‘The new lyrics are our way of creatively challenging Standard Chartered’s continuing funding of fossil fuel projects.' Photo: Climate Choir at Standard Charter bank
Climate Choir interrupts Standard Chartered AGM
‘It’s time, time to choose / What kind of bank you wanna be.’ ‘Fossil Fuels are trouble’, a parody of a Taylor Swift song.
The Quaker-founded Climate Choir disrupted the Standard Chartered annual general meeting this month, to accuse the bank of financing environmental destruction.
Members of the choir, including Quakers, sang ‘Fossil Fuels are Trouble’, a reworking of Taylor Swift’s ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’, outside the meeting on 10 May. The campaigners accused the bank of being complicit in environmental destruction and human rights violations for liquified natural gas projects in Mozambique and the Philippines.
Kate Honey, a composer and the Climate Choir director, who rewrote the lyrics, said: ‘The new lyrics are our way of creatively challenging Standard Chartered’s continuing funding of fossil fuel projects… Their investments do not benefit local communities. They are on the wrong side of history and it is time for them to give up on dirty fuels and invest in renewables.’
Jo Flanagan, co-founder of the Climate Choir Movement, said: ‘Last year we sang at Barclays AGM. In March we occupied and sang in the Houses of Parliament. And today we say to Standard Chartered “your standards are twisted”. While they continue to invest in dirty gas and coal, global warming has exceeded temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius over a twelve-month period. This is a dire warning to humanity – a warning that some bankers still do not seem to heed.’
Daniel Ribeiro, from Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth, said the Mozambique gas project will increase the country’s domestic carbon emissions by six to ten per cent per year. ‘The project also offers embarrassingly low and delayed revenues to Mozambique because of a combination of unethical tax avoidance and unfair benefit-sharing contracts,’ he said.
Taylor Swift has been under fire in recent years for her private plane usage. However earlier this year she claimed to have bought double the amount of carbon credits needed to offset her flights for her international ‘Eras’ tour.
