels and its topline findings were stark: bank financing for fossil fuels increased sharply between 2025 and 2024. Citibank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase: all financed more coal, oil, and gas in 2025 than the year before.

Released a couple of weeks later, Investing in Climate Chaos analyzes the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels. It revealed that even major investors that you might expect better of are failing the most fundamental of climate tests. Three of the four pension funds with the largest holdings in fossil fuels are California and New York’s public pensions.  

Reading these two reports, in the lead up to the country’s birthday celebrations, one other major takeaway jumped out to me: no other nation is as responsible for the fossil fuel expansion fueling deadly climate change as our own. Nobody else is even close. 

The numbers speak volumes: 

• US investors are responsible for 62% of all institutional investments in fossil fuel corporations.
• 8 of the world’s top 10 investors in fossil fuels are US-based.
• More than one-third of the $900+ billion commercial banks provided to fossil fuel companies last year came from just ten US megabanks. 

I suppose the fact that the United States is beating heart of fossil finance shouldn’t come as a shock. For years, as China has been making strides to becoming the world’s first electrostate, we’ve been doubling down on becoming the world’s largest petrostate.

The US first overtook Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer in 2018. By 2024, the US was producing twice as much oil as Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest oil producer. 

It’s hard not to look at just how much the US has become the heartland of the fossil fuel industry and the great web of finance that holds it up and conclude that, one way or another, the climate fight will largely be won or lost here, in the belly of the Big Oil beast.

The fossil fuel industry, after all, is the largest obstacle to climate action, whether at the global, national, or local level. There is no solving the climate crisis without directly taking on and figuring out a way of defeating the fossil fuel industry.

This is why, here at Stop the Money Pipeline ― even as we expand our campaigns to tackle the rise of authoritarianism ― we’re never going to take our eye off our original mission of severing the financial umbilical cord between Wall Street and Big Oil.  

And even if the reports out last month highlight how challenging that is going to be, the heat and the storms pummeling so much of the world are also a reminder of how essential it is, too. 

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director

– BlackRock’s $42 billion problem

The New York City Comptroller, Mark Levine, has announced that the city’s pension plans are beginning a new search for asset managers to manage their massive investments – and the city will factor climate criteria into how it will assess its hiring of new asset managers. This could mean BlackRock, the world’s second-largest investor in fossil fuels, losing out on $40 billion worth of business, owing to its failure to support climate action. 

Such a move would follow hot on the heels of massive European (and possibly Asian) pensions pulling billions from BlackRock. Who knows? Maybe Larry Fink will soon start to get the message: climate action is good for business.

– No Immunity for Big Oil

After New York and Vermont passed “Make Polluters Pay” bills in 2024 which would force major oil companies to help pay for the climate damages they caused, Big Oil made pushing Congress to pass a blanket “immunity shield” its top priority. In response, Republicans have introduced federal legislation that would prevent Americans from holding Big Oil financially or legally liable for climate damages, ever again. 

Last week, 4,000+ of you sent emails to your Member of Congress demanding that they oppose legal immunity for Big Oil. If you haven’t done so yet, you can send an email to your Member of Congress here. Once you send an email, we’ll follow up with other ways for you to take action on this. 

– Got a 401(k)? Want it to support climate action, not fossil fuels?

Stand.earth has released this great step-by-step guide to help you push your employer and your retirement plan to offer pension options that support a just transition. They also released this briefing, highlighting exactly the kind of dirty fossil fuels many of our retirement plans are currently invested in.

– Holding Musk accountable

There have been many travesties under the Trump Administration, but allowing the world’s richest man to destroy USAID and kill countless children in the process is one of the deepest. That’s just one reason why the new Congress must commit to hold investigations and hearings into DOGE – we deserve to understand exactly what happened to our data, and exactly what the impacts of Musk’s actions were. 

If you haven’t signed our campaign petition to Congress yet, you can join 50,000 others and 50+ organizations and unions in signing here. Once you sign the petition, we’ll follow up with more ways to plug into this campaign.

– Making Citibank pay for its environmental racism

If the news that big banks have increased their support of fossil fuels again has got you angry, here’s one thing you can do: plug into our campaign to call on Costco to dump Citibank, and take its 13 million credit cards with them.

If you’re in Texas or Louisiana, sign this Gulf South letter to Costco. If you’re in the Seattle area, email Sarah to plug into flyering Costco HQ employees.

– Vs. Goliath

A new award-winning, four-part documentary series from Tikkun Olam Productions & Fossil Free Media, VS. GOLIATH, follows everyday people, including many friends of STMP, across the country as they stand up to the fossil fuel industry. Check out the trailer here.

Fossil Free Media is hosting virtual screenings of a VS. GOLIATH episode on the first Tuesday of each month. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A panel with activists featured in the episode, and serve as an opportunity for viewers to learn, strategize and get inspired for the fights that lie ahead.

RSVP and details for each screening:

• July 7th (TODAY!) — VS. GOLIATH: Cancer Alley 
• August 4 — VS. GOLIATH: Appalachia
• September 1 — VS. GOLIATH: Greater Chaco
• October 6 — VS. GOLIATH: Port Arthur

– Insures make record profits

Have you noticed your home insurance getting more expensive lately? If so, you’re not alone. In the face of a huge rise in climate-driven disasters, homeowners in almost every state are facing skyrocketing premiums and many cannot even get insurance any more.

But here’s the thing, as a new report from Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project reveal,  insurance companies are raking in record profits, even as they raise rates for the rest of us.

Oh and at the same time as raking in record profits and hiking rates for all of us, the insurance industry has weighed in on the side of Big Oil in a pending Supreme Court case, arguing that local and state governments shouldn’t be allowed to sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages. 

All of which is, of course, all the more reason to pass legislation like the Insure our Communities Act in New York…

– And a reminder: just how much we really are a petrostate

To close out this month’s newsletter, here’s a graphic from Statista that really hammers home just how much the US has become the world’s number one petrostate. Here’s to all of you working, in a million different ways, to change this:

The post July Newsletter: The climate fight will be won or lost here. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

When Donald Trump was elected, we knew our strategy would need to change. Up until that point we’d been laser focused on pushing Wall Street to stop backing Big Oil ― but when the world changes, your strategy needs to as well.

That’s why, in early 2025, we officially expanded our mission to have a twin approach: fighting fossil fuels, and fighting the rising threat of fascism in this country. 

Since then, a lot of our campaigns have centered on Elon Musk. We’ve supported the Tesla Takedown movement; pushed pension funds and local governments to break ties with Musk; and led a campaign to get thousands to cancel their T-Mobile contracts, owing to its ties with Musk and Trump. 

Our focus on Musk is down to a simple fact: in the fight to preserve democracy, Elon Musk remains a uniquely dangerous threat. 

Since January, Musk’s AI, Grok, has created and distributed millions of fake, nonconsensual sexualized images of women and girls, including thousands of sexualized images of children. 

Between last October and mid-April, Musk posted on X about white grievance politics 850 times, posting nearly daily about white supremacist conspiracy theories such as their being a “genocide” happening against white people. This week, Musk has been busy encouraging race riots in the UK. 

And, after spending nearly $290 million to get Trump elected, Musk caused untold harm in his role at DOGE. Tens of thousands of dedicated public servants were fired, core functions of the government were shredded, and Musk destroyed USAID, an act that killed more than 500,000 of the world’s poorest children in just the twelve months that followed. 

Former DOGE staff, who worked under Musk, are under investigation for stealing the sensitive data of every living American, and for stealing huge troves of data related to labor union organizing and labor complaints. 

That’s why we’ve launched the DOGE Accountability campaign, calling for Members of Congress to commit to hold Congressional hearings and investigations into DOGE in the new Congress.

So far, our petition to Congress has been signed by over 50,000 individuals, 50+ organizations, the labor unions SEIU and CWA, which represent nearly 3 million workers, and the Climate Justice Alliance, a network of 95 leading environmental and climate justice groups across the country.

Next up, between June 12th and June 18th, we’re organizing a week of action. All across the country, activists like you, who care about holding the world’s richest racist accountable, will deliver copies of the campaign petition to their Members of Congress and urge them to hold Musk and DOGE accountable.

You can sign up here to deliver a petition, and help build the people power needed to push the new Congress to hold Elon Musk accountable. Once you’ve signed up, our campaign lead, Nancy, will plug you into an organizing meeting and share everything you need to join the week of action.

I’m genuinely excited about the momentum this campaign has generated already. Not only because it would be really satisfying to see Musk squirm before Congressional hearings, but because it’s critical that the new Congress stands up to billionaires like Musk. 

What kind of message does it send if Musk can destroy huge swathes of the government and not face any accountability for his actions? What kind of message does that send the rest of the tech oligarchs and billionaires?

That’s why this campaign matters: it’s about showing there are meaningful checks on the power of billionaires; it’s about sending a message to the entire billionaire class: if you break the law, you will be held accountable. 

So, join the week of action and be a part of a movement taking on the world’s richest far-right extremist,

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director

– Meeting with Santander Bank’s leadership

In April, 33,000 of you sent emails to Santander executives, calling out the bank for rolling back climate promises, financing fossil fuel expansion, and supporting Big Oil’s latest attempt to water down global climate policy.

This week, I joined other representatives from the STMP network to meet with the bank’s top sustainability managers. During the meeting, they made their frustrations at receiving 33,000 emails clear – a sure sign of the effectiveness of the tactic. 

And while we didn’t come to an agreement with the bank during the meeting, we did make it  crystal clear: so long as Santander continues to undermine the energy transition, they can expect push back.

– Insuring communities, not fossil fuels.

The insurance industry is emerging as a critical villain in the climate story. Not content with abandoning communities while continuing to underwrite new fossil fuel projects, the top insurance lobbying group recently filed an amicus brief siding with Big Oil in the pending Supreme Court case over whether local governments can sue fossil fuel companies for damages from climate disasters.

That’s why one of our top priorities right now is building the power required to pass the Insure our Communities Act in New York. If passed, this bill would force insurance companies doing business in New York to stop insuring new coal, oil, and gas projects.

If you’re in New York State, you can join the Insure our Communities New York campaign here.

And no matter where you are, join our partners at Green America on June 16th for a webinar discussing how the largest property insurance companies are fueling the climate crisis, and how you can find climate-smart option insurance options.

– Gulf South environmental justice leaders visit Tokyo

This month, Gulf South-based environmental justice leaders, Manning Rollerson, Gwendolyn Jones, and Melanie Oldham, traveled from Texas to Tokyo to submit a first-of-a-kind series of coordinated complaints against the Japanese financiers of Freeport LNG.

These complaints are a key first step in holding Japanese financiers – some of the largest funders of the build out of LNG in the Gulf South – accountable for funding harmful LNG projects across the Gulf South. The complaints detail the 2022 explosion, health harms, and climate & environmental damage done by Freeport LNG. Read more here and here; watch here and here.

– Letting Costco know: the Gulf South demands it dumps Citibank

The recently-released Toxic Finance report revealed that Citibank, Costco’s credit card partner, is the #1 funder of petrochemicals in the United States. So, we’re teaming up with Texas Campaign for the Environment to deliver copies of the Toxic Finance report to every Costco warehouse in Texas and Louisiana to let Costco know that Gulf South community members want toxic Citi out of our Costcos.

If you live in Texas or Louisiana, join a team delivering a report to your local Costco or sign the letter to Costco here.

– Trump’s latest climate idiocy

The stupidity of the Trump Administration on climate change should surprise no one, but this month saw several noteworthy developments.

Yesterday, the Administration announced $700 million of investment in the coal industry – a move that comes shortly after Trump paid Total Energy $1 billion to not build wind farms in the country.

And in early May, Trump’s Security and Exchange Commission moved to rescind the climate disclosure rule implemented under the Biden Administration, robbing investors of critical information to assess companies’ climate transition plans. STMP partners at the Sierra Club and Green America have useful breakdowns of what this means. back. 

– No immunity for Big Oil

With the fossil fuel industry’s puppets in Congress introducing a bill that would give the fossil fuel industry blanket immunity from any laws or lawsuits that could hold them accountable for climate damage, now is a good time to call your Member of Congress and urge them to oppose this poisonous bill.

– Fundraising gala report back

Last month, we had a great time at Brighter Futures, our annual community celebration and fundraising gala. We were joined by movement leaders Bill McKibben and Dr. Roishetta Sibley Ozane, as well as climate activist and professional cellist, John Mark Rozendaal, who performed Bach on his cello.

In the end, not only did we have a grand ol’ time, but we blew past our fundraising goal, raising nearly $11,000 for critical climate work. Thank you to all of our friends who donated auction items, and to everyone who chipped in. If you weren’t able to make it, but would like to make a donation you can do so here.

– And finally, don’t forget: it’s time to hold Musk accountable

Join the DOGE Accountability Week of Action here.

The post June Newsletter: Congress must hold Musk accountable. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.