“The Oil and gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit. Generates over $4.3 trillion dollars a year in revenue. It is the seventh largest industry in the world ranked above food production, automobile production, coal mining, and at $1.4 trillion, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t even crack the top ten. The industries listed above oil and gas are completely dependent on oil and gas. The more they grow, the more we grow. That’s the scale, that’s the size of this thing.”

This is the opening monologue by the independent oilman character, Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, in the Taylor Sheridan‘s TV production, “Landman”.

Exact numbers or not, they are staggering. And the amount of climate and species damage caused by fossil fuels is even more staggering.

Since the signing of the Paris Climate Accord in 2016, the world’s major banks have lent approximately $7.9 trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry, 20 percent of which has gone toward fossil fuel exploration and expansion. These numbers are real and are also staggering.

In December 2024, one month prior to Trump’s second inauguration, six major U.S. banks (JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs) withdrew from the United Nations sponsored net zero banking alliance. This gives new meaning to Trump’s expression “burn, baby burn.” As our planet gets hotter every year, the interest on our credit card payments, our checking and savings accounts, and our pension funds are financing climate disaster.

Can we do something about this?

Yes. Should we do something about it? Absolutely!

Easy first steps are to bank on the community level. We can do our banking and get our credit cards from credit unions, financial companies that don’t loan money or buy the debt of fossil fuel companies.

But if we really want to make a difference, we can organize around getting our private and public pension funds to stop investing our pension dollars in fossil fuel assets. We can organize around getting the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB) to stop investing the 18 pension funds they oversee in fossil fuel assets.

While the WSIB makes it difficult to precisely identify how much of their assets are invested in fossil fuels, a reasonable estimate is $6-8 billion directly invested in fossil fuels and at least as much in indexed funds that contain fossil fuel investments. All told, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-7% of the WSIB portfolio.

Why is it so important to divest, or to use a less pejorative financial term "rebalance," WSIB assets out of fossil fuels?

Right out of the chute, fossil fuel assets continue to underperform the overall stock market. Since the end of the last bear market, October 2022, the Standard and Poor index of funds grew by 92 percent, while fossil fuels pulled up the rear at 17 percent. You don’t need to be a math major to understand that our pension assets would earn more money if they weren’t invested in fossil fuels.

But given the real and palpable urgency of reducing carbon emissions and slowing down and reversing climate disaster, if a well-respected fund like the WSIB rebalanced their portfolio out of fossil fuels it would send a clear message to other institutional investors that you can earn great returns while also protecting our planet. Not too shabby of a rationale. As a species, humans are great at making excuses not to do something. Particularly when billionaires and their representatives tell us there is a better way. Engage, they say, don’t divest.

A cursory reading of the history of the corporate response to asbestos and cigarettes should be fair warning. Simply engaging corporations in a discussion around lowering carbon emissions will kill us on a grander scale than anything we have known before. Climate disaster is the greatest existential crisis there is.

The situation that we are in right now recalls for me two sayings I am quite fond of. The first by our dear friend Michael Righi, recently passed, who used to say “every billionaire is a policy failure.” We have to stop taking our advice from people who benefited the most from extractive industries and who will be the least impacted by climate disaster.

The second is by humorist and social commentator Will Rogers. Rogers used to say, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Acknowledging that fossil fuel investments have put us in an existential fix is a first step. Now it’s time to stop making it worse, time to stop digging!

Over the next several months I will continue to research and write about ending the financing of climate change. In the meantime, if you are persuaded by this article or the group of essays I wrote last year, “Protecting our Assets, Protecting Our Asses”(visit our website at psara.org and click the image on our homepage) then please write letters, emails, or postcards to our political leaders (Governor, Lt. Governor, State Treasurer, Director of Labor and Industries) and to our union leaders and tell them it is time to act.