9 May 2019

Mark Carney: put your money where your mouth is, unleash green investment now!

Bank of England Action 2019 On Thursday 2nd May, Positive Money staff, supporters and members of the grassroots divestment group Fossil Free London, gathered outside the Bank of England to get our voices heard on the role of the Bank in tackling climate change.

Bank of England Action 2019

On Thursday 2nd May, Positive Money staff, supporters and members of the grassroots divestment group Fossil Free London, gathered outside the Bank of England to get our voices heard on the role of the Bank in tackling climate change.

And we didn’t go alone. We carried over 4,500 signatures from supporters with us. (The petition’s still running if you want to sign click here!) Here are some snaps from the day.

With not one but two megaphones between us, we made sure the commuters and bank employees walking passed heard our message loud and clear; with chants like;

Green QE not Shell, BP

If you create money, make it fossil free!

And we received amazing media coverage;

It’d been an exciting couple of weeks for us on this issue. Our report ‘A Green Bank of England’, launched back in 2018, included three recommendations.

In late April, Carney publicly called on private banks to disclose their climate risk and announced the Bank would do the same; including the Bank’s own pension fund – that had been our first recommendation.

This was shortly followed by news of a consultation by John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, into reviewing the Bank’s mandate to include tackling climate change – that had been our second.

So it was with these two wins in our pocket that we marched over to Threadneedle street to demand our third: Green QE – for Carney to unleash billions of pounds into the green economy. Whilst media attention would be glued on the Bank for their quarterly announcement on interest rates, we hoped to shake things up and highlight the climate emergency instead.