APRIL 2020 / ROLLING STONE / 55
maybe it would have been wiser (certainly more
lucrative) to stick with the gold bars.
But there’s reason to think that stopthemoney
pipeline.com might work. For one, Chase’s lend-
ing to the oil-and-gas industry is vast, but it’s only
about seven percent of its business — it’s not like
Exxon, which has no real option but to fight.
And if the electoral map is tilted toward the red,
the money map goes the other way: The people
Chase really cares about, the ones with funds
to invest, are mostly in those pockets of blue,
where people care deeply about the climate
crisis. (That’s why BlackRock, the biggest asset
manager on Earth, started moving some money
out of fossil fuels in January. BlackRock wasn’t
alone; in the past few months, Goldman Sachs
announced that it would stop lending for coal
projects and drilling in the Arctic, and the Euro-
pean Investment Bank, the world’s largest pub-
lic bank, swore off fossil-fuel lending altogether.)
Perhaps it was the prospect of thousands of
people cutting up their credit cards or moving
their accounts that made Chase decide to pull
back on coal and some Arctic projects — Jane
Fonda joined young climate activists and faith
leaders in a call for action on April 23rd (the day
after Earth Day) in branches across the coun-
try. “If you don’t move your money, we’ll move
ours,” she said. All the polling indicates that for
young people, the climate crisis is the number-
one political issue, so maybe the Doomsday Bank
will even find it hard to recruit the next class of
bright-eyed young loan officers for the trip down
to the vault.
Chase blinked the previous March, after a long
campaign by people calling it to task for lending
to private prisons. So who knows? Right after our
January arrests, a Chase spokesman told Politico,
“We have a significant amount of work under-
way to further build upon our efforts on climate-
related risk and opportunity, and we look for-
ward to sharing more in the coming years.” Activ-
ists will have a harder time forcing broad action
on fossil fuels than on prisons, because oil and
gas make a lot more money for Chase. But if the
bank took a real stand — deciding to stop lend-
ing to the kinds of projects that expand an indus-
try that every scientist agrees must now contract
— the results would reverberate everywhere,
bouncing from one stock market to the next. The
speed of that reaction — far faster than political
change is likely to come — might let us start catch-
ing up with the physics of global warming.
Given the stakes, it’s worth a full-on try. Maybe
you’re one of that fast-growing group of people
beginning to feel queasy about the climate cri-
sis — beginning to feel like you need to do more
to make a difference. You probably don’t have
a coal mine in your neighborhood, or a frack-
ing well in the cul-de-sac. But the odds are high
there’s a Chase Bank branch not far away. So
JOSH HANER/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUXhere’s your chance to take a stand.
CAN WE PLANT
ENOUGH TREES?
The trillion-tree project may sound like
corporate greenwashing, but there’s real
science behind the idea BY TIM DICKINSONAS TEMPERATURES rise and
wildfires rage from Can-
ada to Australia, forests
have become a symbol
of danger in a warming
world. They may also be
one of our best hopes
for capturing and storing
the unsustainable levels
of carbon dioxide that
humans have released
into the atmosphere. “If
we can do it right,” says
British ecologist Thomas
Crowther, “the conser-
vation and restoration of
forests can potentially
buy us some time as
we try to decarbonize
our economies.”
A recent study that
Crowther co-
authored in
Science
points
to nearly
a billion
hectares
of nonurban,
nonagricultural land
on Earth that could be
reforested — to capture
as much as two-thirds of
the atmospheric carbon
released since the dawn
of the Industrial Age.
Crowther says we have
long known about the
role of forests as carbon
sinks. “But this helps to
understand the scale of
what is possible.” (Basic
Earth-science refresher:
Trees absorb carbon diox-
ide from the atmosphere
and turn it into wood. This
trapped carbon is stored
not only in the living trees,
but also, over time, in the
soils of the forest floor.)
The undertaking would
be massive — replanting
an area the size of the
United States — primarily
across Russia, the U.S.,
Canada, Australia, Brazil,
and China. But the study
also cautions that the
window of opportunity is
closing. If allowed to rageunabated, global warming
will soon destabilize and
diminish existing forests.
“Restoration will achieve
nothing if we do not con-
serve what we currently
have,” says Crowther.
At the World Economic
Forum in Davos, President
Trump highlighted the
One Trillion Trees initia-
tive, which seeks to jump-
start global reforestation.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of
Salesforce and a trustee
of the WEF, took credit for
getting the idea in front of
Trump in an interview with
ROLLING STONE. Benioff
touts the appeal of a proj-
ect he believes can unite
governments, industry,
and activists, through the
platform that he and WEF
are building at 1t.org. “We
need to cut emissions,
and we need to sequester
carbon — and we all
need to get on it,” says
Benioff, who ballparks the
cost of reforestation at
$300 billion. If the Trump
administration can get
behind reforestation, he
believes, that’s an import-
ant first step. “I hope that
Democrats and Republi-
cans can come together
and agree on the tree. If
the tree is not the ultimate
bipartisan issue,” he says,
“I don’t know what is.”
Some environmental-
ists fret, however, that
tree planting could be
used as “greenwashing”
by carbon polluters while
avoiding the much harder
work of rejecting fossil-
fueled growth. “Planting
trees is good,” said
Greta Thunberg, “but it’s
nowhere near enough.”
Scientists back her up. “If
tree planting is just used
as an excuse to avoid
cutting greenhouse-gas
emissions,” Crowther
says, “then it could be a
real disaster.”