As part of the Oily Money Out week of protests, over 60 health professionals are risking arrest this morning by staging a ‘die-in’ and ‘climate inquest’ in the road outside JP Morgan Chase’s London Embankment offices.
The protest is designed to highlight the bank’s leading investment role in the new fossil fuel extraction which is driving increasing levels of climate-related death and suffering.
Health for Extinction Rebellion, who have a long running campaign against JP Morgan’s fossil fuel investments (HXR, 2021, 2022, 2022-2, 2022-3, 2022-4), sought to emphasise, through their action today, the intolerable and growing human health impacts of the climate and ecological crisis, and the complicity of firms, like JP Morgan, who continue to drive fossil fuel extraction.
The action comes as the ‘Energy Intelligence Forum’, being held in London this week, is the focus of major protests and demands to get “Oily Money Out” of our politics, out of COP 28, and out of power.
Today’s action saw 14 health professionals lay themselves, shrouded, in the road outside the conference in military hospital style. Other health professionals circled amongst them, tending their ‘fallen’ colleagues, and laying headstones indicating the climate health impact each represented. A mock inquest was then held, in which health-workers gave testimony on the deaths already caused by the planetary emergency. These included among others, the 6 million deaths every year resulting from air pollution (Fuller, 2020), the 5 million deaths globally each year from extreme temperatures (Zhoa. 2021), and the 43,000 who died from the climate-change associated drought and famine in Somalia last year (WHO/Unicef, 2021)
Following the action the group will be handing in a letter addressed to Luke Nelson, JP Morgan Chase’s head of sustainability. It reads:
“Society in the future is likely to judge companies that continue such fossil fuel investments as both immoral and as operating outside international law. What does JP Morgan plan to do right now to avoid such a judgement?”
New extraction goes against the explicit warning of the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2021) and the United Nations (UN news, 2022), yet politicians, lawyers and financiers continue to support a fossil fuel industry that has known for decades that fossil fuels cause deadly global warming (Scientific American, 2015). To emphasise this complicity, health workers today also held ‘Cigarette-style’ Health warnings, and banners reading ‘Fossil Fuels Kill’, and “Cause of Death = Fossil Fuel Finance”. The action sought to draw a direct parallel with the Tobacco industry which was complicit in 100,000’s if not millions of deaths, by knowingly misleading the public around the health impacts of smoking.
Despite the bleak reality of the climate crisis, the action also emphasised the numerous potential benefits for human health of climate action (The Health Foundation, 2023), and the need to galvanise mass support for the appropriate action needed to safeguard a healthy future.
Health for Extinction Rebellion previously wrote to JP Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon, ( 3rd September 2021 to outline their concerns and to suggest a positive route forward for the bank, but have yet to receive a reply. They have returned on numerous occasions speaking ‘off record’ with concerned employees.
We return in number today, to highlight the health impacts of the climate and ecological crisis (as above) and to additionally ask:
Does JPM operate within the rule of Law? And
Can law exist in a vacuum removed from morality?
JPM’s own business principles include “A Commitment To Integrity, Fairness and Responsibility”, stating that; ‘We face facts’ and ‘We help strengthen the communities in which we live and work.’
Yet the JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray admit in their paper, written in 2020, that the climate crisis will impact the world’s economy, human health, water stress, migration and the survival of other species on Earth. They state; “We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,”
How can JP Morgan consider that it is facing facts and strengthening communities, when the evidence increasingly suggests that continued investment in new fossil fuels is tantamount to intergenerational genocide. Certainly it seems more and more likely that society in the future will judge companies such as JP Morgan as operating both immorally and outside international laws.
