Organizers turn up the heat on Vanguard climate campaign

From Monday to Friday, supporters of a climate campaign targeting Vanguard aim to log about 40 miles on foot, following the money behind polluting industry and fossil fuel businesses until they reach the $8 trillion asset manager’s Malvern campus on Earth Day.

The week-long agenda is part of an ongoing effort to pressure Vanguard on its influential stock purchases on behalf of customers saving for retirement and other investors. Campaign organizers, such as the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT), say the company’s vast holdings in coal, oil, gas, and other polluting industries are “a major driver of climate destruction and environmental racism.”

The round of actions leading up to Earth Day also comes on the heels of the latest warning by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The panel described a “now or never” window to cut greenhouse gases in the next several years and keep the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

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“I don’t see a way of meeting the 1.5 degrees unless ordinary people say: We have to stop allowing people to profit from the destruction of the Earth and theft of a stable climate from future generations,” said Eileen Flanagan, EQAT’s interim campaign director.

“If we can shift the financial dynamic and be in better solidarity across geographic areas ... I actually think it’s the best chance we have,” Flanagan said. She is expecting at least 125 people to participate during the walk.

EQAT is a local partner to the Australia-based Sunrise Project, which first launched a climate campaign aimed at asset manager BlackRock under the banner “BlackRock’s Big Problem” and followed last year with the similar-sounding “Vanguard’s Very Big Problem.”

This week the campaign will officially rebrand as “Vanguard S.O.S.” — a nod to the ship featured in the company logo, and a change that reflects the campaign’s own momentum, as well as the growing sense of urgency on climate change, organizers said.

“There is a real panic, I would say, happening in the climate movement right now based on the latest IPCC report,” said Diana Best, senior finance strategist with Sunrise. “We have three years to really turn the ship around.”

In the short term, organizers want Vanguard to use its influence as a big shareholder “to push the companies it invests in to change course on climate change, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights,” Flanagan said.

And in the long run, she said, “we really do want them to move away from investing in fossil fuel companies, and companies that engage in deforestation.”

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The Sunrise Project said that Vanguard has made some positive changes, such as issuing a statement on coal risks this year, as well as increasing transparency in its latest investment stewardship report. But Sunrise also said Vanguard continues to move too slowly in addressing climate change risk, and that it has increased investments in coal to $101 billion, according to the German nonprofit Urgewald.

As of last year, Vanguard held about 6% of its assets, over $290 billion worth at the time, according to a 2021 estimate by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

“Vanguard considers climate change to be a fundamental risk to many companies and their shareholders’ long-term financial success,” Vanguard spokesperson Emily Farrell said. The company continues to address that risk, she said, “by engaging with the companies held in our funds on their climate risk oversight, mitigation, and disclosures; through thoughtful investment products that help investors manage certain climate-related risks and opportunities; and, through engagement with policymakers, industry regulators, and aligned organizations.”

The walk will make stops early in the week in communities that have spent decades confronting sources of pollution.

Zulene Mayfield founded Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living in 1992, not long after a waste incinerator went up in the Delaware County city. The company Covanta later took over the waste-to-energy facility in 2005.

“The incinerator being there is a daily assault on all of your senses,” Mayfield said, from noise to smells to difficulty breathing.

Vanguard was one of the largest shareholders in Covanta as of last year, before the company was acquired by Swedish firm EQT in late 2021.

Corporations, Mayfield said, “have put pollution and profit over top of people, and that’s a messed up formula for all of us.”

Covanta spokesperson Nicolle Robles said the company is “transparent about our operations” and posts “our continuous emissions monitoring results online for all to see.”

“While we respect the rights of these outside groups to assemble and express their views, it is unfortunate that they have tried to overwhelm public discourse in the City of Chester,” Robles said. “Facts can help mitigate unnecessary fear.”

On Tuesday, demonstrators will visit Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood, where residents have borne the costs of flooding and living near the Clearview Landfill superfund site and the now-shuttered South Philly refinery.

“Back in the day, put it this way, we had little say in reference to what kind of industrial activities were going to happen in our community,” said Earl Wilson, president of the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition. That is “an issue of tremendous concern for African Americans and people of color.”

The landfill, which operated from the 1950s to the 1970s, is just one example. Now undergoing a federal cleanup, the dumping ground has been a source of contamination where regulators have identified numerous hazardous substances in the past.

“What keeps me focused on the work that we’re doing is the fact that we’re going to do as much as we possibly can to change, or correct, some of these issues,” Wilson said.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow introduced the concept of a “Freedom Seder” in 1969, linking the civil rights movement to the traditional story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt told at Passover.

That version, weaving in quotes from Nat Turner and Martin Luther King Jr., has inspired other adaptions in the decades since. Waskow has adapted the Seder once again, now for the climate movement.

“Here are these out-of-control companies, no accountability, enormous amount of power, enormous amount of money, and they’re causing plagues … wildfires, floods, famines,” said Waskow, founder of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia.

A coalition called Exodus Alliance is helping to organize seders at about 20 Chase Bank locations around the U.S. during Passover this week — including one at a Chase location in Wayne on Wednesday, which participants in the Vanguard walk will attend. Organizers are demanding a stop to funding for the fossil fuel industry.

EQAT and Waskow thought their respective efforts were a good match. Vanguard is among the largest investors in JPMorgan Chase, which is a top financier to fossil fuel companies, according to a recent analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap using Bloomberg data.

From 2020 through 2021, the analysis found, JPMorgan provided $81.2 billion in primary financing to fossil fuel businesses, more than any other bank.

A spokesperson for JPMorgan said in 2021 the firm “facilitated more than $100 billion for green activities like renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable transportation” and doubled its “green investment banking activity.”

“These efforts help put us well on our way to our target of $1 trillion for green initiatives over 10 years,” the spokesperson said. “We are also taking pragmatic steps to meet our 2030 emission intensity reduction targets in oil & gas, electric power and automotive manufacturing, while helping the world meet its energy needs securely and affordably.”

As the campaign continues, EQAT’s Flanagan said, “we’re not asking customers to move their money out of Vanguard, at least immediately.”

Rather, the campaign is encouraging customers to advocate for change. “We would much rather see Vanguard improve its practices,” she said.