Quaker midwife highlights City fossil fuel investment
Sixty healthcare professionals protest outside JP Morgan’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.
A Quaker midwife who took part in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests in London last month has said that she was partly motivated by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Jo Hindley from Cotteridge Meeting told the Friend that she was one of the sixty healthcare professionals targeting JP Morgan’s headquarters in Canary Wharf as the bank is the biggest funder of coal, oil and gas extraction. Part of the action by ‘Doctors for XR’ involved staging a ‘die-in’ protest where they lay on the floor to symbolise the deaths caused by fossil fuel investment. Canary Wharf’s private security guards quickly carried them away.
Jo Hindley said that she sprayed walls in front of the building ‘code-red’ to match the ‘code-red for humanity’ highlighted by the IPCC. ‘The whole rebellion was very much focused on banks and the City of London, which, as a country, would be right up there at the top for its responsibility for fossil fuel and the climate crisis,’ she said. ‘As healthcare professionals we were also highlighting the UNICEF report identifying that half of the world’s children are at extremely high risk from climate change factors. We handed out loads of leaflets to highlight the role of JP Morgan to employees to see whether they are aware of what they are doing. JP Morgan is right up there as one of the number one investors in fossil fuel projects.’
The medical professionals also delivered a letter referring to the recent IPCC and the International Energy Association’s (IEA) ‘net zero by 2050’ report. The group urged JP Morgan to fit its pledges to the IEA report and set an absolute emissions target rather than its current carbon intensity target.
A 2020 Banking on Climate Change report showed that JP Morgan Chase contributed more money towards fossil fuel industries than any other bank, putting a total of $268 billion into coal, oil and gas firms over the previous four years.
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